Assessing the Impact of Informal Ruralisation Practices within the Rapid Urbanisation of Wuhan, China

As the so-called "developing" world marches rapidly forward on the paths of urban expansion, Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis of planetary urbanisation seems increasingly inevitable. However, this article demonstrates, through the first remote sensing analysis of an informal urban agricultural practice dubbed chengshi kaihuang (urban homesteading), that the massive urbanisation of the rural can create a bottom-up countermovement that ruralizes the urban and in doing so assert significant ecological and social alterations to Western conceptions of urbanism. Taking Wuhan as the study area, this paper leverages optical remote sensing data from the Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 missions in conjunction with open access LU/LC products to study the spatial, temporal, and ecological dynamics of urban homesteading. Through machine learning techniques, the study shows that urban homesteading has constituted ~5% of Wuhan’s urban center since 2017. This paper is one of the first in-depth studies of urban homesteading, and the first to leverage remote sensing techniques.