Reaching the sea: Guangzhou southern expansion from rural industrialization to polarized strategical planning

At the turning point of the new century Chinese urban growth has arrived to a new challenge: the improvement of its urban space after the astonishing development of the late Eighties and Nineties. At that time many scholars, impressed by the great urban sprawl occurring in China and other Asian regions, tried to conceptualize models in order to explain that particular phenomenon of the peri-urban dispersion. The paper wants to explore, selecting the city of Guangzhou as case study, capitol of Guangdong Province, which are the most influential passages that could demonstrate how much policy has influenced the management of the urban spatial growth. Analysing a system of driving forces, derived from the market but managed by the political system, and comparing them with the mapping of the city growth in a temporal dynamic selection, it’s possible to understand that South China cities had to change their planning from agglomeration to strategical organization in order to survive. In this way Guangzhou has achieved the possibility to redefine its leading role inside the Pearl River Metropolis, improving urban space from dispersion to a multi-polar and specialized system.