Changes of Rural Life Space and Its Impacts on Human Settlement

This book explores the development process of the agricultural areas in the central plains of China under rapid urbanization, especially the changes in the daily lives of rural residents. Taking the Jianghan Plain as the study case, this book summarizes the rural transformation and reconstruction process of the region, as well as the changes in the daily activities of rural households under the context of urbanization and rural transformation. This book introduces and applies theories such as the mobilities paradigm, behavioral geography, and time geography, expanding the scope of their application and enriching the theoretical framework of rural geography and rural sociology research. This book could be used as a reference for graduate students, as well as researchers in the fields of geography, planning, sociology, etc.

Rongrong Zhuo was born and grew up in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. She has studied at Central China Normal University (Wuhan, China) for 12 years. She did her undergraduate degree in law (B.A., 2013) before going to the School of Urban and Environmental Sciences to do her M.Sc. (Human Geography, 2016) and Ph.D. (Human Geography, 2021). During her Ph.D. study, she has been a visiting student in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada). She is currently a lecturer at Zhejiang University of Finance & Economics and also a post-doctoral researcher at Chinese Academy of Sciences. Rongrong is interested in rural spatial-social mobilities, rural transformation and restructuring, and activity-based rural gentrification. In the field of rural studies, she have been engaged in a series of studies examining changing rural territorial functions, changes in rural household’s everyday life and accessibility of rural life space under the context of urbanization within central China. She has led research projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education of China, Foundation of Educational Committee of Zhejiang Province of China. Her team is now starting new projects on the rural gentrification from a perspective of mobility, capitalization of rural space, global countryside in the developed area of China, such as Zhejiang Province.