Infrastructure and the evolution of settlement space: a study from a spatial anthropological perspective on the Pearl River Delta

The paper argues that infrastructure is central to understanding how settlement spaces evolve, particularly in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) where rapid development has been shaped by flows of people, goods, and information. From a spatial anthropological perspective, the study reframes regional society as a complex system in which infrastructure, social organization, and spatial fields co-evolve over time. It proposes analyzing points (infrastructure), lines (spatial flows), and planes (regional areas) to interpret social and spatial evolution. Two guiding questions are posed: (1) How do anthropologists interpret settlement space evolution through infrastructure? (2) What interconnected factors (political, economic, cultural, environmental) drive settlement space evolution? The purpose is to build a historically grounded, interdisciplinary analytical approach that links material space to social processes and informs urban protection, planning, and sustainable development.

The review traces anthropology’s expansion from studies of so-called simple societies to complex urban and regional systems, integrating geography, political economy, religious studies, and urban studies. Foundational works by Morgan, Redfield, Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, and Weber established frameworks for understanding social structure and urban morphology. Appadurai’s work on the social life and flows of commodities linked sociocultural value to material space change. Post–World War II economics and policy discourse (Rosenstein-Rodan’s social overhead capital; Greenwald’s infrastructure definition) foregrounded infrastructure’s role in development. Dewey’s study of Javanese markets and Jinnai’s spatial anthropology of Tokyo illustrated how infrastructure mediates production, exchange, logistics, and urban form. Recent scholarship (e.g., Blok et al.) examines ties between infrastructure and socio-environmental systems, reinforcing infrastructure as a key analytic of settlement evolution. Western theoretical shifts inspired Chinese scholarship: Fei, Yang, and William Skinner analyzed rural markets and urban-rural systems; Liu, Johnson, and Strand showed how water towns, maritime networks, and urban transport industries shape socioeconomics; Naquin and Huang studied religious and agrarian infrastructures; contemporary work (Lin et al., Li et al., Zhou) explores how modern transport, logistics, internet, and high-speed rail reconfigure urban space. Across these strands, infrastructure appears as material, technical, social, and political, shaping spatial form and organization and enabling cross-disciplinary dialogue and localized theorizing in China.

The study employs a qualitative approach combining systematic literature mining, archival/historical analysis, and case study comparison across periods and places in the PRD. Spatial anthropology provides the lens to embed infrastructure within complex social systems and to read the relationships among natural environment, infrastructure, material flows, social organization, and settlement configurations. The analytical framework treats infrastructure as drivers of spatial transformation and focuses on specific spatial typologies—ports, salt pans, and marketplaces—as microcosms of production, exchange, and logistics. It maps points (infrastructure), lines (circulations/flows), and planes (regional areas), emphasizing functional characteristics and the often-invisible infrastructural skeleton sustaining daily life. Complex systems theory guides attention to adaptability, self-organization, and emergence, enabling a contextual, interdisciplinary, and replicable template for analyzing socio-spatial change.

- Infrastructure functions as a primary driver of settlement space evolution in the PRD, mediating social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics over time. - Ports: Historical shifts from coastal to inland river ports (e.g., during Ming–Qing prohibitions) and later modern networks reveal how environmental, technological, commercial, political, and military factors co-produce port–city spatial relationships and influence settlement structures. - Salt pans: A long-standing pillar industry, salt infrastructures formed socio-political and economic networks; control over production and distribution embedded salt with social/political significance affecting settlement organization. - Markets: The PRD’s commercialization during Ming–Qing (e.g., Thirteen Factories era) expanded and specialized markets (e.g., 176 markets recorded in 1602; later specialized markets in Panyu), shaping grassroots socio-economic structures and spatial dynamics. - Adaptability: Post-1978 reforms saw PRD population grow from ~30 million to ~70 million; Shenzhen’s permanent population reached 17.7901 million (2023). Rapid expansion of metro systems and region-wide infrastructure (PPP investment exceeding one trillion yuan) supported accelerated urban development; Baiyun Airport’s throughput growth underscores transport-hub status. - Self-organization: Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei evolved from spontaneous vendor clustering to Asia’s largest electronics trading center (>10,000 merchants by late 1990s), demonstrating scale effects, supply-chain maturation, and the role of social networks without direct top-down planning. - Emergence: Smart Guangzhou integrates big data and IoT across transport, healthcare, and environment, improving bus capacity, speed, and punctuality; average commute times fell from 38.7 to 36.5 minutes (a 2.2-minute reduction). Environmental monitoring and feedback mechanisms helped meet the 2022 PM2.5 standard. Intelligent transformations (e.g., pond–dike agriculture) show nonlinear, culturally informed spatial adaptation. Overall, infrastructure catalyzes adaptive, self-organizing, and emergent dynamics that reorganize settlement space, revealing multi-scalar, historically contingent mechanisms.

The findings address the research questions by demonstrating that infrastructure serves as both an analytical lens and an active agent in the PRD’s settlement evolution. Through ports, salt pans, and markets, material networks articulate with social organization, governance, and economic flows to shape spatial morphology and regional linkages. Complex systems dynamics—adaptability (policy innovation, demographic shifts, technological uptake), self-organization (market clustering, network effects), and emergence (smart-city integrations)—explain how local interactions generate large-scale spatial patterns. Understanding infrastructure as an invisible skeleton linking points, lines, and planes clarifies the interplay between material space and social change. This perspective advances planning and governance by highlighting the need for historically grounded, interdisciplinary approaches that consider infrastructural functions, social networks, and feedback mechanisms to guide sustainable urbanization.

The study positions infrastructure as a core medium in the production of space, aligning with Lefebvre’s space production and Appadurai’s flows while adopting Foucault’s genealogical approach to treat infrastructure as an active shaper of social change. It offers an interdisciplinary, spatial anthropological framework—mapping points, lines, and planes and focusing on typologies—to analyze PRD settlement evolution and to inform regional planning and sustainable development. Although the paper centers on ports, salt pans, markets, and metro systems, the framework is adaptable to other infrastructures (e.g., roads, ancestral halls, logistics). Future work should expand cross-regional comparisons, deepen ethnographic case studies, and situate infrastructure–settlement interactions within broader socio-ecological systems to guide equitable, resilient policy and practice.

- Historical data gaps limit coverage of certain key stages, affecting completeness and precision. - Emphasis on materiality and relationality risks attenuating critical analyses of infrastructure’s power and inequities. - The PRD focus may constrain generalizability; broader comparative and ethnographic work is needed. Proposed remedies include expanding data collection, cross-regional comparative studies, in-depth ethnographies, socio-ecological framing, and stronger assessment of socio-cultural effects to ensure fairness and sustainability in policymaking.