Producing and Performing an Aestheticized Rural Landscape

Landscape change has long been a key characteristic of gentrification research. While much of this research has examined landscape changes in gentrified neighborhoods in the Global North, much less attention has been given to contexts in the developing world. This chapter draws insights from two perspectives on landscape, namely the symbolic landscape and the lived landscape, to show how RTMs have produced a new rural landscape of local and global characteristics and how they perform a mundane and aestheticized rural landscape. In so doing, the research enriches our knowledge of gentrification in a non-Western context by analyzing a gentrified rural landscape in the Chinese context, produced by the emerging Chinese new middle class and their westernized consumption preferences.