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Drawing on the shrinkage of manufacturing districts, the transformation of waterfronts, the rise of edge cities, and the delocalization and deepening commodification of real property, this article reflects on the “newness” of the contemporary city. It argues for the simultaneous existence of historical continuities and discontinuities and the presence of novel spatial arrangements that originated in enduring trends. The contemporary city is never complete and thus never totally different from its predecessors.

Urban village collectives, as one of the stakeholders of land requisition and development in urbanized China, have gradually been driven into real estate development. This transformation has raised an important question regarding how villagers develop their 'property mind'. From 2015 to 2017, guided by an abductive institutional economics approach, which holds both original and new institutional economics in dialogue, we addressed this question by conducting fieldwork in Xiaojia village, Northeast China. In Northeast China, unlike in the southern cities, there was no foreign investment and the population was in decline. Nevertheless, the villagers developed housing, first for their own use and then for the market. The resulting evidence indicates the following: 1) property rights are social relations and constructed socially and institutionally; 2) markets are not independent, they are conditioned by the institutional context.

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