No abstract

The fate of Chinese urban villages (chengzhongcun) has recently attracted both research and policy attention. Two important unaddressed questions are: what are the sources of informality in otherwise orderly Chinese cities; and, will village redevelopment policy eliminate informality in the Chinese city? Reflecting on the longestablished study of informal settlements and recent research on informality, it is argued that the informality in China has been created by the dual urban-rural land market and land management system and by an underprovision of migrant housing. The redevelopment of chengzhongcun is an attempt to eliminate this informality and to create more governable spaces through formal land development; but since it fails to tackle the root demand for unregulated living and working space, village redevelopment only leads to the replication of informality in more remote rural villages, in other urban neighbourhoods and, to some extent, in the redeveloped neighbourhoods.

University of Hong Kong, UK Biobank, and the UK Economic & Social Research Council.

Discussions about gated communities, shopping malls, and industrial parks—proprietary developments produced by entrepreneurs—frequently espouse overly simplistic notions of private and public realms, viewing the encroachment of the latter by the former as a threat. In this essay I develop the thesis that, in reality, cities naturally fragment into many small publics, each of which may be thought of as a collective consumption club. The club realm may, therefore, be a more useful—and theoretically more powerful—idea than the public realm. I argue that proprietary communities are a particular case of urban consumption club—one in which legal property rights over neighbourhood public goods are assigned by property-market institutions. In other respects, the club realms that they create are not dissimilar from club realms created by other urban governance institutions. Government, the markets, and voluntary community action can all effectively assign property rights over shared neighbourhood goods, and in so doing create a set of included ‘members’ and a set of excluded ‘nonmembers’. In contextualising the discussions of gated communities in this way, I draw connections between three interrelated concepts: public goods, the public domain, and the public realm.

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