Building an image of Villages‐in‐the‐City: A Clarification of China's Distinct Urban Spaces

Abstract

Villages-in-the-city ("chengzhongcun") as distinct urban spaces in Chinese cities have attracted a lot of scholarly attention, and the term has been variously interpreted. The term 'urban village' was initially borrowed and applied to describe this urban phenomenon. While the term in a Western context refers to a planned neighbourhood that features good urban planning and design, the question posed in this essay is: are villages-in-the-city the Chinese equivalent of urban villages? Furthermore, within China, villages-in-the-city are always regarded as migrant enclaves, no different from Zhejiang village or Xinjiang village in Beijing. Are they the same kind of settlement? A primary aim of this essay is to reassert the differences between villages-in-the-city and urban villages that have developed in the United Kingdom. A secondary objective is to explore the variations between villages-in-the-city and Zhejiang village. Through investigating the variations between these urban morphologies, this study attempts to fill gaps in the current literature and hence clarify the misconceptions and confusion about Chinese villages-in-the-city. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Neighbourhood cohesion under the influx of migrants in Shanghai

“…Compared to traditional courtyards, only urban villages fare even worse in terms of informal social control potentially because of the even higher residential turnover. Moreover, since urban villages belong to and are managed by the rural collective (Chung, 2010), there may be little incentive for tenants to participate in community affairs. Low-income communities often suffer from lack of resources such as limited living space and employment opportunities, which force residents who lost their job due to the restructuring of state-owned enterprises and work units (Wu et al, 2010) to compete with neighbours for jobs.…”

“…Although so far no study on urban China has examined how cohesion may vary across neighbourhoods with different levels of migrant concentration, some initial studies conducted in urban villages show a less straightforward relationship between migrant influx and social cohesion. Migrants living in urban villages tend to have very close relations with other migrant neighbours due to the need for self-help whilst being isolated from the native population (Chung, 2010;Liu et al, 2012). However, despite poorer intergroup relations migrants living in urban villages have fairly high residential satisfaction (Li and Wu, 2013).…”

“…However, despite poorer intergroup relations migrants living in urban villages have fairly high residential satisfaction (Li and Wu, 2013). Local villagers in urban villages, who are the landlords and make up the other major resident group, tend to have a very close-knit relationship with fellow villagers but have little interaction with migrants (Chung, 2010). Other research (Cheng and Selden, 1994;Roberts, 2002;Solinger, 1999) also suggest that urban residents feel the city has become more dangerous due to the influx migrants, which is why migrants are actively being discriminated against by native residents.…”

“…Neighbourhoods with a migrant share between 0 and 20% are isolated host communities, 20 and 50% are non-isolated host communities and from 50% onwards we classify them as migrant-dominated enclaves (Poulsen et al, 2001). The rationale to divide neighbourhoods into three categories is based on earlier studies which suggest that migrant enclaves in China such as urban villages differ greatly from mainstream neighbourhoods in various aspects including its residential composition and neighbourly relations (Chung, 2010;Forrest and Yip, 2007).…”

Accelerated restructuring in rural China fueled by ‘increasing vs. decreasing balance’ land-use policy for dealing with hollowed villages

“…The traditional centrally planned economy has been transformed into a market based economy, with accompanying processes of industrialization and urbanization. These processes have impacted on the social, economic and environmental landscape of both urban and rural China, with key trends including mass migration from rural to urban areas and the development of 'villages-in-the-city' (chengzhongcun) of rural migrant workers (Chan, 2010;Chung, 2010;Liang et al, 2002;Song et al, 2008); the growth of urban sprawl and the loss of agricultural land in peri-urban districts (Lin, 2006;Liu et al, 2010b;Wang and Scott, 2008;Wei and Zhao, 2009;Yu and Ng, 2007); and rural industrialization, especially in districts close to cities with highly liberalized economies (Peng, 2007).…”