Placing the Urban Village: A Spatial Perspective on the Development Process of Urban Villages in Contemporary China

Abstract

The rapid urbanization of China since the mid‐1980s has led to the development of a new spatial category, the urban village (chengzhongcun). The dominant neoliberal urban development regime approaches urban villages as a social, spatial, economic and political problem, and as targets for aggressive redevelopment and eradication policies. In this article, I propose a spatial perspective that makes use of several theoretical ‘anchors' to analyze the influence of urban village spatiality on its development process and to explore alternatives to the dominant redevelopment model. I begin by examining the spatial conceptualization of the urban village as a non‐place, arguing that this spatial reading undergirds the redevelopment‐by‐demolition model and tends to obscure alternative conceptualizations. I then move on to propose three alternative readings of urban village space, examining it as an everyday space, a liminal space and a neighborhood. Combining these three readings with the ‘non‐place' conceptualization provides a nuanced understanding of urban villages' unique spatial attributes and social roles, by evoking spatial and social processes that take place in most urban villages across China. Taken together, these spatial readings challenge the social and spatial rigidity of dominant representations of urban villages and supply a much‐needed spatially based conceptual framework that can be used to develop new urban planning models.

Village Redevelopment and Desegregation as a Strategy for Metropolitan Development: Some Lessons from Guangzhou City

“…Villagers’ self‐organization for social welfare provision reinforced urbanizing villages as self‐governing and segregated communities. Such reconsolidated indigenous communities, permitting informal rules and tremendous flexibility in grassroots solutions to emerge and flourish, have in turn provided migrant workers with not just affordable housing and employment but also business opportunities to pursue what Kochan (: 945) calls ‘much‐needed social, cultural and economic capital’ in the city. Nevertheless, the current trend of village redevelopment has uprooted more and more of these visible communities, creating modern but rootless neighborhoods.…”

“…Urbanizing villages constitute a form of urban informality in the Chinese context (Wang et al ., ; Liu et al ., ; Zhang, ; Wu et al ., ). Some recent studies have begun to perceive them as coherent components of a Chinese city (Song et al ., ; Kochan, ). Although China's urbanizing villages somewhat resemble informal squatter settlements elsewhere, there are also major differences.…”

The Rural–Urban Fringes in the Local Limelight: Urban Village Redevelopment in Yinchuan, Ningxia

“…Adopting a spatial perspective, Kochan (2015: 928f) argues that the prevailing reading of the chengzhongcun under the “dominant urban development regime” is to merely see them as problems which have to be dealt with. Urban villages, which often have been tolerated by local governments due to their function as an affordable housing market for migrants which the city could not have otherwise provided, are increasingly seen as “non-places” in desperate need of remodelling.…”

“…Urban villages, which often have been tolerated by local governments due to their function as an affordable housing market for migrants which the city could not have otherwise provided, are increasingly seen as “non-places” in desperate need of remodelling. He ascribes this reading to the “neoliberal perspective,” which negates the history of these spaces, labels them as dirty and chaotic, and denies them any future – until eventually only “complete eradication” is seen as a rational solution (Kochan, 2015: 931f). Similarly, Li Zhang (2009: 115) identifies the “various rhetorical devices and imagery” which local governments have been employing since the 1990s as a strategy to label chengzhongcun as undesirable spaces in order to erase them and profit from urban redevelopment projects.…”

Anatomizing the Institutional Arrangements of Urban Village Redevelopment: Case Studies in Guangzhou, China

“…These villages are generally clusters of human settlements for the rural population. Among these villages, urban villages, also known as the "villages in the city," "villages amid the city," "villages encircled by the city," or chengzhongcun in Chinese, are a special product generated from the process of urbanization [2][3][4]. Because of the high demand for urban land use, the farmlands of villages located in the vicinity of cities were usually expropriated first due to relatively low compensation and transaction costs [5,6].…”