“…In this way, the lived experiences of migrants can do more than uphold their imagined sojourning goals, which, especially in the dominant discourse, are assumed to be focused on economic activities and therefore not conducive to a permanent urban settlement. 7 Such portrayals, which also emphasise notions of lower quality (suzhi), inferiority, temporality and outsider-ness (see Shi and Collins 2018) are challenged by migrants as they are creating practices that ultimately produce new and complex affiliations directed toward a possible sharing of dominant urban values, attitudes and places:…”
Section: The Roles Of the Everyday: Contesting Placementioning
confidence: 99%
“…In this way, the lived experiences of migrants can do more than uphold their imagined sojourning goals, which, especially in the dominant discourse, are assumed to be focused on economic activities and therefore not conducive to a permanent urban settlement . Such portrayals, which also emphasise notions of lower quality ( suzhi ), inferiority, temporality and outsider‐ness (see Shi and Collins ) are challenged by migrants as they are creating practices that ultimately produce new and complex affiliations directed toward a possible sharing of dominant urban values, attitudes and places:When I came to the city to work for the first time, I walked a lot, to get a feeling, to sense the environment, to know the city. Now [after moving from Dongguan to Shenzhen], I feel I know the place, I am here for a short time, but I know every merchandise have a place you go to buy it, each need has its own place.…”
Section: Introduction: Urban Belonging In Chinamentioning
While internal migration in contemporary China ascribes a great change to urban China's demographic composition, social structures and economic development trajectories, it is yet to restructure the formal definitions of urban identity and belonging, which are still dominated by the household registration system (hukou). The paper suggests that as a result of changes in the political, economic, demographic and social contexts within which China's internal migration develops, there emerge a crucial need to re‐examine the crude forms of determining identity and belonging, questioning the addressing of spatiality within the existing mechanisms (such as hukou system or the shiminhua discourse). To do so, the paper argues that the existing de‐territorialisation of the migration experience has to be replaced with a more nuanced understanding of how spatial practices and conceptualisations shape migrants’ experiences, as it is becoming imperative to develop a new framework that is more sensitive to migrants’ lived process of identification and belonging, especially as these traverse multiple geographies and spatial scales. This close engagement with migrants’ spatiality can then be used as a base from which to engage with a more complex view of migrants’ spatial and social relatedness, as well as the development of their urban belonging and identity.
“…In this way, the lived experiences of migrants can do more than uphold their imagined sojourning goals, which, especially in the dominant discourse, are assumed to be focused on economic activities and therefore not conducive to a permanent urban settlement. 7 Such portrayals, which also emphasise notions of lower quality (suzhi), inferiority, temporality and outsider-ness (see Shi and Collins 2018) are challenged by migrants as they are creating practices that ultimately produce new and complex affiliations directed toward a possible sharing of dominant urban values, attitudes and places:…”
Section: The Roles Of the Everyday: Contesting Placementioning
confidence: 99%
“…In this way, the lived experiences of migrants can do more than uphold their imagined sojourning goals, which, especially in the dominant discourse, are assumed to be focused on economic activities and therefore not conducive to a permanent urban settlement . Such portrayals, which also emphasise notions of lower quality ( suzhi ), inferiority, temporality and outsider‐ness (see Shi and Collins ) are challenged by migrants as they are creating practices that ultimately produce new and complex affiliations directed toward a possible sharing of dominant urban values, attitudes and places:When I came to the city to work for the first time, I walked a lot, to get a feeling, to sense the environment, to know the city. Now [after moving from Dongguan to Shenzhen], I feel I know the place, I am here for a short time, but I know every merchandise have a place you go to buy it, each need has its own place.…”
Section: Introduction: Urban Belonging In Chinamentioning
While internal migration in contemporary China ascribes a great change to urban China's demographic composition, social structures and economic development trajectories, it is yet to restructure the formal definitions of urban identity and belonging, which are still dominated by the household registration system (hukou). The paper suggests that as a result of changes in the political, economic, demographic and social contexts within which China's internal migration develops, there emerge a crucial need to re‐examine the crude forms of determining identity and belonging, questioning the addressing of spatiality within the existing mechanisms (such as hukou system or the shiminhua discourse). To do so, the paper argues that the existing de‐territorialisation of the migration experience has to be replaced with a more nuanced understanding of how spatial practices and conceptualisations shape migrants’ experiences, as it is becoming imperative to develop a new framework that is more sensitive to migrants’ lived process of identification and belonging, especially as these traverse multiple geographies and spatial scales. This close engagement with migrants’ spatiality can then be used as a base from which to engage with a more complex view of migrants’ spatial and social relatedness, as well as the development of their urban belonging and identity.
“…However, even if the official discourse of the Chinese government was to carry out harmonious urban regeneration, the emergence of these cultural clusters attracted a new upper-middle class, a process which very often excluded local residents and low-skilled "rural-to-urban" migrant workers (mingong) from state planning (Yu and Francis 2018). These two antagonistic positions engendered and deepened the myth of identity creation and the understanding of Suzhou Creek's deindustrialization process.…”
Section: Introduction To the Industrial And Post-industrial Chronotop...mentioning
This article explores how vernacular aesthetics have been re-appropriated from pictorial to modern documentary photography over the past century to instigate a modern collective imagination of the industrial disintegration in the Chinese urban milieu. Within the scope of a discursive visual process, Jean Philippe Gauvrit (b.1963) documents the departure of the industrial urban society in his photo-essay Shanghai in JP Gauvrit (2008). The paper claims that Gauvrit’s documentary photography can be understood as a visual critical discourse of several representational perspectives of time that render visible anachronistic and new social structures that come into being: between utopias of the past and visions of the future in an alternative chronotopic ‘present’ cartography. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) conception of chronotope, in this study, the sublime industrial comes to be represented as an intelligible reconfiguration of linear and cyclical time. By linking that socio-economic reality of that time with a collective consciousness, documentary photography can serve as a chronotope that reveals both the tension and the assimilation relating to the historical myths that lie between the fall of an industrial mode of production and the birth of a post-industrial cultural city in an era of de-industrialization.
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