Socio-spatial segregation in China and migrants’ everyday life experiences: the case of Wenzhou

Abstract

Although internal migration is one of the most frequently discussed aspects of China's twenty-first century urbanization, much of the research in this area emphasizes megacities. This paper, however, focuses on Wenzhou, a Chinese city that served as a national model for the introduction of small-scale private enterprise in the 1990s. Through a survey of migrants living in the subdistrict of Shuangyu, a settlement dominated by manufacturing workers, this article argues that socio-spatial segregation research should pay more holistic attention to migrants' use of urban space, beyond simply place of residence. Focusing on how migrants use space in several aspects of their everyday lives, this article contends that Shuangyu is socially and spatially segregated from other parts of the city. Rather than neatly incorporated into the rest of the city, migrant settlement in Wenzhou is both marginalized and independent. We thus theorize Shuangyu's place in Wenzhou's new socio-spatial structure as a "city within the city." ARTICLE HISTORY

Exploring the Associations of Walking Behavior with Neighborhood Environments by Different Life Stages: A Cross-Sectional Study in a Smaller Chinese City

“…We found that walking duration in general was positively associated with recreational walking and social quality (i.e., seeing other people or activities), but negatively associated with disadvantaged groups (e.g., junior college students and self-employees), in line with some findings from previous studies in China [13,24,25,30,48]. In our study, the associations are further discussed across TLS.…”

“…This may explain why the average walking duration of young adults was the shortest in this study (mean = 2.79) compared to the other two life stages [30]. In addition, participants noted that most young adults reached the average income level (Table 1), but the disadvantaged groups had to sacrifice their leisure time to work harder and earn more money, resulting in feeling tired and being less active during their rest or recreational period, as also found in a study of immigrants and social-spatial separation in Weizhou [48]. For example, a 27-year-old participant said:…”

“…The college entrance examination was reinstated in 1977, which led to lower educational attainments in people who were over 40 during the time of our research. In the late 1990s, after the reform, people with higher incomes tended to move out, and the work units were less well-maintained and gradually decreased in number [21,26] According to the understanding above and the age groups used in a study of socio-spatial segregation in China [48], the "working age population" was divided into three life stages (TLS): late adolescents (aged [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25], young adults (aged [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35], and middle-aged adults (aged . The classification of TLS was discussed and refined twice with the local participants:…”

Associations of perceived daily walking duration with residential food outlets in small Chinese cities: a cross-sectional study

“…This reveals that these three outlet types are more variously impacted by different socioeconomic groups. One speculation is that migrants and older people in China prefer to purchase from informal street vendors or markets due to the lower prices, compared with purchasing in supermarkets and grocery stores [15,50]. Our eld observation revealed that grocery stores often occurred inside residential buildings at an extremely short distance from home, but the price of fruit and vegetables in these amenities was much higher than when bought from street vendors or in markets, partly due to higher rental costs.…”

“…Secondly, to further understand the impact of food outlets on DailyWalk among different age groups, participants were categorised into younger adults (aged [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] and older adults (aged 36-59). This threshold was the same as that used in previous studies in Chinese contexts [15,50]. We then performed the multivariate logistic regression model for the two age groups.…”