Space Production by Migrants in China's Urban Villages

Space Production by Migrants in China's Urban Villages PDF

Author: Shiyu Yang

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2023-12-31

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 3839469147

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As China races towards modernity, its cities are experiencing an unprecedented surge in urbanisation, characterised by a relentless influx of migrants and sprawling expansion into suburban realms. Shiyu Yang draws upon Henri Lefebvre's influential theoretical framework and applies it to case studies of two urban villages in Beijing to examine how migrants shape the social production of space in these districts. With a wealth of first-hand material from the field, this study provides essential insights into the ongoing processes and social dynamics that resonate with scholars from cross-disciplinary urban studies as well as practitioners in governance and urban planning.

Rural Migrants in Urban China

Rural Migrants in Urban China PDF

Author: Fulong Wu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1135095345

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After millions of migrants moved from China’s countryside into its sprawling cities a unique kind of ‘informal’ urban enclave was born – ‘villages in the city’. Like the shanties and favelas before them elsewhere, there has been huge pressure to redevelop these blemishes to the urban face of China’s economic vision. Unlike most developing countries, however, these are not squatter settlements but owner-occupied settlements developed semi-formally by ex-farmers turned small-developers and landlords who rent shockingly high-density rooms to rural migrants, who can outnumber their landlord villagers. A strong state, matched with well-organised landlords collectively represented through joint-stock companies, has meant that it has been relatively easy to grow the city through demolition of these soft migrant enclaves. The lives of the displaced migrants then enter a transient phase from an informal to a formal urbanity. This book looks at migrants and their enclave ‘villages in the city’ and reveals the characteristics and changes in migrants’ livelihoods and living places. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book analyses how living in the city transforms and changes rural migrant households, and explores the social lives and micro economies of migrant neighbourhoods. It goes on to discuss changing housing and social conditions and spatial changes in the urban villages of major Chinese cities, as well as looking into transient urbanism and examining the consequences of redevelopment and upgrading of the ‘villages in the city’; in particular, the planning, regeneration, politics of development, and socio-economic implications of these immense social, economic and physical upheavals.

Strangers in the City

Strangers in the City PDF

Author: Li Zhang

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0804779341

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With rapid commercialization, a booming urban economy, and the relaxation of state migration policies, over 100 million peasants, known as China’s “floating population,” have streamed into large cities seeking employment and a better life. This massive flow of rural migrants directly challenges Chinese socialist modes of state control. This book traces the profound transformations of space, power relations, and social networks within a mobile population that has broken through the constraints of the government’s household registration system. The author explores this important social change through a detailed ethnographic account of the construction, destruction, and eventual reconstruction of the largest migrant community in Beijing. She focuses on the informal privatization of space and power in this community through analyzing the ways migrant leaders build their power base by controlling housing and market spaces and mobilizing social networks. The author argues that to gain a deeper understanding of recent Chinese social and political transformations, one must examine not only to what extent state power still dominates everyday social life, but also how the aims and methods of late socialist governance change under new social and economic conditions. In revealing the complexities and uncertainties of the shifting power and social relations in post-Mao China, this book challenges the common notion that sees recent changes as an inevitable move toward liberal capitalism and democracy.

Changing China: Migration, Communities and Governance in Cities

Changing China: Migration, Communities and Governance in Cities PDF

Author: Li Si-Ming

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-02

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1315536676

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China’s unprecedented urbanization is underpinned by not only massive rural-urban migration but also a household registration system embedded in a territorial hierarchy that produces lingering urban-rural duality. The mid-1990s onwards witnessed increasing reliance on land revenues by municipal governments, causing repeated redrawing of city boundaries to incorporate surrounding countryside. The identification of real estate as a growth anchor further fueled urban expansion. Sprawling commodity housing estates proliferate on urban-rural fringes, juxtaposed with historical villages undergoing intense densification. The traditional urban core and work-unit compounds also undergo wholesale redevelopment. Alongside large influx of migrants, major reshuffling of population has taken place inside metropolitan areas. Chinese cities today are more differentiated than ever, with new communities superimposing and superseding older ones. The rise of the urban middle class, in particular, has facilitated the formation of homeowners’ associations, and poses major challenges to hitherto state dominated local governance. The present volume tries to more deeply unravel and delineate the intertwining forms and processes outlined above from a variety of angles: circulatory, mobility and precariousness; urbanization, diversity and segregation; and community and local governance. Contributors include scholars of Chinese cities from mainland China, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and the United States. This volume was previously published as a special issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics.

Transcending Boundaries

Transcending Boundaries PDF

Author: Biao XIANG

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2004-11-01

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 9047406796

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Based on the author’s own six years’ fieldwork, this book looks at critical features of China’s current social change, recounting how, against the odds, a group of migrants created their own major community outside of the State system and looking at that communities’ interaction with the State.

Manufacturing Towns in China

Manufacturing Towns in China PDF

Author: Yue Gong

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-12-29

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9811333726

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This book offers an engaging and unique view of the governance of Chinese rural migrants in non-factory areas of manufacturing towns. By asking how authorities govern migrants as an ongoing source of cheap labor, this book demonstrates and interprets authorities’ power exercised in the form of governing rationalities, regulations, programs, activities, and designated non-factory spaces—town and village centers and migrant living zones. These power exercises take place routinely in migrants’ everyday lives but typically veil themselves, producing knowledge that legitimates our understanding of migrants. Based on their power exercises, authorities’ governance of migrants, like multiple “invisible filters” that select and help create migrant labor in non-factory areas, leads to an inclusion of a certain number of migrants as cheap factory workers and an exclusion of the rest. Nevertheless, by exercising their unique power techniques, migrants can resist and alter authority governance; thus the authorities’ power exercises are deficient and may ultimately be futile. This book details these power exercises, offers rewarding insights, and can greatly enrich our understanding of China’s local governance of migrants and migrant resistance.

Villages in the City

Villages in the City PDF

Author: Stefan Al

Publisher:

Published: 2014-09-30

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13:

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This book argues for the value of urban villages as places. To reveal their qualities, a series of drawings and photographs uncovers the immerse concentration of social life in their dense structures and provides a peek into residents homes and daily lives.

Settlement Spaces: Urban Survival Prospects of China’s Special Communities

Settlement Spaces: Urban Survival Prospects of China’s Special Communities PDF

Author: Xiao Wu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-10-16

Total Pages: 688

ISBN-13: 9811648921

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This book examines the settlement space of special communities in China on the community scale from an interdisciplinary approach that combines perspectives from urban planning and sociology. Using the framework of integration response, it theoretically and empirically explores the approaches these communities adopt to survive and evolve. Empirically, this discussion centers on four particular groups, namely international students, land-lost peasants, ethnic minorities, and migrant workers, and offers an analysis of their settlement spaces from different perspectives. Theoretically, this study optimizes the logic of one-way integration as used in classical theories. By constructing a two-way linkage in the theoretical framework of integration response, it provides a multi-scenario interpretation and summary of the laws of survival and evolution that govern the urban settlements of special communities in China. This study conforms to the major transformations that China has undergone in the concepts, models, and orientation of its development since the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Furthermore, it renders profound research value and bears practical significance for the adjustment and management of urban spatial patterns in China, social care for marginalized groups, and the construction of a harmonious and moderately prosperous society. This study provides valuable reference for educators, researchers, and management personnel across various fields, including urban planning, geography, and sociology.

Spatial Mobility of Migrant Workers in Beijing, China

Spatial Mobility of Migrant Workers in Beijing, China PDF

Author: Ran Liu

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-03-30

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 3319147382

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The great migration of farmers leaving rural China to work and live in big cities as 'floaters' has been an on-going debate in China for the past three decades. This book probes into the spatial mobility of migrant workers in Beijing, and questions the city 'rights' issues beneath the city-making movement in contemporary China. In revealing and explaining the socio-spatial injustice, this volume re-theorizes the 'right to the city' in the Chinese context since Deng Xiaoping's reforms. The policy review, census analysis, and housing survey are conducted to examine the fate of migrant workers, who being the most marginalized group have to move persistently as the city expands and modernizes itself. The study also compares the migrant workers with local Pekinese dislocated by inner city renewals and city expansion activities. Rapid urban growth and land expropriation of peripheral farmlands have also created a by-product of urbanization, an informal property development by local farmers in response to rising low-cost rental housing demand. This is a highly comparable phenomenon with cities in other newly industrialized countries, such as São Paulo. Readers will be provided with a good basis in understanding the interplay as well as conflicts between migrant workers' housing rights and China's globalizing and branding pursuits of its capital city. Audience: This book will be of great interest to researchers and policy makers in housing planning, governance towards urban informalities, rights to the city, migrant control and management, and housing-related conflict resolutions in China today.