A Room of One’s Own: Highly-Educated Migrants’ Strategies for Creating a Home in Guangzhou (original) (raw)
Related papers
The urbanisation of rural migrants and the making of urban villages in contemporary China
In the past decades, urban villages proliferate in major cities of China. These marginalised places not only are home to many local villagers, but also host millions of rural migrants. This paper provides an ethnographic account of the spatial and social production of Chinese urban villages. It discusses urban village residents' detailed tactics in developing/participating in the informal housing market, service market and labour market. By so doing, it emphasises people's agency in making their own living spaces and further challenges the marginalisation paradigm that either victimises or disparages urban village residents. It shows peasants, who are commonly assumed to be the antithesis of modernisation and urbanisation, are major actors and urbanise their living spaces. This paper also elaborates on the types of governing strategies at the village and municipal levels. It points out that the contradictions and loopholes in state power have left space for the formation of informal markets and contribute to the making of urban villages in contemporary China.
Between the worlds: Shanghai's young middle-class migrants imagining their city.
In this paper, I use the case study of Hui, a young woman who lives in suburban Shanghai, to explore the migration experience of educated Chinese youth, who come to live, study or work in this city. A young middle class enjoys privileged access to China's global urban modernity. They are also increasingly sharing space with the "global classes" of transnational privilege. However, the image of common urban space, in which the aesthetic distinction between global-elite lifestyles and local aspiration is increasingly blurred, does not necessarily translate into common access to this space and to its hierarchies of hospitality and opportunity. Middle-class migrants are aware of their status as outsiders, whose successful integration in the city hinges not only on strategies of emplacement but also on performing the exclusive cosmopolitan repertoire that Shanghai has built for itself. Despite promises of safe bourgeois arrival, they often remain "in-between", with a sense of vulnerability in a competitive urban environment, and struggle with divided emotional and social attachments. In this paper I look at emerging suburban lifestyles in Shanghai, which are becoming part of the Chinese urban repertoire. Many young professionals are being squeezed out of the housing market in central locations. While some may choose to continue living with their parents to save money for home ownership, others buy apartments further out. Though replicat-ing many of the bourgeois dreams that have informed "Western" suburbia, the urban form that is developing in China is also different and its middle-class imaginaries are less readily connected to the sensorial promises of the Chinese global city.
This paper examines the consumption of homeownership by migrant workers who are long-time residents in Beijing, but purchase real estate properties elsewhere. Most of these workers do not plan to move into their properties any time soon. So for them, homes are less the space they physically inhabit, but rather what anchors their hopes and aspirations and thus transform their class identities by generating feelings of security, fulfillment, and upward social mobility. This paper examines how social exclusion in the urban village and the lure of a booming real estate market cultivate a rural migrant desire for homeownership elsewhere. Many use homeownership as a remedy for their ‘‘in-between status’’ and assume that owning an urban home will allow them to move from migrant laborer to urban consumer. However, this rural migrant ‘‘in-between status’’ is not the result of a lack of affordable and decent places to live, but rather the outcome of being incorporated into a spatially divided production/consumption regime. As a result, not only does owning a home somewhere cannot put an end to their ‘‘in-between status,’’ but also it intensifies their experience of being ‘‘stuck’’ in an ‘‘in-between’’ environment/ status. The more they desire home ownership, the more likely they will invest in the marketplace as laborers or producers. Meanwhile, the more they become successful in that market, the less likely it is that they will leave their adopted cities and live in the urban properties of their own.
"Snail Households": Containerization of Migrant Housing on Shanghai's Fringe
positions: asia critique, 2022
China's escalated infrastructural building and real estate development have gradually erased urban villages and reduced affordable living space for rural-to-urban migrants. This article showcases the emerging practice of container housing among low-income migrants, based on ethnographic data collected between 2016 and 2018 in Shanghai. Such “snail households” living in removable cargo containers and prefabricated metal shelters represent a submissive coping mechanism in response to demolition and eviction, to reduce living cost and stay put on the urban fringe. This article examines the containerization of migrant housing, a process of sociospatial reconfiguration of migrant livelihood that has become increasingly precarious during China's economic restructuring in the twenty-first century. It shows how container housing reifies the state capitalist mode of production and accumulation. The containerization of migrant housing entails a multifaceted process of extraction of labor and land, during which migrants’ mobility and sense of entitlement are highly contained. Container housing represents migrants’ sociospatial precarity in China's exclusive urban citizenship and place-specific property regime. It symbolizes a reinforced subaltern position of migrants subdued in the politics of accumulation, which contributes to the lack of strong resistance and collective action amid forced eviction.
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2016
Drawing on a social constructionist approach and Philipsen's theoretical framework of cultural communication, this study examines how rural-urban migrant workers in China construct the meaning of home in their communication about migration. Interviews with migrant workers and participant observation of their everyday conversations reveal that migrant workers frequently evoke a cultural code of home attachment and actively construct a political code of displacement to construe their prolonged liminality between the city and the countryside. Implications for studying the use of culturally specific and politically situated discursive practices to address common challenges of displacement are discussed.
Consuming urban living in 'villages in the city': Studentification in Guangzhou, China
Urban Studies, 2014
Against the backdrop of higher education expansion, studentification refers to a particular type of urban sociospatial restructuring resulting from university students' concentration in certain residential areas. Over the last decade, studentification has evolved into different forms and has spread to different locales. This study aims to provide a contextualised understanding of this distinct phenomenon in China so as to decode the complex dynamics of urban sociospatial transformation in the Chinese city. In this paper, I present a line of empirical evidence based on fieldwork in Xiadu Village and Nanting Village, two studentified villages close to university campuses in Guangzhou. These two villages exemplify different consumption and spatial outcomes of studentifcation, owing to different institutional arrangements, types of studentifiers and roles of villagers. Yet, in both villages, studentification has profoundly transformed the economic, physical, social and cultural landscapes. Notably, rather than the spatialisation of compromised and marginalised residential choices by higher education students, studentification in China is better interpreted as the spatial result of students' conscious residential, entrepreneurial and consumption choices to escape from the rigid control of university dorms, to accumulate cultural and economic capital, as well as to actualise their cultural identity. In the Chinese context, studentification provides a useful prism to understand a unique trajectory of urbanisation: re-urbanising the 'villages in the city' through bringing in urban living/urban consumptions. In the long run, studentification could provide a potential solution to sustain and upgrade the villages in the city.
Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 2019
Based on a survey conducted after the reform of the residential registration system (hukou in Chinese), this paper explores housing tenure change among China's rural-urban migrants in a medium-size city. It emphasizes the long-term effect of their initial hukou status which encapsulates the conditions in their place of origin and the social capital these represent. Our study presents two major findings: One, the initial housing tenures of rural migrants differ because their tenure choice reflects their socio-demographic characteristics and their migration record; the latter expresses their moving history as well as their short-and long-term objectives. Two, the current tenure choice of rural migrants is pathdependent-once they choose the initial tenure, they will be more (or less) likely to choose a specific subsequent one, leading ultimately to the current tenure. The national reform of the hukou system is fundamental to the understanding of their housing careers. This reform made it possible to change the hukou obtained at birth to a local one, giving the migrant access to a wide range of facilities and social services. Homeownership became the usual key to unlock these benefits. Migrants who intend to settle permanently at their destination may therefore be expected to purchase a dwelling later in their housing career. Adopting a housing policy that sets migrants on the path to homeownership, allows a city to bind desirable migrants. That path appears to be conditioned by the early steps in the migration experience. Therefore, the local housing policy should be concerned with accommodating the housing needs of newly arriving migrants.
China's New Generation Migrant Workers' Urban Experience and Well-Being
Among the tens of millions of migrant workers in Chinese cities, a substantial proportion are new generation migrants. Yet, their distinction from the old generation and their unique urban experience and well-being have not been fully explored in the existing literature. Referring to Bourdieu's concepts of field and habitus, this chapter unfolds the stories of China's new generation migrant workers by examining their predicaments and well-being, their changing imagination and representation of the city and home, and their life prospects under a confluence of forces from the state, market, and society. Compared with the first-generation migrants, the new generation is better educated and more willing and adaptable to stay in the city. Unlike their predecessors, most of them do not have farming skills, but they are more creative and have an adventurous and entrepreneurial spirit. Nonetheless, their urban lives suffer from the same level of precarity as their predecessors, sometimes even worse because the rigid hukou system and rural-urban dichotomy endure while competition among themselves becomes much fiercer. In the highly unequal and contested urban field, self-stigmatization and ambiguous identity are common "habitus" for new generation migrants and are reflected in their imagination and representation of the city and home. To a large extent, the field and habitus faced by migrants are shaped by state institutions. Yet, market and societal forces have added new dimensions to migrants' urban experience.