Housing Preferences of Temporary Migrants in Urban China in the wake of Gradual Hukou Reform: A Case Study of Shenzhen

In the wake of the recent announcement by the State Council concerning the provision of public rental housing across China, and the gradual reform of China's household registration system (hukou), this article explores how potential adjustments in government housing policies (namely access to public rental housing) influence the housing preferences of temporary migrants who are currently residing inside the chengzhongcun (urban villages) of Shenzhen. The results indicate that dissatisfaction with rental cost and living conditions in these urban villages are the key reasons for migrants wishing to move into public rental housing if it is offered to them — and not the fact that they are treated differently within the hukou system. Public rental housing is welcomed in particular by newly arriving migrants who live outside the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ), and migrants who have decided to remain in Shenzhen for the foreseeable future. By contrast, dissatisfaction with urban villages is the sole contributor to housing preferences for those residing inside the SEZ.     

中国快速城市化时期农民工住房类型及其评价

城市化过程中来自农村的城市移民的住房问题是城市化过程中的突出问题之一,这个问题解决不好就会出现如巴西和印度等国家大量的城市贫民窟,成为城市发展的“肿瘤”.在分析中国城市农民工住房的基础上,从城市化、城市空间结构、经济和社会发展等角度评估现有的比较典型的农民工住房类型,最后提出几点政策和规划建议.     

Making the ‘Invisible’ Visible: Redevelopment‐induced Displacement of Migrants in Shenzhen,China

Gentrification in China is intertwined with urban redevelopment, which causes the large‐scale displacement of rural–urban migrants from ‘villages in the city’ (ViCs). Because of the informality of ViCs, migrant renters have very insecure tenancy and during redevelopment they are treated as a negligible (‘invisible’) social group. As they are very difficult to locate after displacement, they are also literally invisible to researchers. To make the invisible visible, this study traced a sample of displaced migrants from Huangbeiling village in Shenzhen. The focus was on the displacement process and on identifying the consequences for the displaced. We found various forms of displacement during the redevelopment process. Nearby ViCs were prioritized by displaced migrants to minimize as much utility loss as possible. However, they generally suffer from decreased proximity, increased living costs, and the loss of social networks and job opportunities. Remarkably, some choose to return to the gentrifying village, enduring displacement in situ caused by increasing rents, drastic physical neighbourhood changes and declining liveability, in exchange for retaining their original social and economic networks. Large‐scale urban redevelopment is causing the rapid shrinkage of informal housing. Recognizing and addressing the housing needs of this impoverished social group is a matter of urgency.     

从出租屋看农民工市民化的困境

出租屋是农民工在打工地的主要居住方式。其基本特征是:大多数位于城乡结合部;大多数建在宅基地上;运作成本低廉,成为出租屋主财产性收入的重要来源;显著不同于国外的贫民窟;获得农民工较高的满意度。存在的主要问题是:政府对出租屋的规划管理具有滞后性;在法律上还没有承认出租屋的合法地位;对出租屋流动人口管理服务有待于进一步加强。有关的政策建议是:高度重视出租屋的地位和作用;加强对农民工居住的出租屋的研究,建立健全有关法律法规;科学制定城镇规划;加快宅基地、农村集体建设用地改革步伐;保持"以屋管人"的连续性。     

有序推进农业转移人口市民化途径研究

有序推进农业转移人口市民化是新的历史时期推进新型城镇化的重大举措,也是各级政府关注的重点。目前农业转移人口市民化从上到下基本没有阻力,但也有一定的压力,如资金、均等化社会保障、住房、稳定的就业创业等。面对压力可通过加快农村土地收益分配体制改革、加快城乡统一的社会保障体制改革、完善住房保障体系、构建覆盖农业转移人口的就业服务体系等举措可有效缓解农业转移人口市民化的压力,从而有序推进农业转移人口市民化。     

The Institution of Hukou‐based Social Exclusion: A Unique Institution Reshaping the Characteristics of Contemporary Urban China

This conceptual article contributes to institutional analysis and the neo‐institutional theory literature by identifying and analysing the linked rules, values, norms and patterned practices that surround and structure the way rural migrant workers are treated in urban areas of China in terms of Scott's integrated model of institutions. It argues that these hukou‐based rules, values, norms and patterned practices that discriminate against rural migrants can be considered to be a unique institution — the institution of hukou‐based social exclusion (IHSE). IHSE has dominated Chinese urban society for 3 decades and significantly shaped the lives of millions of rural migrant workers, the character of contemporary China and the nature of managerial practices among Chinese firms. This is the first article to examine the social exclusion of rural workers from the perspective of neo‐institutionalism, providing the first systematic analysis of the regulative, normative and cognitive dimensions that together socially exclude migrants in urban areas of China. It presents a holistic picture of the newly identified institution that offers new insights into China's urban society and management, and a new starting point for research.     

Formalization by the State,Re‐Informalization by the People: A Gecekondu Transformation Housing Estate as Site of Multiple Discrepancies

This article demonstrates residents' transformative practices and discusses attendant outcomes to contribute to an understanding of state‐built housing estates for people affected by urban transformation projects. It draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a social housing estate (K‐TOKI) in the Northern Ankara Entrance Urban Transformation Project (NAEUTP). It addresses questions on why formalization of informal housing takes place today, under what conditions it is countered by re‐informalization practices, and what the outcomes of this process are. As informal housing became formalized by NAEUTP, gecekondu dwellers were forced into formalized spaces and lives within K‐TOKI, which was based on a middle‐class lifestyle in its design and its legally required central management. Informality re‐emerged in K‐TOKI when the state's housing institution, in response to the estate's poor marketability, moved out, allowing residents to reappropriate spaces to meet their needs and form their own management system. When cultural norms that are inscribed in the built environment and financial norms that treat residents as clients conflict with everyday practices and financial capabilities, the urban poor increasingly engage in acts of informality. I argue that the outcome of this informality in a formal context is a site of multiple discrepancies.     

‘Many Rivers to Cross’: Suburban Densification and the Social Status Quo in Greater Lyon

Urban research often considers densification from the perspective of sustainable development and social mix. This essay focuses instead on the social and political stakes involved in densification through the example of a large French metropolitan area. It shows that the densification policies put in place in the Lyon agglomeration cannot be said to succeed in breaking down the historical segregation between its residential and affluent western suburbs (banlieues) and its industrial and working‐class eastern ones. The political manoeuvres executed by the institutions implementing densification, and the search for consensus characterizing France's intercommunalities, block any possibility of redistributing functions and social classes at the metropolitan scale, and hence of ending the social specialization of Lyon's suburbs. Moreover, municipalities subjected to pressure from suburban areas carefully assess the profile of residents selected to occupy new housing units—i.e. individuals already residing in the commune in the case of western suburbs, and middle‐class individuals hailing from the eastern part of the agglomeration in the case of eastern suburbs. Densification does not foster social mix at the metropolitan scale, neither does it improve the housing conditions of disadvantaged populations.     

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

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.     

POLICIES IN THE UNITED STATES TO PROVIDE HOUSING ASSISTANCE TO LOW‐INCOME HOUSEHOLDS1

From the 1930s onwards America's housing assistance policies have largely been shaped by the federal government's response to catastrophe, whether of an external nature (the Great Depression, the urban riots of the 1960s) or an internal nature (mismanagement, excessive costs). Consequently, today's collection of federal housing policies resemble more the results of an archaeological dig through 70 years of activity than a coherent approach to a longstanding problem. Nonetheless, one key theme that emerges is the shift from wholly government solutions to a hybrid public–private partnership approach in the early 1970s.     

Urban Ecological Enclosures: Conservation Planning,Peri-urban Displacement,and Local State Formations in China

Across contemporary China, city governments are unevenly territorializing peri-urban villagers’ land and housing by creating new urban ecological conservation sites. I analyze this emerging form of what I call ‘ecological territorialization’ through three interrelated spatial practices: comprehensive urban–rural planning, peri-urban ‘ecological migration’, and the distribution of institutional responsibility for conservation site financing, construction and management. Detailing this triad of territorializing practices renews attention to the relationship between conservation classifications that justify state intervention, uneven displacements of people from rural land and housing, and site-specific capitalizations that collectively consolidate urban government control over rural spaces. These practices emerge stochastically as state, private, and semi-state institutions capitalize on conservation projects in the context of legally and constitutionally underdefined land use rights and ecological land designations. In the current post-socialist moment of urban ‘greening’, these practices are key to producing frontiers of land-based accumulation and extending local state control across the peri-urban fringe. Urban ecological enclosures not only remake city-level state power but also shape rural people's relationships to land, labor and housing.     

福利国家英国的住房政策

本文分析了英国住房福利体系的构成与其居民的居住方式。通过对英国住房福利体系的分析和近年来住房制度的改革 ,指出英国住房政策对我国的启示     

Negotiating the Politics of Exclusion: Georges Candilis,Housing and the Kuwaiti Welfare State

In the early stages of welfare planning, the Kuwaiti state restricted equal access to its housing programs in neighborhoods outside the city. The subsequent demographic shift, caused by a Kuwaiti exodus to the ‘suburbs' and non‐Kuwaiti urban labor migration, prompted calls for housing schemes to encourage city living for citizens. Georges Candilis's proposal for a residential neighborhood in Kuwait City emerged from this context. This article examining Candilis's unrealized project also offers a critical perspective on Kuwait's unbalanced housing policies. From this analysis, it draws observations on the role of architects and their limited impact on policies established by decision‐making networks within the welfare state. Seen from this perspective, the Candilis project bears witness to broader socio‐economic agendas that privileged some groups while marginalizing or excluding others.     

Spaces of Extraction,Metropolitan Explosions: Planetary Urbanization and the Commodity Boom in Latin America

Through an exploration of the political economy of the current commodity boom in Latin America, and on the basis of recent appropriations of Henri Lefebvre's notion of planetary urbanization, this article proposes viewing spaces of resource extraction resulting from an escalating international demand for raw materials as particular morphological expressions of market‐driven processes of urbanization. Furthermore, the article draws on Lefebvre to argue that such burgeoning spaces of urbanization are the result of a contradictory tension between spatial homogenization—in the form of multiscalar governance frameworks and infrastructural programs—and territorial fragmentation—in the form of fixed capital allocations and state‐led spatial segregation. When considered jointly, these contradictory movements allow us to grasp fully the extent of the problematic explosion of spaces that, according to Lefebvre, characterizes capitalist urbanization. The article concludes by reflecting on the emancipatory promise that underlies the planetary extension of the urban form because, with the projection of material infrastructures required for resource extraction—especially information technologies—across the rural realm, local communities have been able to shed their isolated state and emerge as fully fledged political actors.     

‘Gentrification Without Displacement' and the Consequent Loss of Place: The Effects of Class Transition on Low‐income Residents of Secure Housing in Gentrifying Areas

The increasingly disputed concept of gentrification‐induced displacement is combining with the argument that the poor benefit from social mix to produce a theoretical case for ‘positive gentrification'. The notion that new middle‐class residents not only attract more investment but bring opportunities for ‘upward social mobility' to low‐income people who manage to stay in gentrifying areas has become policy orthodoxy. While there are scholarly challenges to the extent of these benefits, the disadvantages of imposed social mix on low‐income communities even where they are not physically displaced remain under‐researched. This article helps to fill this gap by reporting on research into the experience of long‐term low‐income residents of gentrifying neighbourhoods who managed to stay put. The research explores notions of social mix, place and displacement among residents of secure community housing in Melbourne, Australia (the equivalent of small‐scale social housing in Europe and North America) with the object of establishing whether the absence of physical displacement is sufficient to ameliorate gentrification's negative impacts. The findings demonstrate that transformations in shops and meeting places, and in the nature of local social structure and government interventions, cause a sense of loss of place even without physical displacement.     

Remaking Shanghai: New Divisions in an Expanding Metropolis

This study of Shanghai analyzes the city's emerging patterns of residential settlement in 2010. Most previous research on China focused on central city patterns, but by 2010 urban development in major metropolitan areas was taking place predominantly in the suburbs. The analysis re‐examines and extends previous studies of the level of segregation by various key population characteristics, showing that the highest segregation is found in the suburban ring, where original villager residents are now joined by an influx of migrants from other regions and by intracity movers. We probe the sources of the segregation pattern in multivariate analyses at two scales—an innovative analysis at the level of individuals that shows how people's citizenship status, occupation and education affect the type of housing that they are able to live in, and jointly contribute to their location in the metropolitan area. We show that the patterns attributable to the market reform period mostly did not supplant the socialist urban structure, but rather used it as its foundation. Segregation today can be attributed less to current class inequality than to state policies in the distant and recent past that have determined when, where and for whom housing is built.     

Financialization of Housing in Brazil: New Frontiers

The financialization of housing has been increasingly identified as an important driver of social and economic change in contemporary capitalism. Focusing on the Brazilian context, this article considers the extent to which recent changes in housing regulations, policies and markets confirm or challenge narratives about the financialization of housing in the international academic debate. I argue that while many of the trends stressed in the literature are apparent, more extreme processes of financialization within the Brazilian housing sector remain limited––not only because of institutional and regulatory constraints, path dependence or political resistance, but also because of fundamental structural conditions of Brazil's position as a peripheral economy. Three different but mutually reinforcing processes are scrutinized in order to evaluate the financialization of housing and its limits in Brazil: the re‐regulation of the real estate financial sector initiated in the 1990s; the changing funding patterns among real estate companies since the mid‐2000s; and the increasing commodification of housing induced by a large‐scale and heavily subsidized housing program launched in 2009.     

LAND MARKETS AND THE EFFECT OF REGULATION ON FORMAL-SECTOR DEVELOPMENT IN URBAN INDONESIA

Until recently, urban land and housing markets in Indonesia seemed to function well. Informal-sector development provided low-income housing affordably. Through government programs, formal-sector developers could build housing for all but the poor. Since 1989, however, daily conversation pictures land speculation as rampant and formal-sector housing as rising beyond the means of the middle class. Newspapers carry stories of conflicts between small landowners and large developers with government officials in between. This article investigates this situation by addressing two related questions: are urban land prices rising “too fast?”; how do land regulations and development practices affect costs, and who pays these costs? The article includes quantitative estimates of urban land prices, changes in urban land supply, movement of land through the permitting process, and the effect of development regulations on costs. Data come from a literature survey and interviews of some of the largest formal-sector developers in Indonesia. A principal finding concerns a development regulation called a “location permit” and the “social function” of land in Indonesian law. Although helpful as a means of assembling land in Indonesia's highly fragmented land markets, location permits allow formal-sector developers to hold land off the market and pay low prices to small landowners. Ultimately, the “social function” of land under Indonesian law holds down the price formal-sector developers pay for land, but not at the price at which they sell their product. The article concludes by proposing reforms to the regulatory process.     

The Spatial Pattern of Residential Mobility in Guangzhou,China

In urban China, residential mobility behaviors have changed fundamentally in recent decades. While research has been undertaken on the trends and causes of residential relocation for different population groups, less attention has been paid to micro‐level processes of residential change, yet the latter underscore urban dynamics. This study addresses this through a survey conducted in Guangzhou in late 2012, which analyzes the spatial flows of residential shifts within and between three distance zones—inner core, inner suburbs and outer suburbs—to reveal complex mobility trends. In particular, hukou or household registration status, socio‐economic status, the nature and rank of employment, and tenure were found to have varied effects on the probability of inward and outward shifts. More specifically, while outward shifts in recent years mainly involved local hukou holders, families with higher education levels, a higher socio‐economic status or those working for government departments and public institutions were found to be more likely to settle in high‐rise commodity housing in the inner core. The majority of non‐hukou migrants, by contrast, moved within the same street or between adjacent streets within the same suburban area, while age, socio‐economic status and homeownership were found to increase an individual's chance of an inward shift.     

震后重建为契机的城市政策转型:墨西哥城案例的启示

1985墨西哥城发生8.1级地震,是世界上为数不多的发生在国家首都的中心地区、并使人口和公共设施都受到严重损害的地震。地震发生时墨西哥正处于快速城市化和经济衰退时期、正要推出一系列改革的起步阶段,面对如此巨大的损失,震后重建的政策调整显得尤为关键。以首都重建为契机,墨西哥政府开始关注城市宏观发展策略、可负担性住房和法规健全等问题,并且通过一系列震后改革策略来推进城市管治思路的转型。事实上,这些震后推出的新政策对城市发展产生了深远的影响:城市中心职能外迁促进了城市功能的有机疏散;以低收入住房为主的住房政策推动了城市的郊区化,同时也使城市中心区住房产权发生了本质性转变;从立法角度对城市进行灾害危险性分区,并对建筑单体构造性能进行严格规定。同样发生在发展中国家高速城市化时期的灾害,墨西哥震后重建的经验和教训将对中国城市防灾抗灾提供重要的借鉴意义。