Suchergebnisse

Since the late 1980s two waves of gentrification have occurred in Guangzhou, China and brought about dramatic transformations of cityscape and sociospatial configuration in the central city. Accordingly, the emphasis of urban policy has shifted from fighting the 'blight' to eliminating the 'obsolescence', which signifies the rise of neoliberal urban policies. The first wave of gentrification started in the late 1980s and paused in 1999 and was mainly in the form of sporadic housing redevelopment justified by city betterment and infrastructure improvement. The second wave surged around 2005, featuring an ambitious urban upgrading scheme with the aim of building a world-class city. While the first wave of gentrification was a modest experiment of marketised operation, the second wave of gentrification is at the core of the local government's growth-seeking and city reimaging neoliberal urban strategy. Defending the right to appropriation has been a major struggle for residents affected in both waves of gentrification, although in the first wave there was very little room left for rights claiming. In the second wave, rights conflicts have gone deeper and been more fierce, and struggles for a right to participation started to rise. Buttressed by local media, academics, activists, and volunteers, local residents have made modest progress in defending their rights. Yet, it is still far from seriously challenging the power structure in urban decision-making and the trajectory of (re)urbanisation dominated by the elite class and vested interest groups.

AbstractIn the face of state‐led land grabs, enterprising Chinese peasants have started a revolution in the ambiguous and insecure rural tenure system by developing an extralegal property system known as the small property right (SPR). Using the SPR, peasants are able to capitalize on their property through the sale of houses built on collectively owned land. Little is known, however, about the specific process behind the development of the SPR by the peasants, or how this extralegal property system functions in terms of securing the use and transfer of property without the backing of law. This article aims to clarify the situation through the lenses of the Endogenous Nature of Institutions and Relational Contract Theory, aiming to understand the socially constructed, endogenous and relational nature of the property rights that make SPR functional. Based on an ethnographic investigation of Beijing's largest SPR housing settlement, we show how enterprising peasants develop long‐term relational contracts with urban households for the provision of housing services, secured on the basis of the common interests and symbiosis of the two parties and a reputation system that serves to deter defaults. The discretionary treatment of SPR housing by local states serves as a further motivation for the village and the informal homeowners to preserve a stable property arrangement, with such a specific institutional setting being an exemplar of China's pragmatic state entrepreneurialism.

In this paper we engage with a theoretical reflection on the concept of the right to the city amidst China's emerging urbanism. In particular, we conceptualize the right to the city as embedded within the complex geometries of power relations throughout the production process of China's urban modernity; and in this sense assert the right to urban life is inevitably entangled with a social project of altering dominant power structures. We suggest that the rights of three social groups—namely socialist workers in work units, rural migrants, and urban redevelopment displacees—to the modern Chinese city is situated within the uneven distribution of social power and corresponding infrastructures of social control, which contribute to these social groups' structural marginality in the process of urban social formation. In some cases, these social groups may be endowed with substantial rights to social welfare but the dominant power structure is left unquestioned and unchallenged, resulting in latent forms of social vulnerability. Therefore, the concept of the right to the city needs to be captured as a combination of the distribution of things (social welfare) and the mobilization of process (structural change). In this sense, a Hegelian teleology of linear social development to comprehend the rights issue amid China's emerging urbanism must be called into question.

Explores the household and neighbourhood factors that leads to both the generation and continuance of urban poverty in China. This title is based upon a household survey in six Chinese cities and provides insights into microscopic and neighbourhood level poverty dynamics.