Chinese Urban Villages as Marginalized Neighbourhoods under Rapid Urbanization

Abstract

Within the rapid process of urbanization, urban villages have appeared in many Chinese cities, particularly in those regions experiencing an acceleration of economic growth. The Chinese name for the urban village is chengzhongcun, literally ‘village in the city’. The rapid expansion of Chinese cities has been encroaching into surrounding villages since the 1990s. In many cases, although villagers lose their farmland due to land requisition by the city government, they maintain property rights over their own houses and their housing plots (zhai ji di) within the village settlement. However, by law their rights to land and housing are not alienable, which means they cannot capitalize their assets through land or housing sale; so they redevelop their housing at high densities. Village housing, typically low quality and high density with many closely packed apartment blocks of between two and eight floors, is rented out to migrant workers and also some urban residents. Without planning and development control, and stimulated by rental income, every villager tries to build a house as high and big as possible. Construction has already lost the aesthetic significance of individual differences, and the harmonious habitat of the traditional Chinese village no longer exists. Urban villages become concrete forests up to 20 metres in height, with a radius of several kilometres. They are not produced by developers or the village collective, but are built by individual villager households. The urban village is characterized overall by narrow roads, face-to-face buildings, a thin strip of sky, and inner streets packed with shops, grocery stores and service outlets. Despite its well-known unruliness and disorder, to some extent China’s urban village shares some similarities with the western urban design concept of urban village, such as pedestrianization, accessibility, self-containment, mixed land use, neighbourhood interaction, and so on.