The definition of urban villages in Shenzhen or in China in general cannot be fitted neatly into written words, much like their existence cannot be neatly fitted into cities. Urban villages in Shenzhen are actually clumsy combinations of memories, senses, and experiences. They are made up of human beings and architectural forms. They inspire different conceptions, that vary from person to person. The villages represent completely different concepts to different people living within or beyond the borders of the urban village. Some live in the villages out of necessity but would rather live elsewhere if they could afford it. Some rather enjoy their lives in the villages and would even miss them were they to leave for somewhere else. Some people are born in urban villages. As for those who live outside the villages, the concepts of urban villages tend to be much simpler. They can usually be summarized into a few adjectives. Some with zero training in architecture would say that urban villages are ugly. Some would comment on the untidiness in urban villages, hence calling them dirty. And then there are some who would describe the urban village as problematic, parasitic, and dangerous. These people fear urban villages or they may simply have different ideas in mind for those areas, arising from self-interest or ideological zeal. More than anything, the urban villages are parallel worlds to the mainstream urban society of Shenzhen. Sometimes, urban villages are located right next to some of the most grandiose and affluent shopping malls or luxurious apartments. Maybe this is further proof of the socialistic nature of urban China, that the rich and poor are still not so segregatedâ in contrast to some of the ranchero communities in Southern California or gated communities elsewhere. Often one can sit at one of the fancy coffee houses, be it Starbucks or one of the other popular international coffee chain that are so numerous in Shenzhen nowadays, and observe the chaotic yet lively scenes across the street in the urban villages.1 The residents of the urban village, whether migrants or millionaire original villagers in casual wear might also sit at a Hunanese rice noodle shop or one of those Hong Kong cafĂ©s (cha can ting), calmly looking back at those sitting in the coffee houses. They are rather comfortable where they are. The urban villages have a clumsy divide between the rich and the poor, the migrants and the long-term residents in Shenzhen. The border between the world of urban villages and mainstream Shenzhen is totally open. Many of the technical nouveau riche elites who work at the high-rise office buildings on the main street will from time to time venture into the urban villages for hometown snacks.
Philosophically, words tend to lose their meaning and fail to capture the full concept of urban villages. Called chengzhongcun in Chinese, it is literally translated into English slightly out of order as âcity center villageâ or âcity with village within.â While some scholars insist on using the term âvillage-in-city,â others would prefer âurban villageâ for its simplicity. Urban villages are something to be experienced with the bodily senses. They always have something surprising to offer, beyond the theories and photographs from scholars and observers. Quite simply, the urban villages in Shenzhen are both the buildings and the people. In Shenzhen, and in China in general, urban villages are some of the freest and most open spaces in a city. It is far easier to gain access to urban villages than the ID card swapping office, or the gated residential apartment blocks which are very common nowadays among Chinaâs urban middle class. Sometimes one will venture into urban villages without even noticing. The urban villages of Shenzhen are often located right next to some of the cityâs proudest consumerist constructions, the great malls, things that are increasingly molding Chinese cities into a similar âformula.â It is no coincidence that the great new shopping malls are always located next to urban villages; they were always built partially on top of them, on villagesâ land, acquired at different stages of urban expansion or urban renewal.
The year 2015 was the 35th anniversary of the launching of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ). This city has grown and coexisted with its villages for all these years. Shenzhen used to be known in China incorrectly as a just small fishing village. There is the very clichéd story of how a small fishing village turned into a metropolis, which kind of reminds people of the founding myth of Singapore, rising from third world to first world, from kampung to smart city.2 However, there are a few crucial differences between the urbanizing stories of Singapore and Shenzhen. First, Singapore has almost no kampungs left, other than a handful for tourism purposes, while Shenzhen is still full of urban villages. Second, Shenzhen is much bigger than Singapore in both land and population. In simpler terms, Shenzhen is twice as big as Hong Kong, and Hong Kong is twice as big as Singapore.
For a very long time I have lived my life around these urban villages. My residence sometimes directly overlooks them. I moved to Shenzhen as a teenager following my parentsâ job relocation. My father was here first in the late 1980s, being one of the early technical migrants to this city. When he first arrived, he was already assigned a dormitory-like studio apartment. If I remember correctly, that place had no hot water. In about two years we moved to a place named Hongli Village, which is not an urban village. It was one of the early danwei (work unit) compounds in Shenzhen. Then we moved to the bordering area of Mu Tou Long village, which is a major urban village in Luohu district. Next we relocated to the bordering area of Shangsha Village in Futian District. Now, I lived next to one the largest âuntouchedâ urban villages in Shenzhen Baishi Zhou, literally translated as âwhite stone sand bar.â And my place of work is next to another well assimilated urban village in the Nanshan DistrictâGuimiao Xincun (Guimiao New Village or Osmanthus Temple New Village). My life in Shenzhen has always been next to urban villages across the three original SEZ districts of Shenzhen, Luohu, Futian, and Nanshan. There must be some faithful coincidence or Yuan fen (the Chinese loose translation of karma) that I always live next to an urban village. More likely, there are simply too many urban villages in Shenzhen to escape them. After 35 years, the urban villages are still thriving in this rapidly developing city.
Growing up, I had heard numerous stories about the villages, often resembling folk tales that are used to scare little children. The urban villages are like the dark forests in the fairy tales, mysterious, attractive, yet forbidden. There are always stories of illegal activities within the villages, be it gangs, prostitution, or drugs. Interestingly, they were just outside oneâs door, by door I mean the main gates of the well-monitored urban commercialized residential apartment blocks. In those earlier days, the phrase âurban villagesâ (chengzhongcun) had not yet entered my vocabulary. I simply referred to them by their location name or their Chinese categorizing name cun, the Chinese word for village. The notion that somehow there were villages next to urban main streets never seemed strange to me. It was only much later that I learned that there are fundamental differences between the Chinese concepts of village and city, and a dualistic divide between them. Now I have to teach some of these concepts to my students. All things in China are essentially divided into the realms of urban and rural, industrial and agrarian, urban hukou-holding citizens and rural agrarian hukou holders. The village and the city are also strictly separate things. The term âurban villageâ is a learned term for me. Ever since I discovered this term, I began to see these villages and Shenzhen city differently. In this case, words create borders; they make definitions and distinctions. Those living within and without the borders of the urban villages began to be perceived differently by me. I discovered that some of my friends were urban villagers, and that most are not. I began to develop an almost kinship-like feeling for some of the villages. In the Chinese media and popular mindsets of the new urban middle class, the urban villages remained areas to be avoided, much like the âdangerousâ ghettos of Western cities. The sharp contradiction between how urban villages are widely portrayed and my personal experience always fascinates me.
Defining Urban Villages
Research on urban villages is a relative new area of study for mainland Chinese scholars. It was only in the mid-1980s that urban villages across China were first researched and analyzed. Chinese scholars are fascinated by the urban village because of its particular grayish nature, that somehow this is a land not fully controlled by the urban authorities. There is always something new about the urban villages. The Chinese government at local city level also had a hard time dealing with the urban village largely due to ambiguous legal circumstance during transition in jurisdiction from rural to urban. Hence, the grayish nature of the urban villages acted very much like a protection aura.
Many scholars have focused on the migrant aspects of urban villages. In the late 1980s, Chinese scholars in research teams started to conduct sociological and anthropological field work in the villages. In most cases, this field work did not penetrate deep into the villages. There was very much a case of the Hawthorne effect at work in that the villagers were very aware of their presences. In most cases, the urban villagers, especially the original villagers, have refused them deep access. Until recently, research into urban village companies and original villager communities have been rare. In the early days, many Chinese scholars had a rather confused concept of urban villages. Many of them even considered the Zhejiang Cun (Zhejiang villages) on the outskirts of Beijing to be urban villages. These earlier settlements were really only concentrated residential areas for migrants from Zhejiang province. They could be on the outskirts or in a suburb village of Beijing, but they could also be simple factory flats outside Beijingâs domestic Nan Yuan Airport.
Shenzhenâs urban villages and those of the Pearl River Delta in general were a category of their own, which was formed by the combination of certain human elements and forms of self-constructed buildings. Some local Shenzhen scholars, such as Wang Ruyuan (2004), have divided and categorized the urban villages into levels and types according to residential density. In the wider region, Chen Yi (1999) and Li Peilin have subdivided the urban villages according to their forms and how they are positioned within the city. Li is a famous scholar/official (the chief of the prestigious China Social Science Academy, CSSA) and likely the person to have coined the word chengbiancun (âcity border villageâ) in China. Some scholars have divided the urban villages according to their development level, calling them âinfantile, adult,â and other humanized adjectives. Others have labeled the different villages according to their function or for what they are known. Sometimes, these analyses have enhanced the very biased view of urban villages. Many of these unconsciously lead to stereotypes such as âconcubine villageâ or âcocaine village.â Of course, there are also positive stereotypes such as âyoung intellectual villageâ or âpetty bourgeois villageâ (xiaoqingxincun).
Many Western scholars have tried to apply existing concepts to the urban village. In some of her travels across China Dorothy Solinger has mentioned various âshantiesâ in the Chinese city which are highly likely to be urban villages, based on her description. Her description of the shanties is widely cited by many Western scholars including Mike Davis in his Planet of Slums (2006). Empirical observation would lead many to equate the urban village the the slums or shanties in many third world countries. This is likely a mild case of orientalism at work, applying a singular concept to all developing countries. Surely not all areas of self-built informal housing in the developing world are slums. In fact, the very term âthird worldâ or âdeveloping worldâ is hardly applicable to China anymore. It is almost a suzhi-like categorization at national level. Chinaâs government at the central and local levels is much stronger than most developing countriesâ. This is a case in point made by a researcher at Chinaâs CSSA (China Social Science Academy) Latin America Research Division when I asked her to compare and contrast Latin American cities and Chinese cities. At least according to her, Chinaâs absence of slums or barrios was due to strong government presence and control.
Then there is T.G. McGeeâs theory of desakota, which is actually very popular among urbanism scholars in China.3 Scholars following McGeeâs schema conclude that the Chinese urban development model and emerging urban sprawl are following the pattern of Indonesian rural-urban metropolitan regions on the island of Java. McGeeâs desakota model has been directly applied to the Pearl River Delta region and the Yangtze River Delta region. Urban Village are not desakotas. In the categorization of Desakotas, many of the urban villages that are connected to the city have been mistaken for rural village when one of the fundamental distinctions of urban villages is the lack of agrarian activities. There are no more farms in urban villages and the only crops that people have grown are buildings.
Scholars even disagree on the English name of urban villages. Some point out that the English usage of urban villages predates that of China. It is not known when exactly the term âurban villageâ first emerged. Herbert Gans published The Urban Villagers in 1962, about the urban villages in the West End of Boston, Massachusetts. These are village-like neighborhoods with high concentrations of European immigrants (Gans 1982). The German, Jewish, Polish, and the Italian neighborhoods in various North American cities were sometimes historically referred to as urban villages (Wolf 1980; Gans 1982). Hence there is German Village, Germantown, Little Italy, Chinatown, Little Saigon, and other similar ethnic or immigrant urban neighborhoods. The original American urban villages might be still very village-like due to the make-up of their early immigrant community. Many of those migrants were fresh-off-the-boat immigrants who were mostly from farms in Europe. Many came directly as a result of crop failure, such as the large percentage of Irish migrants in the mid-to-late eighteenth century during the Potato Famine. Due to early language adaptation difficulty, many of the European migrants, much like the later Chinese migrants, lived in concentrated clusters or congregated into neighborhoods.
Then there are the urban villages of Britain, a concept which likely has its origin in the garden city movement of Sir Ebenezer Howard in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Howardâs garden city concept was a reaction to the widespread âurban diseasesâ of the late nineteenth century, with British cities surging forward utilizing all the marvels of the industrial revolution. British cities such as London or Manchester were becoming some of the largest and most densely populated cities in Europe and the world. Howard wanted cities to be like the British countryside, small semi-rural towns with pastures and the view of Victorian gardens. The population limit was strictly advised to be kept at the level of a quarter of a million. Howardâs garden city movement had influence well into the latter half of the twentieth century under various names. Building upon Howardâs concepts, a British version of the urban village was formed. These were sparsely populated semi-rural small towns. One key distinction was that British urban villages still had an aristocratic feel, with open land and green pastures reserved for the elite, feudal landowning class. To live in the countryside or a village was to be admired. One must say that British urban villages also reminded peopleâat least in partâof the great escape to suburbia by the upper middle class in some of the great American cities such as Los Angeles. The British kind of urban village was something certainly not built for migrants or new immigrants from the Continent and the rest of the world. These urban villages were strictly for the elite among elites.
In more recent times, there has even been a new modernist layer of meaning to the concept of the urban village, which is particularly popular among new urbanism planners and theorists. According to them, the modern form of urban village is a planned community that is walkable, convenient, and environmentally sustainable (Grant 2005, p. 125). It is a community that distinguishes itself from the type of rigid business atmosphere of downtown urban areas or the kind of highly fractured suburbia where people rely on cars to conduct their daily commute. This kind of âurban villageâ may already be on the blueprints of some Chinese urban planners, but at present the use of âurban villageâ in this book is exclusively with reference to the ones that have undergone rural-to-urban transformation. There are many obvious distinctions betw...