Speaker
Description
Today, over 370 million internal migrants cross jurisdictions and live in unauthorized rental housing communities. The housing struggles of migrants challenge China’s urban governance structure (Hsing 2010; Zhang 2002). As the governing strategies of the household registration system have proved inadequate, China has launched an initiative to reconfigure the largely informal rental housing market and develop an affordable rental housing market through state-sanctioned corporate projects. Unauthorized rental housing communities are being converted into affordable rental housing respectively for rural migrant workers and migrant college graduates. At the conjecture of increasing migration and a crisis in China’s real estate market, I ask 1) how China’s shifting from homeownership to rental policies reconfigure the governance and management of migrant populations? 2) how do the housing struggles of migrant communities contest the state power and call for a redefinition of urban citizenship?
Based on a 10-month ethnography of planning processes and of migrant tenants’ everyday lives in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, I suggest that the rental housing initiative marks a reterritorialization of the state strategy to fix and govern the heterogeneous migrant populations. I present the following findings: 1) by reconfiguring the unauthorized rental housing market and reorganizing migrants into different housing communities, local government, planning bureaus and real estate companies render the migrant communities and individuals legible and governable. 2) the affordable rental housing communities are mobilized by the state and non-state governing actors to mold industrious and docile rural migrant laborers as well as high-quality (suzhi) (Anagnost 2004) and globally competitive talents. 3) A significant proportion of migrants fell out of the government’s categorization, particularly migrant families. In a protest against a rental housing project in Shenzhen, mobilizing the rhetoric of children’s constitutional rights to in situ compulsory education, mothers spearheaded a rare protest for the right to the city in China.
References
Anagnost, A. (2004) ‘The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)’, Public Culture, 16(2), pp. 189–208. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-2-189.
Hsing, Y. (2010) The great urban transformation: politics of land and property in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zhang, L. (2002) Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China’s Floating Population. 1st edition. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
| Keywords | Rental housing, internal migration, social movement, right to the city |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
