Neighbourhoods

A key strand of research is situating migrant studies in the neighbourhood context. Key references are available here.

Other themes include governance at the neighbourhood level, poverty, etc. Key references include:

Abstract: The death of urban entrepreneurialism is proclaimed surprisingly by opposite conceptualisations of austerity urbanism and radical municipalism. This paper argues that rather than seeing them as contrasting types, post-pandemic statecraft reflects the increasing tension and entanglement between capitalistic and territorial logic. From the ground of Chinese urban governance, we illustrate how Chinese statecraft maintains state strategic and extra-economic intention through deploying and mobilising market and society – to create its own agents and to co-opt those that are already existent or emerging. This statecraft is illustrated through community building, urban development, and regional formation.

Abstract: Following the notion of the entrepreneurial city, this paper examines recent scholarship about China’s urban governance. Despite prevailing marketisation, the role of the state is visible in neighbourhood, cities and city-regions. The state necessarily deals with a fast changing society and deploys market-like instruments to achieve its development objectives. Through multi-scalar governance, the state involves social and market actors but at the same time maintains strategic intervention capacity. China’s contextualised scholarship provides a more nuanced understanding beyond the entrepreneurial city thesis, which is more state-centred.

Abstract: This article explores how far the Foucauldian concept of “governmentality” may offer valuable insights into new trends of participatory regeneration in urban China. Drawing on participatory micro-regeneration projects in Qinghe, Beijing, this research follows a governmentality approach. It explores how the Chinese state exercises new governmental technologies of community participation and self-governance to construct governable spaces and governable subjects. During the regeneration process, we identify multiple participatory practices where citizen power is exercised in decision-making and project implementation but guided by experts within the fields structured by the state. We argue that participation has been instrumentalized by the state to achieve extra-economic objectives of social governance and people-centred development. We also observe tensions and resistance during participatory micro-regeneration, leading to the failure to develop a self-governed community.

Abstract: Housing commodification has led to the development of gated neighbourhoods in China. However, the types of gated neighbourhoods are very different from each other, and include ‘commodity housing’, affordable housing and resettlement housing. They might not be the same as the commonly known ‘gated communities’, which are characterised by both gating and private governance. Using three cases in the city of Wenzhou, we analyse the motivations for development, service provision and property management, and neighbourhood control. In commodity housing, the state is still visible and self-governance is limited, while the real estate developer leads land development and property management. In affordable housing, the state regulates the standards and the prices of services, while the developer is the provider of these services. In resettlement housing, the state uses a state-owned enterprise to relocate households, while the homeowners’ association and the service charges are ineffective. All these cases demonstrate the important and variegated role of the state and provide a more nuanced understanding of these gated neighbourhoods.

The variegated role of the state in gated neighbourhoods in Wenzhou, China. From the paper above.

Abstract: Based on a large-scale household survey conducted in 2007, this article reports on poverty concentration and determinants in China’s low-income neighbourhoods and social groups. Three types of neighbourhood are recognized: dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods, declining workers’ villages and urban villages. Respondents are grouped into four categories: working, laid-off/unemployed and retired urban residents, together with rural migrants. We first measure poverty concentration across different types of neighbourhood and different groups. The highest concentrations are found in dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods and among the laid-off/unemployed. Mismatches are found between actual hardships, sense of deprivation and distribution of social welfare provision. Second, we examine poverty determinants. Variations in institutional protection and market remuneration are becoming equally important in predicting poverty generation, but are differently associated with it in the different neighbourhoods and groups. As China’s urban economy is increasingly shaped by markets, the mechanism of market remuneration is becoming a more important determinant of poverty patterns, especially for people who are excluded from state institutions, notably laid-off workers and rural migrants.

Abstract: In this paper we examine poverty concentration in Chinese impoverished neighbourhoods and estimate the effects of household characteristics and neighbourhood types on social deprivation. We find that unemployed households in old neighbourhoods are among the most deprived. The Chinese case suggests that urban poverty is concentrated by particular social groups living in specific neighbourhoods. We find a small but not insignificant neighbourhood effect on poverty generation in China. Living in impoverished neighbourhoods increases the probability of becoming poor by a steady percentage. For every 1% increase in poverty rate, the chance is raised by 4.4%. Living in old neighbourhoods and being unemployed raises the chance by 4.7 times with demographic and socioeconomic attributes controlled for. The neighbourhood effect in the Chinese case is linked to path dependency of institutionally derived inequalities.

Path dependency of urban poverty: vulnerable social groups in impoverished neighbourhoods in Chinese cities. From the paper above.

Abstract: This paper aims to understand the formation of poor neighbourhoods through examining the transformation of a suburban industrial district into a poverty neighbourhood in the city of Nanjing. The notion of a poverty of transition is developed to show how such a transformation occurs in the aftermath of state-led industrialisation. It is argued that, rather than simply being attributable to marketisation, the driving-forces include a set of institutional changes that work together to pave the way for the development of poor neighbourhoods: deindustrialisation drives industrial workers and the self-employed at the margin into a poverty trap; self-exploited and hardworking rural migrants, not covered by official welfare support, are becoming the working poor; housing privatisation serves to convert low-income households into homeowners of low-capitalised assets; the new minimum living standard regime contains the poor and maintains the stability of poverty neighbourhoods.

Abstract: Since the transition of the economic system in the early 1990s, urban poverty has become a prominent social problem and attracted attention among Chinese officials and academics. However, there have been few studies on the spatiality of urban poverty. The purpose of this paper is to examine the spatial pattern of urban poverty in China and the mechanism of spatial concentration. Urban poverty has begun to concentrate in specific locations, mainly in three types of poverty neighbourhoods: inner-city dilapidated residence, degraded workers’ villages and rural migrants’ enclaves. We argue that the emergence of concentrated poverty is rooted in the state-led urban development and the socialist housing provision system. Based on fieldwork in typical poverty neighbourhoods in the city of Nanjing, the concentration of poverty is examined, and its creation mechanism is analysed. Further discussion indicates that poverty concentration in particular neighbourhoods is different from slums or ghettoes in advanced western economies.

The spatial concentration of urban poverty and its creation mechanism. From the paper above.