Tag Archives: urban village

emplacements

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i’ve moved up from the second floor of building two, tianmian garden estates to the sixteenth floor of city square, an upscale residential / business apartment complex just next to the shenzhen-hong kong border. the differences between my two apartments speak to how lifestyles has become an important aspect to the construction, definition, and maintenance of class positions in shenzhen. specifically, the buildings themselves facilitate the cultivation of different bodies. very different kinds of lives.

key differences:

(1) tianmian gardens is located in an urban village (tianmian), next to the new central business district, just west of the old border between “downtown” shenzhen and what used to be “the suburbs”. in contrast, city square is an independent residential building, located right next to the border, indeed, i can see the luohu train station from my window. in addition, city square is not part of a larger project, instead it is an independent residential building. for example, i now live just next to a multi-story sauna and bath club. in other words, tianmian gardens was built through rural urbanization and city square as part of urbane urbanization (for definitions of these terms see this entry.)

(2) tianmian was planned and built between 1998 and 2001 (the tianmian city office building and garden skylight hotel were finished in 2004). city square was planned and built between 2004 and 2006. this difference is important because it reflects two different moments in shenzhen real estate. before 2005, shenzhen real estate was primarily affordable housing. at the time, millenium oasis represented luxurious living in shenzhen. however, post 2005, shenzhen real estate prices suddenly exploded. as a result, developers have been upping the luxury ante in order to maintain profit margins.

(3) the two apartments share the same basic layout–subdivided box. however, city square is smaller, but more luxuriously appointed. also, the kitchen in city square is larger, occupying a larger percentage of space than its counterpart in tianmian.

what strikes me in the two apartments is the orientation of the two apartments. tianmian was clearly designed for daily living, middle management worker. however, given the rent in tianmian gardens, the one and two bedroom apartments were regularly rented as office space. indeed, i lived across the hall from a dentist. in contrast, city garden is designed for upscale young chinese and international business people; city square also provides service apartment rentals.

also, city square is located across the street from the mix-c mall (in the west) and caiwuwei village (in the east). i’ll say more about caiwuwei in another post, what i want to emphasize in this post is that it’s possible to buy western food in the mix-c. all kinds of cheese and granola and chocolate bars are available, along with nicely packaged and accordingly overpriced soy milk and other chinese food products. in contrast, in tianmian it was possible–but only possible–to buy fresh vegetables, fresh meet, and chinese food products at relatively cheap prices. these foods and prices are available in caiwuwei.

more interestingly, its not simply that the furnishings are higher end in city square, but also that the health club in city square facilitates the cultivation of skulpted and shiny bodies. yesterday, while drinking fresh carrot juice in the 9th floor health club, i felt like i was living in a korean soap opera. one after another, young and toned bodies, clothed in the latest fashion walked past on their way to the weight room and swimming pool. one headed to a private pilates lesson. it’s like being at my new yoga studio.

this move has reinforced my impression of ongoing stratification and differentiation in shenzhen. time and place. these bodies are less noticeable in tianmian, but i also think that even five years ago there were fewer of them, before the construction of city square and like complexes. time and place, indeed. i now live amongst the young upwardly mobile and most-sculpted class of global managers.

rural and urbane urbanization in shenzhen

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shangbu overpass, downtown shenzhen (futian)


the guangshen road, songgang

Today, I have decided to define two key terms–rural and urban urbanization–with respect to ongoing administrative restructuring and zoning in Shenzhen. My point of departure is a concise timeline of administrative change in Shenzhen [from my paper, “Vexed Foundations: An Ethnographic Interpretation of the Shenzhen Built Environment”. Contact me if you want the full academic version.] I then illustrate the importance of these changes by comparing who uses the Guangshen Road and Guangsheng Expressway, respectively.

SHENZHEN MUNICIPALITY est. 1979 by elevating Baoan County to the Status of Shenzhen Municipality. Original Districts carved out of Baoan County communes: Shenzhen, Nantou, Songgang, Longhua, Kuichong, Longgang; all are “special”.

SHENZHEN MUNICIPALITY re-established urban-rural distinction 1981, with the establishment of New Baoan County and the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone is designated “urban”, inside the SEZ communes are administratively districted as “administrative regions (管理区)” It is a two-level administrative structure. Outside the SEZ, New Baoan County is designated “rural”. This means that the SEZ develops according to urban law and New Baoan County is administered according rural law. The Second Line (二线) divides the SEZ from New Baoan County. There are seven checkpoints along the border, and Chinese citizens must have a travel pass to enter the SEZ. There are no cross-line buses or taxis. Legal Shenzhen residents and visitors must disembark and go through customs when traveling between the SEZ and New Baoan County. The Second Line is fully operative by 1986.

NEW BAOAN COUNTY (est. 1981): 1,557 km2 zoned for industrial development under rural villages and 25 market towns　（Xin’an, Xixiang, Fuyong, Shajing, Songgang, Gongming, Guangming, Shiyan, Guanlan, Dalang, Longhua, Minzhi, Pinghu, Pingdi, Kangzi, Nan’ao, Longcheng, Longgang, Henggang, Dapeng, Buji, Pingshan, Kuichong, Bantian, Nanwan）

SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE redefined 1983: initially, 327 km2 zoned for industrial development under urban work units; villages zoned for independent industrial development under village administration.

SHENZHEN MUNICIPALITY restructured 1990. In keeping with administrative norms for major cities, the SEZ now consists of a three-level administrative structure—municipality, district, and street. New Baoan County zoned into municipal districts, Baoan and Longgang. The market towns remain rural. Baoan District is primarily Cantonese speaking and made up of 12 market towns (Xin’an, Xixiang, Fuyong, Shajing, Songgang, Gongming, Guangming, Shiyan, Guanlan, Dalang, Longhua, Minzhi). Longgang is primarily Hakka speaking and made up of 13 market towns (Pinghu, Pingdi, Kangzi, Nan’ao, Longcheng, Longgang, Henggang, Dapeng, Buji, Pingshan, Kuichong, Bantian, Nanwan).

SHENZHEN MUNICIPALITY completes SEZ rural urbanization in 1996. All villages in Luohu, Futian, and Nanshan Districts have been designated neighborhoods and administratively integrated into District governments by way of Street governments. The SEZ is restructured again in 1998, when Yantian District is carved out of Luohu District in order to stimulate economic growth in the eastern portion of the city.)

SHENZHEN MUNICIPALITY By 2006, the last of Baoan and Longgang market towns and villages have been converted to streets and new villages, respectively. Importantly, although the border between the SEZ and New Baoan County still in place, it no longer functions as a border. Cross-line buses and taxis no longer stop and passengers no longer disembark to go through the checkpoints.

SHENZHEN MUNICIPALITY restructured in 2007 with the establishment of Guangming New District, combining the Baoan Street administrations of Guangming and Gongming

All this to contextualize the two forms of urbanization in Shenzhen—rural and urbane. Rural urbanization is led by and benefits local people (formerly farmers). Urbane urbanization is led by and benefits migrants from China’s cities—Guangzhou, Chaozhou, and Huizhou in Guangdong, but also Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, and Chongqing, to name a few.

The second line remains an important landmark in Shenzhen. Although people no longer speak of the SEZ, nevertheless the categories “outside (关外: guanwai) and “inside (关内: guannei)” the checkpoint are fundamental areas in cognitive maps of the municipality. Roughly speaking, local people have urbanized the area outside the checkpoint; it is a prime example of urbanization as the proliferation of new village forms. Urban planners and architects have designed most of the area inside the checkpoint; it is the poster child for China’s high modern modernization. Inside the checkpoint, the new CBD is the prototype of this kind of modernization. Thus, guanwai development epitomizes rural urbanization and guannei development represents urbane urbanization.

To get a sense of how fundamental the distinction between rural and urbane forms of urbanization has been to the construction of Shenzhen, you could do worse than compare the Guangshen Road and Guangshen Expressway. Along the Pearl River in western Shenzhen, there are two primary roads from Shenzhen through Dongguan to Guangzhou—the Guangshen Road (广深公路) and the Guangshen Expressway (广深高速公路). After the Nantou Checkpoint, both the Road and the Expressway pass through Xixiang, Fuyong, Shajing, and Songgang before entering Dongguan and then Guangzhou.

Eight-lanes wide, with two-lane access roads, the Road functions like a mega-Main Street, where manufacturing, residential, and commercial clusters grow thickly along its edges and tributaries. Everyday, hundreds, indeed thousands of container trucks surge from village and zhen industrial parks toward Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Unlike inside the second line, where only the small blue container trucks can be seen, on the Road, large, 20-ton containers rumble past, twenty-four/seven. Busses that traverse the Road stop regularly, allowing, for example, Fuyong residents to pop—if pop can be used to describe the journey—over to Shajing. Consequently, the trip from Nantou Checkpoint to the Songgang terminus takes over an hour, often longer, depending on traffic.

In contrast, the Expressway operates like an expressway, slicing through the surrounding area, but not actually connecting with it. Cars and busses get on and off the Expressway at toll stations. Such is the Expressway’s disconnect from the local environment that its construction has not stimulated local business. Indeed, agricultural and piscatorial industries still abut the Expressway. Instead, the Expressway connects interests in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, integrating the economies of the two cities, quite literally allowing this level of economic production to bypass local residents. Consequently, the trip from Shenzhen bus station to the Guangzhou terminus takes about ninety minutes.

The Road links Shenzhen’s urban villages, where most manufacturing is located. In contrast, the expressway links commercial and financial interests in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. In other words, the Road supports the interests of village urbanization, while the Expressway supports the interests of urban urbanization.

In the unfolding of rural-urban valuations, the Shenzhen experiment has constituted an interesting twist on post-Mao reforms. Specifically, Shenzhen has actualized the attempt to realize xiaokang by transforming formerly “rural” areas into appropriately “urban” areas. In other areas, like Shanghai or Anhui Province, reform has entailed reforming cities as cities, or rural areas as rural areas. Many recent studies focus on the contradictions that migration into urban areas has created. In Shenzhen, however, the state imposed the work unit system onto an area that had been administered through collective ownership. In other words, the Shenzhen experiment initially consisted in transforming formerly “rural” areas into appropriately “urban” areas, even as it maintained this division within its administrative structure. Crudely, the past thirty years of reform and opening might be understood as an attempt to restructure and re-imagine the Chinese state by urbanizing rural areas. In this sense, Shenzhen is an ongoing product of a historically specification mediation of rural and urban Chinese societies.

The Road and the Expressway both exemplify the contradictions between rural and urbane forms of urbanization in Shenzhen and also actualize how that contradiction has been built into the environment, shaping possible lives. Pictures of the road, here. To contrast with urbane Shenzhen, visit icons of urbane urbanization.

talk of a global future (revised june 25, 2008)

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Over the past few years, Shenzhen has emerged on the American public’s map of China and all sorts of people have been using the municipality to talk about globalization. Just recently, Rolling Stone published Naomi Klein’s articleAll Seeing Eye (sz fieldnote here), and on June 8, 2008 the New York Times Magazine architecture issue published The New, New City by Nicolai Ouroussoff. Indeed, these articles constitute part of a growing public literature on Shenzhen, which includes The Power of Migrants, Wall-Mart Nation, In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back, and the more general, China’s Instant Cities. In tone, these articles are slightly less sensationalist than Newsweek’s 1999 article Wasted Youth, in which Mahlon Meyer commemorated the tenth anniversary of 6.4 by visiting Shenzhen and suggesting “For Those On The Fringe, Post-Tiananmen China Is A World Of Disaffected Punks And Casual Sex. This May Be Good.”

The diversity of topics, notwithstanding, these articles all use urbanization in Shenzhen to ask: What will the global future be? Who’s creating it? Where is it taking shape? When did it first appear? Why is like this? How can we participate in it? The architects in Ouroussoff’s article are clearly aware of this.

“The old contextual model is not very relevant anymore,” Jesse Reiser, an American architect working in Dubai, told [Ouroussoff] recently. “What context are we talking about in a city that’s a few decades old? The problem is that we are only beginning to figure out where to go from here.”

“The irony is that we still don’t know if postmodernism was the end of Modernism or just an interruption,” Koolhaas told [Ouroussoff] recently. “Was it a brief hiatus, and now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, or is it something radically different? We are in a condition we don’t understand yet.”

Indeed, more than any other group (in English), architects have been debating the shape, form, and meaning of the municipality. See, for example, In Shenzhen: City of Expiration and Regeneration.

Lately I wonder if Americans have difficulty thinking Shenzhen because the “suddenness” that we are experiencing is an effect of journalism. Unquestionably, journalists’ discovery of Shenzhen has been abrupt. However the city has been under construction for thirty years and China has been pursuing industrial urbanization projects since 1949. Much of what is happening today in Shenzhen grows out of those past years, and in within the context of local and national history, Shenzhen’s urban growth begins to make sense.

For example, urban villages (城中村) and handshake buildings (握手楼) are neither recent, nor original to the city. Indeed, what are now called urban villages were once called new villages (新村). The early Shenzhen administration, which at the time was not a municipal government annexed village land for urban construction and assigned villages land for pursuing their own livelihood. At the time planners imagined that the villagers would provision the new industrial zone with food. New villages were thus first constructed within this model of urban-rural co-dependency. Consequently, the first generation of new village housing were two to three story private homes. However, villagers immediately realized there was more to be made through smuggling, small businesses, and rental property. The so-called handshake buildings are second generation buildings, which were built on plats determined through a re-negotiation of new village lands and actualize more fully the transformation of village residential housing into rental property. At the same time, urban growth meant that residential and commercial areas soon surrounded, but did not annex the villages, resulting in the effect today of urban-within-villages (the literal translation of 城中村).

In addition, most Americans are unfamiliar with levels of population density in Chinese cities. We are not accustomed to thinking at a scale beyond baby cities of a couple hundred thousand. China’s population (1.3 billion) is roughly 4 times that of the US (300 million). When using that crude, very crude formula all sorts of things come into perspective. Houston (estimated population 4 million), for example, would have an adjusted population of 16 million, falling between Shenzhen (estimated population of 10-12) and Shanghai, China’s largest city (estimated population of 20-odd million). NYC (pop 8 mil.) would have an adjusted population of 32 million. Chongqing–now an independent city and fasted growing urban complex on the planet–has an estimated population of 30-odd million. Yet most Americans have never heard of Chongqing, which has been characterized in the western press as “invisible“.

In the Fall of 1999, I had several job interviews at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. One of my interviewers asked, “What’s global about Shenzhen?” That question flummoxed me. After five years of living and working in Shenzhen, I took it as self-evident that Shenzhen had always been global. For me the more interesting question was—what isn’t global here? I spent several critical moments trying to ascertain if the question had been asked ironically, and then began to explain that the SEZ had been established in 1980 to reform and open the Chinese socialist political-economy. Reform entailed dismantling the structures of urban work units and rural communes; opening meant allowing foreign capital to fund and profit from this process. Of course, the Chinese government hoped to control how investment occurred, but foreign capital came with all sorts of price tags, some expected others not. The process actualized both the direction and context of Shenzhen’s construction. On the one hand, the goal was to become an international city. On the other hand, the investors, architects, and workers who came to Shenzhen had diverse ideas of what it meant to be international. Of course, what has been built and is under construction exceeds all of that. Exponentially.

In retrospect, it seems clear that I misunderstood the point of the question, which I now understand to be—what do we [scholars of rural Latin America] have in common with Shenzhen? I wanted to talk about Shenzhen with respect to Chinese history since 1949; they wanted to talk about Shenzhen in ways that illuminated and could be enriched by their research on indigenous Andean societies. We could have found common ground to accommodate all concerns, but it would have meant shifting our perspectives, decentering our cognitive maps, and listening more than we were accustomed to doing. Consequently, taking globalization as a topic of conversation didn’t enable us to accommodate international diversity, let alone find a topic that was mutually interesting. Instead, talking about globalization ironically confirmed the borders of our conversational homelands, reproducing the intellectual provincialism that often shapes discourse—academic and otherwise.

The conversations that Americans are having about Shenzhen now constitute an important component of our understanding, evaluation, and realization of globalization. Yet, at present the discourse has yet to leave familiar territory: distopian futurism and exultant capitalism. I think the reason for the impasse is, in part, that we’re still talking about the future of American cities, rather than what might be a truly international future. We have not yet created the perspective necessary to imagine, discuss, and evaluate what it means to live in cities that are simultaneously diverse and co-dependent.

dongmen fading

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street market, hubei village

yesterday, i walked through hubei old village (湖贝旧村) and luoling (螺岭), both of which are under the administration of dongmen administrative neighborhood　（东门街道办事处）. hubei and luoling are located on the eastern, not yet renovated part of dongmen. the western side, of course, boasts china’s first macdonald’s and one of shenzhen’s first attempts at historic preservation for re-use, transforming old commercial buildings into modern commercial buildings. back on the eastern side, where property values far out pace the quality of the buildings, baoan ruins abut old shenzhen dreams, circa early 1980. like the neighborhoods in western shenzhen, hubei and luoling suffer from neglect. one of the more telling signs of change in the area: workers can no longer afford to rent housing. instead they are renting bedspace.

bright spots amidst gray concrete: religious items and plastic goods. as friends remind me, only waitresses wear qipao; only the ignorant believe in traditional gods. nor are there high quality goods for sale, instead household items–ranging from stools to buckets and mops–are all made of the same flimsy plastic, which comes in neon shades of green and pink, sometimes easter egg blue. such are the aesthetics of class formation. dongmen’s bright spots don’t really shine in the same in the rest of the city, where glass and imported plants suggest homeowners’ well-cultivated taste. moreover, in comparison to nearby highrises, the village buildings appear stunted at best, but more likely defective, somehow lacking. certainly, these buildings lack the WOW factor that has put the shenzhen skyline on lists that rank such things.

once upon a time, dongmen was the center of thriving cross border commerce. indeed, when deng xiaoping first came in 1984, he went to the top of shenzhen’s trade center, which overlooked dongmen. in that flourishing hub, he saw china’s post-mao future. today, dongmen seems abandoned, and even the renovated parts of the area seem tacky. for those looking to see fifty years of history condensed into a thirty minute radius, you could do worse than visit dongmen, where in addition to old village remnants and early 80s leftovers, some of shenzhen’s glitziest buildings are located.

guankou (关口)

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who’d’ve thunk it? stalin in shenzhen

silo has gone. floating lives went off better than expected, primarily because mutual goodwill enable a lot of cultural and aesthetic difference to be used creatively, rather than becoming an obstacle. that in itself was a lesson. so, i am back taking pictures of shenzhen’s odd corners, which are actually multiplying even as they are increasingly hidden in the black holes between highrise developments. the other day, i went to guankou, the remnant village located just west of the western gate into nine streets (once upon a time the entrance into the nantou yamen and hence the name “gate entrance village”).

in a parallel china, guankou was located just north of daxin brigade　（大新大队）, which had been the administrative center of the nantou commune (南头公社) and subsequently became the base for the nantou administrative （南头管理区）area (before shenzhen had districts, it had administrative areas, which were basically communes redeployed. in 1990, shenzhen rezoned itself into city districts–nantou became a street (街道办事处) in nanshan district). ever at the edge of western (shenzhen) wealth, guankou was one of the first industrial areas in the shenzhen special economic zone. (today is a day of using discarded language–“special economic zone” has gone the way of “brigade” and “commune”; a historic remnant visible in the landscape but no longer used in everyday conversation. i knew if i procastinated long enough, shenzhen would change enough for me to attain historical perspective! so another promissary note: an entry on “what happened to the sez?”) consequently, guankou was one of the first areas in shenzhen to be industrialized and circa 1982, guankou had factories. these factories lined “nantou old street”, that (before nanyou road became nanhai road) once linked the nantou yamen to shekou.

the architecture of these factories interests me. as does shenzhen’s limitless ability to manifest the ironies of history. at the same time that my old friend, rao xiaojun (shenzhen university college of architecture) had organized an exhibit of photographs of china’s disappearing mega-industrial structures (massive concrete and steel factories), and at the same time that shenzhen is vigorously converting laterday shenzhen factories into cultural centers, guankou still has functioning factories that look like mini concrete leaps forward.

fortunately, because shenzhen is still south china, there are twists on the concrete industrial theme: one-story houses, a central market area, and pink-tiled houses from the mid 1990s. for those, who like me are fascinated by the ongoing shenzhen explosion visit 关口 (a final aside: i’m starting to think of urbanization in shenzhen as somesthing akin to a prolonged volcano eruption. the lava just keeps oozing out, over and in between extant topography, constantly reshaping the landscape.)

南山村：villages, villages everywhere except in view

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dangerous housing notice

several days ago, yang qian and i walked from nanshan to beitou village by way of xiangnan village. together, the three villages are strung along a narrow alley that was once the main road connecting nantou county seat to shekou. the villages have been surrounded on all sides and are invisible from the main roads.

i keep photographing these villages because they remain, for me, what makes shenzhen unique. it is the tension between cosmopolitan versions of modernity and village versions of modernity that drives shenzhen development. it is the form of ghettoization here.

so, images from that walk.

珠光村: transformations

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wall separating village from new housing development

this morning i walked through zhuguang village in xili, one of nanshan’s subdistricts. the further one gets from downtown and the nantou peninsula, the larger the villages and the less centralized the planning. in zhuguang, village industry abuts traditional housing abuts new village housing circa 1985 and 1995 abuts new upper middle class housing development… a wall separates village remnants from the new housing, segregating white collar families from migrant workers. in places like zhuguang, the process of partitioning off the remnants of older villages from the rest of the city is just starting and so easier to see. downtown, in contrast, the few remnant villages are completely walled in, except for a few doors. in shenzhen, this is the form of emergent ghettos: walled off villages, hidden from view behind high-rise complexes and rows of tiled new village housing. sense of layout, here.

dafen museum

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dafen village museum

went to dafen village the other day. the museum building is finished and staff are now finishing the interior, including choosing pictures and designing galleries. the idea of a dafen museum is itself stunning, especially as the museum is a 5 minute walk from the dafen louvre, one of the largest art malls associated with the village. (unlike the museum, the louvre is located accross the street from actual village borders.) so pictures of what seemed incredibly like a critical performance piece but was in fact business as usual–pictures of workers transporting oil paintings from the yet unopened museum to waiting trucks, the same small, blue trucks that are used throughout shenzhen’s industrial villages…

baoan district: new and improving

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rubble, baoan district

yang qian teaches acting to dance students at the baoan district art center; saturday i went with him. while he taught, i tracked new and improving baoan, which lives very differently from “shenzhen”, or the area that is still technically the sez, even though the second line no longer functions. basically, the district is razing the remnants of factory areas and old villages, to be replaced by upscale housing developments. pictures of the rubble, here.

tianmian under wraps

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factories under wraps, alley detail

as part of the push for an economy based on “culture”, the city has chosen tianmian’s factory area to be a center for industrial design. so factory buildings from the mid 80s are now being upgraded to office space. some “before” pictures. when the new look is revealed, i’ll post “after” pictures.