Gentrification in China’s Urban Villages

Picture a Chinese urban village. Perhaps the image of overcrowded and densely built housing springs to mind. Narrow alleys jammed with scooters, hanging clothes, caged balconies, with only a thin strip of sunlight filtering onto street-level. Inside the buildings, the corridors are cluttered, posing severe fire hazards. Worse still, three or four families pack onto the same floor and have to share bathrooms and cooking spaces.

Urban villages (image from internet)

This is where most of Shanghai’s migrant workers reside. In one of my visits, I met Mr Du, who works as a construction worker in one of the skyscrapers of Zhangjiang’s New Science City. He rents a single room here in the outskirts of Shanghai, sharing the bathroom and kitchen with four other families.

As we spoke over a bowl of noodles, he told me about the realities of living in the urban village. Just one month ago, he had been threatened by the landlord to pay 500 yuan more a month in rent or pack up and leave, as there were many more tenants hoping to rent her room. This was not the first time he received such threats. In fact, Mr Du had been forced to move three times, either because of the demolition of the urban villages or sharp increase of the rent. As a result, he was pushed further and further away from the city.

“After more than twenty years in Shanghai, I’m still an outsider,” Mr Du chuckles. He is a member of the floating population—with no Shanghai residency and thus no sense of belonging to the city.

Mr Du’s encounter is the microcosm of the migrant workers whose interests are largely unseen or unheard even if, as residents, they are deeply affected by the regeneration of urban villages. No matter how long they stay in the city, they remain outsiders without local residency and are thus excluded from the housing security they need. High rents leave them with no choice but settling in urban villages.

Without residency, they are left out from the urban regeneration process. The government, developers, and the landlords can negotiate agreements, but even though the migrant workers are major stakeholders in urban villagers, they are unable to voice their concerns. While landlords are often handsomely compensated by the government, migrant workers can only expect eviction.   

Urban villages are overcrowded and often have sub-standard infrastructure. But at the same time, they provide affordable housing for low-income migrant workers. Gentrification occurs when urban regeneration results in the “upgrading” of the urban villages to mid or high-end residential/commercial compounds that price out migrant workers. Without affordable public housing security to draw upon, they have no choice but to move to urban villages even further from the downtown that have yet to be reached by the wave of redevelopment. This drives up the rent in those urban villages, leading to the vicious cycle that Mr Du described.

Gentrified urban village (image from internet)

Building more inclusive and equitable societies calls for the inclusion of the migrant workers in the urban regeneration conversation process and the provision of affordable public housing security or other affordable options for migrant workers to stay in the city. A few cities, such as Shenzhen in 2018, started to implement a softer approach to redevelopment that intentionally maintains a certain percentage of urban villages from real estate development to ensure the supply for affordable housing in the city.

Cities work because migrant workers do. There is a symbiotic relationship between cities and their residents, including migrant workers. It is time for the government to address the provision of housing security for migrant workers. It is also about time that we adopt a more conscientious approach to urban regeneration that considers the interests of all stakeholders and minimizes the adverse impacts of gentrification.