Self-help Housing and chengzhongcun (urban villages) in Chinese Urbanization

Principal Investigator:
Zhang, Li

Co-investigator(s):
Zhao, Simon

Summary:
China is experiencing rapid growth in urbanization in the current transitional period, characterized by massive rural-to-urban migration. Because of their lack of legitimate urban status (a permanent urban household registration) and their employment mostly in low-paid occupations, great numbers of rural migrants as an urban underprivileged group have been institutionally and economically excluded from the urban housing system. As a result, they are forced to seek accommodation with a self-help approach. This situation has produced various types of ghetto settlements which were almost absent in pre-reform China. The project is concerned with habitat issues of rural migrants during the rapid process of urbanization, with special reference to the urban village (chengzhongcun), a major and unique type of migrant enclave in Chinese cities. As a matter of fact, chengzhongcun is accommodating, with little government resources and assistance, millions of rural migrants. Nonetheless, chengzhongcun is generally perceived as undesirable for urban governance because of their association with unsuitable land use, the dilapidated type of housing construction, severe infrastructure deficiencies, intensified social disorder, and deterioration of the urban environment. As chengzhongcun resembles some of the worse features of shanty towns in other cities of the world, there has been a strong signal from government to demolish it under the guise of urban redevelopment. However, the positive features of chengzhongcun in the course of China's urbanization have received no acknowledgement in the official redevelopment plan. This project seeks to understand the underlying rationale of self-help housing and the important contribution of chengzhongcun to Chinese urbanization. It is also going to investigate the impact of government action towards chengzhongcun as a migrant settlement.