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Urban Villages (urban + village)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

"THEY COME IN PEASANTS AND LEAVE CITIZENS": Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2010
JONATHAN BACH
ABSTRACT This essay examines the ongoing process of postsocialist transformation at the intersection of cultural and economic forces in an urban environment through the example of the so-called "urban villages"(chengzhongcun) in Shenzhen, China, a booming southern Chinese city and former Special Economic Zone next to Hong Kong. This essay ethnographically examines the role of former rural collectives encircled by a city that has exploded from farmland to an export-driven city of over 14 million people in little over one generation. These villages form an internal other that is both the antithesis and the condition of possibility for Shenzhen city. By co-opting the market economy in ways that weave them into the fabric of the contemporary global city, the villages become as much an experiment as the Special Economic Zone itself. This essay analyzes the urban,rural divide as complicit in each other's continued production and effacement and explores how village and city exploit the ambiguities of their juxtaposition in the making of Shenzhen. [source]

Land Development, Inequality and Urban Villages in China

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2009
FULONG WU
First page of article [source]

"THEY COME IN PEASANTS AND LEAVE CITIZENS": Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2010
JONATHAN BACH
ABSTRACT This essay examines the ongoing process of postsocialist transformation at the intersection of cultural and economic forces in an urban environment through the example of the so-called "urban villages"(chengzhongcun) in Shenzhen, China, a booming southern Chinese city and former Special Economic Zone next to Hong Kong. This essay ethnographically examines the role of former rural collectives encircled by a city that has exploded from farmland to an export-driven city of over 14 million people in little over one generation. These villages form an internal other that is both the antithesis and the condition of possibility for Shenzhen city. By co-opting the market economy in ways that weave them into the fabric of the contemporary global city, the villages become as much an experiment as the Special Economic Zone itself. This essay analyzes the urban,rural divide as complicit in each other's continued production and effacement and explores how village and city exploit the ambiguities of their juxtaposition in the making of Shenzhen. [source]

Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the Contemporary City

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3-4 2002
Gordon MacLeod
Some of the most recent literature within urban studies gives the distinct impression that the contemporary city now constitutes an intensely uneven patchwork of utopian and dystopian spaces that are, to all intents and purposes, physically proximate but institutionally estranged. For instance, so,called edge cities (Garreau, 1991) have been heralded as a new Eden for the information age. Meanwhile tenderly manicured urban villages, gated estates and fashionably gentrified inner,city enclaves are all being furiously marketed as idyllic landscapes to ensure a variety of lifestyle fantasies. Such lifestyles are offered additional expression beyond the home, as renaissance sites in many downtowns afford city stakeholders the pleasurable freedoms one might ordinarily associate with urban civic life. None,the,less, strict assurances are given about how these privatized domiciliary and commercialized ,public' spaces are suitably excluded from the real and imagined threats of another fiercely hostile, dystopian environment ,out there'. This is captured in a number of (largely US) perspectives which warn of a ,fortified' or ,revanchist' urban landscape, characterized by mounting social and political unrest and pockmarked with marginal interstices: derelict industrial sites, concentrated hyperghettos, and peripheral shanty towns where the poor and the homeless are increasingly shunted. Our paper offers a review of some key debates in urban geography, planning and urban politics in order to examine this patchwork,quilt urbanism, In doing so, it seeks to uncover some of the key processes through which contemporary urban landscapes of utopia and dystopia come to exist in the way they do. [source]