Between promises and uncertainties: an anthropological study of a city thoroughfare
A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities
2016
Ximin Zhou
Social Anthropology | School of Social Sciences Table of Contents List of figures ...... 5
Abstract ...... 6
Declaration ...... 7
Copyright statement ...... 7
A note on language and the Chinese administrative division ...... 8
Abbreviations ...... 9
Glossary ...... 9
Chronology ...... 11
Acknowledgements ...... 12
Preface ...... 13
Introduction ...... 16 Historical context: the road to reform ...... 17 Exploring the idea of infrastructure ...... 23 Infrastructure and modernity ...... 26 Research Outline ...... 32 Positionality and the field ...... 34 Chapter outline ...... 35
Chapter 1: Historical accounts of the road ...... 42 Introduction ...... 42 The road imagined through the state-orchestrated history ...... 44 Finding history ...... 44 The city image: stories of the revolutionaries and progressives ...... 46 A collective public vs. multiple publics ...... 51 Conclusion ...... 56
Chapter 2: A road according to plans ...... 58 Introduction ...... 58 Neighbourhood profiles ...... 59 Luohu District: where the journey begins ...... 62 Futian District: the domination of planning ...... 69 Nanshan District – where does the future(s) lie(s)? ...... 75
2 Disconnections and inequality ...... 77 Urban villages ...... 78 Regeneration of redevelopments ...... 81 Conclusion: future(s) reconsidered ...... 82
Chapter 3: On ways of walking and researching the road ...... 87 Introduction ...... 87 Walking guided by maps ...... 89 The practice of dérive ...... 91 Walking with others ...... 98 Nodes: pause-and-observe ...... 102 Non-place and the figure of stranger ...... 106 Conclusion ...... 108
Chapter 4: Seeing, image making and visual conversations ...... 110 Introduction ...... 110 Up, down, and up again: the road and the city from different points of view ...... 111 With a camera ...... 113 Visual production and outcomes ...... 115 Of the notions of the visual ...... 118
Break ...... 122
Chapter 5: Spatial stories of negotiating presence on the road ...... 123 Introduction ...... 123 Site Portraits ...... 124 Fixedness and mobility ...... 128 Regulation of space and people ...... 131 Social selectiveness of infrastructure vs. strategic ‘invisibility’ ...... 136 Conclusion ...... 138
Chapter 6: The promise for speed and progress, compromised ...... 139 Introduction ...... 139 The road as a moral space ...... 142 Discipline and control ...... 142 The challenge of the individual bodies ...... 144 The road and the delivery of speed and progress ...... 149 “Time and money; efficiency is life” ...... 150 Traffic, when and where social differences become manifest ...... 154
3 Traffic, when and where people wait together ...... 158 Space of exceptions ...... 161 Conclusion ...... 164
Conclusion ...... 166 “Shenzhen 2030” and future(s) imagined ...... 166 Stories so far … ...... 168 Gaps begin to appear through the road ...... 168 The road as a catalyst for adaptive methods ...... 169 A closer look: uncertainties, inequalities, and negotiations ...... 170 Final remarks: reassessing ‘the social’ ...... 171
Bibliography ...... 173
4 List of figures Figure 1 "On the wall", by Weng Fen (taken from Photography of China, http://photographyofchina.com/blog/weng-fen) ...... 13 Figure 2 The Pearl River Delta (Google Map, https://goo.gl/maps/j2LwQyQrWCx) ...... 15 Figure 3 Map of Shenzhen (Google Map, https://goo.gl/maps/NsTGMuncUHB2) ...... 15 Figure 4 Shenzhen Skyline ...... 17 Figure 5 Shennan Road at night ...... 57 Figure 6 Spatial layout of a part of Luohu (Official maps from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/xxgk/csgh/fdtz/) ...... 61 Figure 7 Spatial layout of a part of Futian (Official maps from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/xxgk/csgh/fdtz/) ...... 61 Figure 8 Spatial layout of a part of Nanshan (Official maps from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/xxgk/csgh/fdtz/) ...... 61 Figure 9 Skyscrapers in Futian District ...... 68 Figure 10 A section of Shennan Road (Futian) ...... 74 Figure 11 An interrupted pedestrian path next to Shennan Road (Futian) ...... 74 Figure 12 An urban village being surrounded by high rise buildings (Luohu) ...... 80 Figure 13 Handshake buildings in Baishizhou (Nanshan) ...... 86 Figure 14 Graffiti on an abandoned underground entrance next to Shennan Road (Futian) ...... 109 Figure 15 Another abandoned underground exit next to Shennan Road (Futian) ...... 109 Figure 16 Shennan Road at night (Futian) ...... 140 Figure 17 Overlooking a jucntion on Shennan Road (Luohu) ...... 141 Figure 18 Cars, buses and taxis in lines waiting at the same junction (Luohu) ...... 141
5 Abstract Through an anthropological study of the space and time of a city thoroughfare in Shenzhen (China), Shennan Road, the dissertation traces the cycle of promises, expectations, practices, evaluations and the emergence of new promises across scales in the contemporary context of a post-reform China. I cast the ethnographic gaze upon the newly urbanised population in Shenzhen through their daily interactions with the road and the many different uses of the road which serves different purposes. The specificity of doing ethnographic research on a road prompts the reconceptualisation of the field and my positionality. I adopt the role of a stranger-ethnographer with methods such as participant observations, archival research, filmmaking and photography, and adapt these methods to the modes of moving and pausing with people who use the road. The ethnographic materials presented in the dissertation suggest a significant discrepancy between the infrastructural and symbolic roles as intended for the road by the State, people’s social and practical activities and the many other unexpected roles created for the road by individuals. The roles played by the road render it more than a State conceived space. Spatial negotiations subsequently reconfigure the road as a series of socially produced spaces. The narrative of progress with which the road is closely associated is also challenged by the multiple disjunctive temporalities weaving through the road. In spite of its glamorous façade that is intended to produce a community of aspirations, the road also makes manifest a sense of weariness engendered by the uncertainties of the future. Promises are made by the State with the intention to deliver. They are not necessarily made to be broken but they are in many ways compromised. The road provides many possibilities but is also burdened by its own limitations in meeting conflicting expectations. The study also implies that social relations with infrastructures such as the road are not given; social relations are actively produced but also subject to forces that undo them. Finally, I have intended the visual components (a short film and a photo book) to be an integral part of the dissertation. I consider them as a way to engage in direct visual conversations with the public image of the city conveyed by the road, which the text can only assist in imagination. I recommend to watch the film and go through the photo book during the break between Chapters 4 and 5.
6 Declaration No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application of another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.
Copyright statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/ or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the Copyright) and s/he has given the University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreement which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the Intellectual Property) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example, graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/ or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=487), in any relevant Thesis restriction declaration deposited in the University Library , the University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in the University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.
7 A note on language and the Chinese administrative division Throughout the dissertation, I use pinyin, which is the standard system of romanised spelling for transliterating Chinese Mandarin, with the except of “yum cha” which is a different romanised spelling for translating Chinese Cantonese.
There are in four tones in pinyin spelling, for example, ā, á, ă, à. Differences in tone and combinations of characters alter the meaning of a word, therefore I include tones in phrases to differentiate from names which are not marked with tones.
The Chinese administrative division is based on a three-tier system. 1st tier (directly under the Central Government): provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities; 2nd tier: (under provinces and autonomous regions): autonomous prefectures, counties, autonomous counties and cities; 3rd tier: (under counties, autonomous counties and cities): townships, ethnic minority townships and towns
The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is a sub-provincial city, which strictly speaking, makes it between the 1st and 2nd tiers with its administrative power slightly less than the provincial level.
Shenzhen has direct jurisdiction over six districts: Luohu, Futian, Nanshan, Yantian, Bao’an, and Longgang, and Guangming, Pingshan, Longhua and Dapeng New Towns. Originally, the SEZ only included Luohu, Futian, Nanshan and Yantian, but it was expanded to cover the whole city with the addition of Bao’an and Longgang Districts in 2010.
8 Abbreviations CCP Chinese Communist Party SEZ Special Economic Zone UPLRCSM Urban Planning, Land and Resources Commission of Shenzhen Municipality CBD Central Business District
Glossary bŭ kè Extra lesson chéng guăn Urban management authorities chéng zhōng cūn Villages in the city/ urban villages (see wò shŏu lóu) chuàng kè Creative maker/innovator dă gōng zăi/mèi Working boy/girl dāng bīng To serve in the army dì zhŭ Land owner fèn zĭ qián Contributions (for sharing a car between taxi drivers) fēng shŭi Geomantic systems găigé kāifàng Reforms and opening gōng Public (state-owned/ collective/ authority/ official) gōng hài Public vermin gúo qĺng National (cultural) situation hé xíe shè huì Harmonious society hù kŏu Household Registration jīchǔ shèshī Infrastructure miàn zĭ Image/ the face miàn zĭ gōng chéng Image project sàn-bù To stroll (see zŏu-lù) shān zhài (Electronic) knock-off shóu dì Developable lands suàn shù Accounting wén míng Civilised wò shŏu lóu Handshake buildings (a defining feature of chéngzhōngcūn)
9 xiàng qián zŏu, mò huí tóu Move forward and don’t look back xiăo kāng Moderately wealthy yŏu qían néng shĭ guĭ tuī Money can make the ghost push the millstone for you, mó meaning money can buy any services yum cha (Cantonese) to drink tea; also refers to having dim sum for breakfast or brunch zŏu-lù To walk (see sàn-bù) zuŏ yòu weí nán Catch-22
10 Chronology 1949 The Nationalist Party was defeated in the civil war against the Communist Party. Chiang Kai-shek and most high ranking members fled to Taiwan. Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on 1st October. 1950 Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty Korean War Began 1953 First Five-Year Plan, with major support from the USSR 1956 Hundred Flower Movement instigated by Mao 1958 Great Leap Forward campaign began with the formation of People’s Commune and mass utilisation backyard furnaces. Poor weather and underdeveloped technical skills led to widespread famine causing deaths between 13 and 26 million people; 1966-76 The Cultural Revolution Three years of economic and social disruptions, with school and colleague closures; 1971 China admitted to the United Nations 1976 Premier Zhou Enlai died in January; Chairman Mao Zedong died in September; The end of the Cultural Revolution 1979 Deng Xiaoping reclaimed leadership 1980 August 26th, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone established, 395.81 km2, with 30 million RMB loan to kick start developments. Construction of the first 2.1 km of Shennan Road completed. 1982 Shennan Road extension began. 1984 February: Deng Xiaoping’s First Visit to Shenzhen SEZ; The British Government agreed to return Hong Kong to the Chinese government. 1985 Shennan Road East and Shennan Road Middle completed. 1988 Housing Reforms began in Shenzhen – commercial property for sale 1989 Tiananmen Square Student Protests 1990 Shennan Road completed. 1997 Hong Kong returned to China
11 Acknowledgements This thesis has come a long way to become a properly written piece of work. I thank my supervisor Dr. Andrew Irving for giving me the intellectual guidance on writing and thinking. I also thank my secondary supervisor Professor Penny Harvey for helping me to develop a great part of the thesis. I am extremely grateful for both Andrew and Penny for their patience and time.
I also want to thank all the friends I have met through the department. They are more than colleagues to me and I am very grateful for their emotional support. I also owe them an apology for being out of touch during the last month prior submission. Last but not least, I want to thank my friends and families outside the academic environment for keeping me grounded and letting me see other important things in life beyond the PhD. Especially, I owe my brother Tommi a deep debt of gratitude for his material and emotional support over the years. I am very lucky to have all the support and guidance.
Finally, I wish to give my appreciation to the department of Social Anthropology for providing an inspiring research environment in which I learnt my weaknesses and strengths. I also want to thank the postgraduate administrative team for their support throughout the programme.
12 Preface
Figure 1 "On the wall", by Weng Fen (taken from Photography of China, http://photographyofchina.com/blog/weng-fen)
Economic reforms and the uncompromising drive towards the urbanisation of China have brought dramatic changes to the physical landscapes of Chinese cities. Shenzhen, a costal city in southern China has been at the forefront of the large scale infrastructural transformation of previously rural areas. That these changes have presented social and technological challenges, have generated much interest across academic disciplines and also given rise to a range of artistic works. Amongst them, there are works by a Chinese photographer, Weng Fen whose images juxtapose the formidable scale and pace of urbanisation with the organic human body and the fragility of the future, as often represented by young school girls (Figure 1). It is this contrast between the apparent concreteness of built environments and the uncertainty of the future brought about by social and material change that I aim to explore through an anthropological study of a city thoroughfare in Shenzhen, Shennan Road. I cast my ethnographic gaze upon the newly urbanised population in Shenzhen through their daily interactions with the road and the many different uses of the road
13 serving many different purposes. Through the dissertation I demonstrate how the various roles played by the road impact upon its relations with the city at large and the people who use it. In particular, I look at the discrepancy between the infrastructural and symbolic roles as intended for the road by the State, people’s social and practical activities and the many other unexpected roles created for the road. As an infrastructural piece, the road is entangled with the city in which it is situated. The future of the city imagined by the State is also expressed by the physical changes planned for and materialised on the road. Yet the ethnographic materials also suggest that a significant distance between the future imagined by the State and the future(s) that people can afford to imagine. Very often, we find disjunctive temporalities weaving through the road. As a whole, the dissertation traces the cycle of promises, expectations, practices, evaluations and the emergence of new promises across scales. It examines the promises made by the State, as expressed and made manifest through physical infrastructures such as Shennan Road and the uncertainties of holding onto these promises, while managing the (often conflicting) expectations that arise out of these promises. As we move along the road, we also move in personal and historical time and witness how the building of the road, from its planning, initial and subsequent constructions and daily use, allow it to tell a story of China over the years through large-scale and small-scale events. The physical changes of the road reflect the changes of Shenzhen’s urban landscapes brought by social, political and economic change and the astonishing scale of urbanisation over the last three decades. Promises are made by the State with the intention to deliver. They are not necessarily made to be broken but they are in many ways compromised.
14
Figure 2 The Pearl River Delta (Google Map, https://goo.gl/maps/j2LwQyQrWCx)
Figure 3 Map of Shenzhen (Google Map, https://goo.gl/maps/NsTGMuncUHB2)
15 Introduction China has gone through dramatic economic and social changes over the last three decades. In Shenzhen, a coastal city in southern China, the population has grown from 30,000 in the late 1970s to over 10 million in 2010, most of whom are domestic migrants1. The promise made by the State to lift the country out of poverty have indeed materialised as far as numbers are concerned. The growth rate of Shenzhen’s Growth Domestic Product (GDP) has also become a strong indicator of the city’s economic growth and progress (Shenzhen Municipal Government 2008). The power of numbers such as the GDP growth rate becomes “a propaganda tool” used by nations in rivalry (for example, between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War) to demonstrate success and power (Fioramonti 2014a; 2014b: 12). The use of numbers during the Great Leap Forward campaign in the pre-reform era in China was also a powerful tool to create fictional success in steel production. In a nutshell, numbers tell what the State wants to tell and to some extent, what people want to hear. The present research explores how promises for progress and growth made by the State are expressed and communicated through infrastructures, and the complexity in delivering these promises, while managing expectations across scales in the contemporary Chinese context since the initiation of economic reforms in the late 1970s. I am interested in the complexity that manifests itself in the uncertainties confronting people in their everyday life and that promises made by the State are subject to becoming increasingly elusive and even irrelevant as they filter down through the social hierarchy.
1 According to the official statistics given by the Shenzhen Government, the number of permanent residents has reached 10.78 million (Shenzhen Government Online, accessed 23/08/2016). However, as there are still many children born without being registered to a household, the number may in fact be much higher than the official statistics suggest (Al, et al. 2012). In the 50s, the household registration (hù kŏu) system was introduced to divide the country’s population into rural and urban households (Chan, 1994). Despite the high mobility of population in China, one’s household registration is tied to your place of birth. One important feature of the hù kŏu system is its restriction upon claiming social welfare, which only follows the place of registration as opposed to the person.
16 Having previously studied a small market street in London for my MA dissertation project, I came to the understanding that changes of a street also reflect and in some cases, indeed initiate changes of the surrounding neighbourhood in which it is situated. The present work thus focuses on an ethnographic study of Shennan Road, a city thoroughfare that runs through the centre of Shenzhen. The purpose of studying a road is to gain further understanding of its role as an infrastructural piece in the city and through this, to gain an understanding of the city itself against the wider context of reforms. Building on the knowledge that the road is intended to play the primary role of facilitating movement and connections, I explore other roles the road also plays for the State and people. The questions are: 1) What is Shennan Road expected to deliver, by the State, and 2) what other kinds of possibilities does the road offer? In the introduction, I explore the historical context of economic reforms that led to the establishment of the Shenzhen Municipality and the Special Economic Zone (SEZ hereafter) and how promises of change and progress are communicated by the State, through the municipal and local governments to the common people. Then I explore the idea of infrastructure and highlight particular aspects which will assist me in shaping the discussions in the dissertation. Finally, I will present a summary of the chapters.
Figure 4 Shenzhen Skyline
Historical context: the road to reform In 1949, the People’s Republic of China was established after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won the civil war against the Nationalists. As the CCP occupied Beijing, many of the Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan where they set up a new government. In order to consolidate the revolutionary road of a socialist state in Mainland China, Mao Zedong, the CCP Chairman along with his followers, launched a series of campaigns that
17 gradually led the Mainland into further economic failures and political insecurity (Hou 2011). Amongst these campaigns was the Hundred Flower Movement in 1956, which was a political campaign intended to encourage intellectuals to speak out. But the campaign backfired. Criticisms of the government and the demand for democratic participations voiced by intellectuals became too vigorous and threatened to challenge the CCP’s political legitimacy. Eventually the campaign came to an abrupt end. Then the Great Leap Forward began in 1958 with the formation of People’s Communes. In rural settlements, peasants were encouraged to build their own backyard furnaces to increase the output of steel. Again the campaign failed to produce the high quality steel that Mao expected to match the Western standard. Yet a combination of an overemphasis upon low-tech industrialisation on a massive scale, the subsequent neglect of agricultural production and bad weather ended the campaign with widespread famine and Mao’s resignation in 1959. Following Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi’s (who succeeded Mao) first attempt to restore the economy, Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to mass mobilise yet another political campaign. This time it was set against any anti- revolutionary suspects, such as liberal intellectuals or reformists (including Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi and their supporters). With closure of schools and colleges, the years of the Cultural Revolution were dominated by fear and paranoia. Up until the end of the Cultural Revolution, China suffered economically from the tight control of a centrally planned economy that was ideologically driven. Although Mao’s death in the same year meant the end of an era, the CCP itself continued to suffer from internal conflicts between two major camps – the Maoist dogmatists and the reformists led by Deng who was reinstated. The main objective uniting the CCP was to push forward modernisation in China (Pantsov & Levine 2015). However, members disagreed on how it should be done. The Maoist dogmatists continued the socialist narrative and argued that the Cultural Revolution was only the beginning and that China would see many more (socialist) revolutions during the process of modernisation. There were no signs of deviating from the centrally planned economy as far as the Maoist dogmatists were concerned. On the contrary, Deng took a pragmatic stance and approached the issue of modernisation by calling for a controlled liberalisation of the economy.
18 At this point, he also called for the emancipation of the intellectuals who had been severely suppressed during the Cultural Revolution. They were encouraged to criticize conservative members of the CCP. In December 1978, Deng made a pivotal speech supporting the “expansion of democracy in the economic sphere, speaking against excessive centralism” (Pantsov & Levine 2015: 342). While the political battle against the Maoist dogmatists continued, externally, many top-ranking officials of the Central Government made study trips abroad to learn from the experience of other more developed countries, including some countries in Europe, Hong Kong (still under British rule until 1997), and Japan (Vogel 2011). After establishing a renewed relationship with the Yugoslav Communist Party, the Deng-led reformists found an ideological justification for economic emancipation whilst avoiding the accusation of “committing ideological impurities” (Vogel 2011: 219). Besides the ideological hurdles in putting forward economic reforms, China was also facing the problem of border control in Guangdong, the province bordering Hong Kong. As a result of widespread poverty, many people (especially young men) risked their lives to cross the border to Hong Kong where they would get better economic opportunities. Shenzhen was at the frontline of the battle between the military and the impoverished people who were trying to escape to Hong Kong. Problems of border control such as this made the need for economic reforms more urgent. Although the internal battle against the conservative members of the CCP was gathering strength, doubts about reforms were still prominent. Reforms had to start somewhere. The security problems in Guangdong immediately put Shenzhen under the spotlight. The initiation of reforms in 1978 following the 11th Central Committee meeting in Beijing brought an end to People’s Communes, where labour forces were effectively owned by the State, and opened up the route for small enterprises to emerge in cities across China. The monumental push for the reforms to proceed more systematically was the establishment of SEZs, where reform policies could be tested before they were implemented across China. These zones were given the flexibility to formulate local economic policies and were effectively the windows through which China made its way to the global market. In 1979, what was known as Bao’an County was given the administrative status of a municipality and renamed Shenzhen. In August 1980, the Shenzhen SEZ was established with four administrative districts: Luohu, Futian,
19 Nanshan and Yantian (O’Donnell 2001; Ng 2003). Along with Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou in Guangdong Province and Xiamen in Fujian Province were also made SEZs. Reforms in China are officially known as the Comprehensive Economic Reforms. Apart from the establishment of the SEZs, new reform policies such as land-use rights were introduced to facilitate the transition to a controlled market-driven economy. The reforms began with a series of economic restructuring but they also brought gradual changes (or liberations) in the way people think about their relationship with money. The internal battle against the Maoist dogmatists was matched by Deng’s endeavour to encourage people to break free from ideological straightjacket and thus liberate their economic aspirations towards growth and progress on individual level. The market- driven reforms were justified by Deng using the phrase “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”, which provided a way to circumvent the ideological hurdle. He used concepts such as xiăo kāng (a term with a Confucian root, meaning moderately wealthy) to encourage people to pursue individual wealth. It was a significant ideological shift from need to desire and from the collective to the individual through encouraging some people to “get rich first”, which saw the emergence of private farming and small business initiatives in rural China before spreading to the urban areas, where reforms had taken a longer time to be implemented (Cannon & Jenkins 1990). Fast forward to today, although reforms have brought economic success in cities such as Shenzhen, there are some, who lived under the command economy and the provision of State welfare, reminiscing about how life was simpler and people less money-driven. Yet reforms meant and brought change to a lot of people, especially those who had suffered from the Cultural Revolution and the campaigns before. Differences such as this raise more questions about promise and change or indeed the impact of change. Below I introduce Mr and Mrs Chen to demonstrate what the reforms had meant for some people who needed change.
I arrived in Shenzhen in September 2013. The temperature was still lingering on around 30 degree Celsius. I met up with Mrs Chen in her teahouse. I sat with her in a guest room and she was preparing tea. She began telling me about her move to Henggang, a market town bordering the original SEZ.
20 In 1983, Mrs Chen, originally from western Guangdong, was amongst the first wave of migrants to Shenzhen. Her husband made the initial move in 1981. She then followed him to Henggang. Much to my surprise, she told me that she was not impressed with what she saw in Henggang. “It was so much worse than I had expected.” But when I asked her what she was expecting, she could not articulate it and said: “all I saw was just yellow earth surrounded by mountains and nothing else. The place just looked poor.” Yet, when I asked her if she would turn back home, she was adamant that a poor-looking city would still be better than a rich countryside. For Mrs Chen, a city still meant opportunities. According to Mrs Chen, her side of the family used to be landowners (dì zhŭ) for generations in her home village. Her grandfather was also a member of the Nationalist Party. Being associated with the dì zhŭ class and the Nationalists in the past became the main cause of the trouble her family got into during the Cultural Revolution. Despite the fact that her grandfather had helped a lot of Communists during the war against the Japanese, he was still under verbal attacks and put in prison by the Little Red Guards for re-education. Any possessions labeled as “culturally decadent” were also robbed of her house, in the name of moral and political cleansing. For Mrs Chen, the years of living in her home village during the Cultural Revolution were dominated by fear and insecurity. Although she felt somewhat let down by what she saw when she arrived in Henggang, leaving her home village still meant turning a new page in life and being on the outskirt of Shenzhen was one step closer to a better future. In comparison, Mr Chen did not experience the same level of disappointment as Mrs Chen did. When a villager brought news about economic reforms – găigé kāifàng “reforms and opening”, he followed his older brother and a couple of other male villagers to Shenzhen in 1981. Through the people he met, they found jobs in the construction industry working as carpenters soon after arrival. “[Working in construction] was a place to start for many of us”, Mr Chen recalled, “but when we arrived, we just got on with the odd jobs we could find.” As a result, “making step-by-step assessments as you go along” became Mr Chen and many other migrants’ motto at the time. When opportunities arise, “you just go for it”. However, he also said, “you would only feel somewhat
21 hopeful when your life was really improving. You just wouldn’t hope for anything when nothing gave you hope.”
This brief account of Mr and Mrs Chen’s experience on their arrival in Shenzhen is by no means representative of all migrants’ experience. However, individual examples demonstrate that a city born out of economic reforms presented a glimmer of hope to people who wanted change. But what is it about a city that represents hopes to people? As the transition to a market economy began in Shenzhen, the SEZ started undergoing a series of systematic restructurings. The first domain was spatial reconfiguration for the implementation of reforms. Within the original SEZ, along with other infrastructural projects to connect electricity and water, road networks began to grow. The construction of Shennan Road also began. From construction to its completion in the 1990s, the road does not just play one role. The partial transition from command economy to market economy meant that the State ceased to play the role as the sole provider of economic welfare and commander of national economy but a facilitator in guiding economic and urban developments (Wu 1998). Nonetheless, the transition did not entail total deregulations. The State remained in a powerful position of influencing the way economic developments go. The transition brought about devolution of decision-making power to the lower administrative units: from the national framework, to the provincial level policies and then regional implementations. With the implementation of reforms, what does it mean to have the State playing multiple roles as a director, a facilitator and a participant in the market economy? If the State ceases to be the sole provider of economic welfare, can it still be held responsible for delivering all the promises? To what extent do infrastructures deliver opportunities and promises while they may also be the breeding ground for contestations and uncertainties? Bearing these questions in mind, in the next section, I explore the idea of infrastructure, with close attentions to the configuration of infrastructure, state and modernity, and the promise of progress and the so-called better future(s), against the background of “a socialist economy with Chinese characteristics”.
22 Exploring the idea of infrastructure In this section, I explore the idea of infrastructure through some of its aspects that I consider important for the discussions throughout the dissertation. The exploration is by no means an attempt to create a comprehensive list of all the aspects. The aim is to set up relevant themes for the subsequent analysis of the multiple roles played by Shennan Road. According to Oxford Dictionary, infrastructure denotes to “the basic physical and organisational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies, etc.) that are needed for the operation of a society or enterprise”. With this definition, infrastructure must be in place for anything to operate. A city, a neighbourhood, or a human body needs various systems in place and these systems would be called infrastructure. Infrastructure thus gives rise to other possibilities and enables the formation of relations beyond what is intended. The prefix ‘infra-’ means below, while ‘structure’ originally meant ‘to build’ in Latin. Infrastructure can then be understood as something arranged and built below, forming a web of operational relations below. However, ‘below’ does not necessarily mean that infrastructure is hidden beneath the visible surface and thus invisible. The road, for example, is a visible physical structure. However, as “no work is inherently either visible or invisible” (Star & Strauss 1999: 9), it depends on the definition given by the person in question. The same applies to understanding the visibility and invisibility of infrastructure. I suggest that ‘below’ connotes something more than the physical aspect of infrastructure being invisible. In general, what infrastructure does is to facilitate and support but the question is: what and who do they facilitate and support? I suggest that for infrastructure, being ‘below’ is more understandable in terms of providing the supportive foundations upon which operations are made possible. The structures below thus become fundamental to systemic operations. They provide the conditions for things to operate, ideally, smoothly. This aspect of infrastructure is similar to the idea of gateways that permit multiple systems and thus relations, for no infrastructure develops and operates in isolation (Edwards, et al. 2009). Infrastructures are essential for the everyday operations of a city. The city would fall into chaos without household waste collecting and sorting systems, electricity or running water. Life without these basic infrastructures would be unthinkable for many
23 of us who have developed the so-called modern habitus. Humans are also essential for defining the role of infrastructures as facilitative and supportive. Infrastructure is also a relative concept (Larkin 2013; Star 1999). That infrastructure is relative suggests the inherent relational dynamics and that the concept is less stabilised than is often assumed (Jensen & Morita 2016). Infrastructure is also destabilising because it may upset the existing relations into which new infrastructure is inserted or integrated (often by force). It is also argued that infrastructure can ‘grow’ out of the existing environment that provides the conditions for its existence (Edwards, et al. 2009). At the same time, this process of ‘growing’ is as much about a response to economic growth as it is an organic development of human infrastructure (Simone 2014). Nonetheless, a question remains. Who determines the need for a new infrastructure to facilitate further growth, when it is ‘inorganic’? In Chinese Mandarin, infrastructure reads jīchǔ shèshī, which means “basic (designed and arranged) organisations for provision”. It denotes to an aspect of infrastructure – that is they are the foundations upon which the modern existence is lived. But the Chinese conception of ‘infrastructure’ also depicts a series of events – from design and organisation to provision. It is a depiction of causal relations. From design to implementation, infrastructure facilitates a change of status quo. It matters when it concerns how the change of status quo affects people differently. Yet the causal relations do not always show linear process (Dalakoglou 2012; Harvey & Knox 2012; 2015). In doing ethnographic research on infrastructure such as roads, Penny Harvey turns to the ‘variable openness’ of conceptually conflated terms as state-space that is “both grounded and mobile, simultaneously continuous and discontinuous, specific and generic” (Harvey 2012: 79). She proposes a topological approach to studying roads in order to uncover the relational dynamics that the topographic approach overlooks. In a different ethnographic context, Nielsen (2012) demonstrates that a Chinese-funded road construction project becomes meaningful for the Mozambican workers not through the employer–employee relation but through an unintended connection between the road and a future house or piece of land (for which the workers save up with the wages obtained from constructing the road). Without alternatives, these workers have to endure the unacceptable working conditions and treatments imposed by their Chinese employers. Their wages are so low that “it is impossible to establish a
24 meaningful ratio between labour and money” (2012: 475). As a result, Nielsen argues that when an expected relationship ceases to be meaningful, it is obviated and a new relationship emerges out of the limit of the former. In the case of an unpaved road in Brazil, Campbell suggests that it is a site that exposes the gap between the material and the figural road (2012). He observes the unpaved road shapes the lives of those who settle along it, which demonstrates the resilience and plasticity of these settlers. Yet when the figural road returns with new development initiatives, the settlers are cast aside as outsiders and even destroyers of the ecology. The other aspect of non-linear causal relations produced by infrastructure is the discrepancy between what is intended and unexpected of infrastructure by the State. Infrastructures often shape practices that are not intended but upon which we are sometimes dependent (Dourish & Bell 2007). Building on the anthropological distinctiveness advocated by Larkin (2013) and on the science and technology studies of infrastructure, Jensen and Morita put forward “infrastructures as ontological experiments”. One of the aspects I find convincing for the present work is their engagement with infrastructures as “open-ended experimental systems” that take into account a “dimension of surprise” (2016: 4-5). Surprises are the unintended relations produced by infrastructures. They demonstrate the non-linearity of infrastructures in their production and reconfiguration of relations. However, these unintended relations are not always left unattended. What happens to these unintended relations? Chapter 5, for example, demonstrates how some unintended relations are considered by the State as undesirable. I argue, in a way, that infrastructures are “open-ended experimental systems” also implies a level of uncertainties that concern people in different ways. The unintended relations are also pertinent for the understanding of the city as an aggregate of conflicting forces negotiating with each other (Massey 2005). In Abdoumaliq Simone’s commentary (2012), he argues that what we do together is “largely a question of what is in between us”, which defines infrastructure. It is about the “in-between” that “exerts a force” upon people who may be attracted to or repelled by it. This in-betweenness of infrastructure indicates a change of status quo. It also makes sense to consider this in-betweenness and change of status at various scales. Take the road, for example, for a commuter to travel from home to work via Shennan Road, the road at a micro scale thus becomes a status in between two modes of being:
25 resting and working. On a macro level, infrastructure represents a perpetuation of temporal shift. It represents a mode of change, transformation as well as conflation of identities and modes of being. Yet this in-betweenness of infrastructure can be uncertain and unsettling, for “infrastructure is always built upon turbulence” regardless to how constrained this turbulence may be (Simone 2015: 375). Going from Simone’s comments, I analyse Shennan Road through the differential usage and the particular role it plays to different people as an infrastructure, with the relevant aspects I have highlighted thus far. Seeing that infrastructural projects such as road constructions were imperative for the growth of the Shenzhen SEZ and that reforms also provided the legal infrastructure for modernisation, I explore the relationship between infrastructure and modernity, with specific attentions paid to the State’s expectation of infrastructure in sustaining the modernist narrative of progress.
Infrastructure and modernity What brings the ideas of infrastructure and modernity together? Specifically, to what extent was Shennan Road infrastructural to realising Shenzhen as a modern Chinese city? What other roles does the road play and to whom, considering that other infrastructural projects as the subterranean developments that continue to expand? In order to address and unpack such questions it is necessary to begin by how the understanding of modernity assists the understanding of infrastructure, and vice versa. The idea of modernity assumes a mode of living and experiencing time that indicates a break from the past and an ongoing pursuit and expectations of more, i.e. progress (Harvey 1991, Donham 2002). However it also matters whether modernity is considered as an end in itself or merely as a perpetually forward moving process: a question that simultaneously applies to the development of infrastructure. Initial understandings of modernity often associate it with progress, growth, enlightenment, emancipation, betterment, and so on (Kivisto 2010). In the case of China, modernity took the form of a Maoist state sponsored project centred around industry and production that subsequently transformed into hitherto unprecedented and unparalleled levels of economic growth over the last three decades. Infratructure is an integral part of the modernist project in both the pre-reform era and the contemporary post-Mao era of China (Cannon & Jenkins 1990). Edwards argues, “infrastructures simultaneously shape and are shaped by … the condition of
26 modernity” and that “to be modern is to live within and by means of infrastructures” (Edwards 2003: 186). “To live within the multiple, interlocking infrastructures of modern societies”, Edwards argues, “is to know one’s place in the gigantic systems that both enable and constrain us” (Edwards 2003: 191). Knowing one’s place, however, does not suffice. Being in between infrastructures also means the gradual acquisition of skills to deal with constrains and negotiate with the system. For Berman, “to be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction” and that modernisation is “a state of perpetual becoming” (Berman 1988: 13-16). The flux and uncertainty is similarly expressed by Simone’s observation of “the proliferation of uncertain betweens” (Simone 2015: 376). One might argue that infrastructure provides the facilitative system for the process of modernisation. Without the desire for accelerated change – that is modernisation – infrastructure such as roads, water and electricity supplies, railway systems, bridges etc., would not have multiplied at such intensity as that experienced in China. Modernity means change and progress, and infrastructure is expected to deliver change fast and sustain the progress narrative. Investments in building and expanding infrastructural networks also conjure up the image of economic growth, especially for prospective investors. Research shows that government-funded infrastructures are lagging behind the pace of economic growth in China and thus prompts the need for private investment in infrastructures (Newell, et al. 2009). The appearance of constructing more infrastructural pieces means investments remain active, which in theory should attract yet more investments. When investment lands on the ground with cranes making up the urban skyline and machines occupying construction sites, existing rhythms and ways of life are interrupted. Scenes such as this are indicators of future-in-the-making. Economic growth is articulated by such happenings. In contemporary Dakar, Melly focuses on temporality and infrastructure and argues that the future-oriented infrastructural projects shape the way of living in Dakar, where people endure the inconveniences and disruptions caused by these projects (2013). Modernity means moving forward, and infrastructural projects are manifestations of these forward-movements in space and time. Considering in relation to Berman’s accounts of modernity, investments in infrastructure are the acts creating new modes of progress that surpass the existing fabric, In other words they are
27 investments in “innovative self-destruction” to destroy and replace – literally or symbolically – all that was made yesterday (Berman 1988: 98-99). This process of catching up with a sense of lateness (Zhang 2006), in the case of China – via new infrastructural projects – justifies violations and disruptions that continue to threaten existing communities. This process continues to dominate the Chinese landscapes in the post-Mao era. During the period of fieldwork, Shennan Road itself no longer underwent any major structural works besides maintenance works carried out routinely. However, subterranean developments such as expansion of the underground railway network and shopping plazas were taking place across the city at the time. Some of these projects were (and still are) affecting the overall capacity and efficiency of Shennan Road by disrupting its surfaces and causing lanes to be closed and redrawn. With various different infrastructural projects going on simultaneously, albeit at different speed, the question of the temporality of modernity arises. When one infrastructural part of the city is being affected by the construction of another infrastructural project, I argue that we are in between different phases and kinds of modernity at the same time. When one infrastructural part is completed and in full usage, there will always be another project designed to surpass the existing ones or at least relieve them of current operational pressures. For example, two more expressways (Beihuan on the northern side and Binhe the southern) were constructed running parallel to Shennan Road in order to relieve the pressure of traffic. The road, as an infrastructure, becomes an interesting site that reveals the inherent contradictions of modernity out of which hybrids of modernity emerge (Latour 1993; Harvey 1996). While progress is being made, higher expectations are also being produced by novel infrastructure. More public sentiments such as hopes and fears are invested in new material forms that project a future that is itself future-oriented (Reeves 2016) and better than what we have in the present. This kind of progress narrative is integral to the idea of modernity, which continues to outdo itself and encourages the lived experience of pursuing and expecting more and better. Both ideas of infrastructure and modernity are unsettling and often disruptive, especially in the partial transition from a command economy to a market economy in China. The success of the reforms is also put on display by the growing number of skyscrapers that are dominating the Shenzhen skyline (Figure 4). High-rise office
28 buildings and apartment blocks continue to occupy the lands on both sides of Shennan Road. One may argue that the state orchestrates what modernity should look like with the ongoing (often debt-financed) investment in physical infrastructure for faster and more strategically expansive communication and connection links between developed and less developed parts of a city. The extent of spatial expansion of infrastructural network renders the scope of modernity a tangible fact. Yet modernity is often spoken of as if it is unanimously pursued and supported by all of the public. In China and especially Shenzhen during its early developmental phases, narratives of progress have become so widely referred to in public policies that they have become unquestionable as far as national and regional social and economic policies are concerned. In the aftermath of 1989, the narrative concerning the need for modernization has become concomitant with narratives about the need for political security of the CCP and China’s overall political stability, reinforcing how, modernization remains a state project as well as an economic project. As introduced previously, Deng advocated a controlled economic liberalization and called the reincarnation “a socialist economy with Chinese characteristics”, denoting a modern socialist state of a different kind from the one before. What is less clear is the specific kind of modernity that is being pursued, why it is being pursuing it and on whose behalf. The contemporary Chinese context, however, also adds to the complexity of the idea of modernity. While Latour considers 1989 “the year of miracles” (1993), the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of Berlin Wall sent hopeful signals to liberal intellectuals in China that had been in the middle of its reforms, but at the same time, alarming signals to the CCP. The year of 1989 prompts the rethink of the idea of modernity as a fluid term that take on different articulations that proceed in different directions – economically and politically (Wang 1998). I contend that there is not one unitary Chinese modernity and that the kind of promises made by the State are understood differently by people who may hope for political changes such as greater freedom of expression beyond economic prosperity. When one takes the Chinese state into consideration and its role in constructing a particular kind of modernity, the question about whose modernity is being articulated and pursued is a matter of critical concern. Rather than considering the state as a unified and tangible whole, we are often dealing with different administrative levels
29 from the Central Government (zhōng yāng), regional governments through to state agents such as governmental authorities, all of whom have different and competing interests. These agents operate according to the umbrella framework set up by the Central Government but some are also independent enough to act at their own discretion. Modernity is thus interpreted in different ways given how the broad developmental strategies filter through many levels of administrative communications. This is particularly pertinent in the developmental history of Shenzhen during the early phase. Significant discrepancies emerged between how Beijing envisioned the modern state to be and how the local leaders in Shenzhen (with the quiet support of progressive reformers in Beijing) attempted to put in practice their democratic ideals as a modern progressivist mission (O’Donnell 2017). The state more forcefully began to manifest itself in Shenzhen when these leaders were eventually dismissed and replaced by the conformists, in the aftermath of the 1989 student protest. Li Hao – the newly appointed party secretary of Shenzhen, for example, had the pressing task of creating a more coherent state apparatus. Building a modernist Chinese city thus became a project and mission with a greater emphasis on the building of hard physical infrastructure and strengthening the power of the state within the municipal government, than the democratic infrastructure facilitating political reforms. The state is not only present within the boundaries of its administrations, but also in the physical forms of the roads, buildings and construction projects that shape the built environment. Infrastructure is one of the keys and most visible forms through which the state manifests its presence. As an economic tool, infrastructure facilitates growth, and the physical and economic growth of a city becomes the primary indicator of the political performance of the city according to state defined criteria. As a political apparatus, infrastructure manifests the state’s power over space, reinforcing how infrastructure, in a very real and ever visible sense, is simultaneously a political and an economic project. At the same time, infrastructure is also where the state is tested, scrutinized and held responsible for any of its failures – roads and construction projects become indicators of the failure of the state in keeping up with expectations. In the case of Shennan Road, stories about overspending on physical upgrades and general maintenance continue to appear (Chapter 1). These stories are mostly distributed via online media, reflect the same problem at a smaller scale – the discrepancy between
30 what the state is doing and what it is expected to do, through the maintenance practice of infrastructure. During the post-Mao era, investments in the built environment continue to grow, especially after 2008 when many countries in the West were suffering from the financial crisis. From the outside looking in, the economy in China is still booming with fast growing construction and real estate industries, and the project of modernization continues to be made visible by the dramatic changes to the built environment across China, including in many rural and peripheral areas whose communities have heightened expectations of the social and economic developments that this will bring. Alongside these shared hopes and images of growth and material progress, there is also another side to the story. Whose modernity is at stake when infrastructure fails? When infrastructure, e.g. the underground railway system, experiences systematic failures such as water leakage, or in some serious incidents, collapse of the electronic system, especially when people die from these failures, doubts about maintenance, quality of components begin to surface and challenge not only the management company but also the competency of the state in sustaining the modernity it advocates. Ultimately, what state authorities resolve to do when infrastructural failure or systematic hiccup occurs also render the state as multifaceted and deliberately ambiguous (Migdal 1994). Historically, the modern socialist state in China plays a different practical role than the one before the reforms. As a result of partial devolution of power from the central government to the regional ones, different levels of state and government agents are able to construct their own definitions of modernity that are locally specific and articulated. Vertically speaking, infrastructure occupies a critical in-between space that mediates the relationship between the state and people, who hold different expectations of the state that is itself multi-faceted. In Shenzhen, as in other cities, the municipal government of Shenzhen continues and facilitates the materialization of the state’s ideals. Constructing, upgrading and maintaining Shennan Road, from the government’s point of view is very much concerned with keeping up with the appearances of the city and the state. After all, the image of the road represents the city and the appearance of which is, in turn, an indicator of the state’s performance. Yet, when the seemingly perfect image of the road is challenged by undesirable elements (e.g. unexpected behaviours), then the relationship between the state and people
31 changes. People’s interaction with the road, therefore, provides important insight into the relationship between the state and people, and ways in which modernity is sustained or not by people.
Research Outline The central question I address throughout the dissertation is: what other (kinds) of role does Shennan Road play, for whom and when? While the dissertation considers that the road takes on multiple meanings from people using it differently within a particular temporal and spatial configuration, the aim is to highlight what these different roles mean to the relations established with the road and what they mean for an anthropological study of a city thoroughfare. I set out to answer the main question by considering the role of the municipal government in deciding the functions of Shennan Road in facilitating the growth and development of the SEZ. I analyse the road as infrastructural to the city in facilitating the operation of a growth machine (Molotch 1976). Although Molotch’s idea of the growth machine originates from the American context, his emphasis on locality being defined as “an aggregate of land-based interests” finds resonance in the context of Shenzhen as a post-Mao city of economic reforms.2 As its primary function, a road assists movement of people and good and communication of information between places and plays an important role in connecting all territorialised developments. As an infrastructural piece, the road also gives rise to other types of technologies such as surveillance cameras and traffic lights. Against the backdrop of the economic history of Shenzhen, Shennan Road is intimately tied up with the narrative of growth and progress as promised by a new modern socialist state. Given that Shenzhen grows as it goes from one phase of development to the next, each development phase puts emphasis on the practical and symbolic significance of the road differently. Secondly, as the ethnographic lens moves further into the everyday life of the road on the ground level, it plays different roles in
2 The main aspect that differentiates Molotch’s growth machine from Shenzhen (and the wider context of post-reformed China) is the greater ambiguity resulted from land ownership. There is no private ownership of lands because they are owned by the State or collectively owned by a community. However, as a result of the separation from lands upon which properties are built, there is the private ownership of properties. For developers, they can purchase land-use rights (of 70 years for residential use or 50 years for industrial use).
32 facilitating the everyday operations of urban living beyond the primary function. The second part of the answer to the question thus relies on exploring different ethnographic perspectives that redefine the road in subtle ways. Although they are by no means statistically significant, they do support the claim that the road is reconfigured beyond its technological form. As a result of different usages of the road, different lines of stories are inscribed on the road and render it as a complex assemblage of both social and non-social relations. The ethnographic details demonstrate ways in which the road becomes engaged with people. However, that does not mean an outright negation of what Shennan Road is intended to function, as a traffic corridor, defined by the developmental plans in Shenzhen. Different modes of traveling on the road (in cars or on foot) produce differential experience of engagement with it. While the written text depicts the road from different perspectives, it is also a visual anthropology project that aims at using audio-visual methods to engage with the road ethnographically from different viewpoints. I begin with the perception of the road as a public image of the city, produced by the state. Yet according to the developmental plans, the road becomes a traffic corridor that tells a different visual story. I contend that the contribution of the visual counterpart to the written text lies in its capacity to engage in a visual conversation that puts the city image into question. Furthermore, in the processes of image-making during fieldwork and post-fieldwork writing and editing, the boundaries between producing written text and visual counterparts becomes blurred. The process of writing involves as much walking through the images of the road in the head as the actual process of walking during fieldwork (Ingold, 2010b). Another dimension in responding to the main question is that the road reveals to the ethnographer a community of aspirations (Hetherington, 2014) as well as disappointments and weariness (Buck-Morss, 1995). As the ethnographic materials suggest, the road shows not only the glamorous side of the city but also the intricacy of urban lives. Studying the road also summons up ethnographic research that adapts to the changing environments along the road. I also emphasise the entangled relationship between infrastructure and the city in which it is situated, through the specificity of Shennan Road. I draw attention to the fact that the road also conjures up imaginings about the future of Shenzhen, seeing that the city continues to engage in increasingly fierce competition with other Chinese cities
33 while it also commits to becoming a global city. The future-image to which the city attaches has a direct impact upon the role of the road that co-exists but also somewhat becomes secondary to the newly emerging infrastructural developments.
Positionality and the field Before I proceed to the chapter outline, it is necessary to clarify my positionality and the field. I was born and bred in Shenzhen for the first fourteen years of my life, before I was sent by my parents to the UK to continue my education. To the extent that I speak Mandarin and Cantonese, share memories of the city, and possess partial understanding of the local and migrant cultures in Shenzhen, doing research on Shennan Road in Shenzhen should put me into the category of doing “anthropology at home”. To some extent, having come from Shenzhen, returning to do fieldwork in the city should come as an advantage. That was my assumption. However, it did not turn out to be as straightforward as I had assumed. Two specifications made the research more remote from doing “anthropology at home”. Firstly, despite regular visits for vacations, my long-term absence from living in Shenzhen makes me an estranged second-generation Shenzhener (as my parents were amongst the first wave of migrants settling in Shenzhen in the early 1980s). Therefore, I am neither totally at home nor totally foreign in the city. Secondly, doing fieldwork on a road rather than a bounded community meant that conventional ways of carrying out participant observations would be compromised. The combination of both specifications thus renders the constant status of ‘being there’ (Watson 1999). Fabian argues against the universalisation of time, which is a religio-political act of control and domination of the West (2002 [1983]). ‘Being here’ is being tuned to the time socio-culturally constructed in the context of ‘here’. Likewise, ‘being there’ means being tuned to the time constructed there. Fabian advocates the notion of ‘coevalness’ – the intersubjective experience of the field – and that it is not merely a corporeal experience but also a cognitively shared experience of Time from ‘being there’ (2002 [1983]: 30). Furthermore, the process of preparing for the fieldwork, going into the field to do fieldwork and eventually leaving the field and returning to the home institution is also ‘being there’ in my head through anticipation, imagination, retrospection and reflection (Watson 1999). In this sense, ‘being there’ is not about the spatial and
34 temporal distance; rather, it is more about the differences in our ways of being and understanding about ourselves and others. After all, there remains a difference between being in in the field and being of the culture. To some extent, Bourdieu’s call for “participant objectivation” (2003) is also relevant to the notion of ‘being there’. He urges social scientists to look around them rather than inwards at themselves; it is a “scientific reflexivity” that focuses on the social as well as academic conditions within which the researcher is brought up. Both Bourdieu and Watson agree that the production of anthropological knowledge is an ongoing project and that the authority of anthropologists in the production of knowledge is very questionable and subject to self-reflexivity. Consequently, ‘being there’ becomes a necessary mode in order to draw a line between knowing something about the others and claiming that one knows all about the Other because one has ‘become native’. The very notion of the field has been under critical scrutiny and reconceptualisation in the late twentieth century, with Marcus (1998: 79) urging contemporary anthropology to “move out of the single sites and local situations”, and Ferguson and Gupta pushing for the decentring and defetishisation of the concept (1997). Movements, networks, and scapes have been the new additions to the reconceptualisation of the ‘field’. Besides spending time doing fieldwork on the road, I also followed my informants when they were travelling in the city. The practice of following people takes me beyond the confines of the geographical boundaries of the fieldwork areas and allows me to draw connections between the informants and the places they have been, and between the road and the city. Although my status in the field was neither native nor foreign, my identity as an urban ethnographer allowed me to adopt the position of being both inside and outside. To some extent, ‘being there’ prevented me from taking my own cultural dispositions for granted and thus constantly reminded me of the importance of reassessing my understanding of the road and the city. This constant reassessment thus becomes part of an evolutionary process of developing ideas.
Chapter outline Taking inspirations from scalar analysis of e-infrastructure (Edwards 2003; Edwards, et al. 2009), I explore the role Shennan Road plays to 1) the city and 2) people who use the
35 road to serve different purposes. Scalar analysis thus allows me to address the main question: what role does Shennan Road play for what and whom, and when does it matter? The dissertation is divided into three parts: context (Chapters 1 and 2), methods and representation (Chapters 3 and 4) and ethnography (Chapters 5 and 6). Through the city’s relations with Shennan Road, I explore the road’s primary function and its symbolic significance of being the public ‘face’ of Shenzhen. On the city level, I approach the road as an infrastructural part of the city-building projects as well as its symbolic role in promoting the city image envisioned by the state. I explore the ways in which the state has intended the city to be, and the subsequent impacts upon the role of the road. Then the focus narrows down to the micro scale –the intricate relationship between the road and individuals who use it. A series of ethnographic portraits demonstrate lived experiences unfolding on the road, which becomes a magnifying glass revealing lives in the city. Below I present a detailed breakdown of the chapters in each part. Chapter 1 follows on from the contextual work set up in Introduction. I intend this chapter to be an exploration of Shennan Road in time and study the history of the road as a cultural product as well as a physical manifestation of the modernisation project. I aim at constructing a biography of the road by tracing the history of the road from construction and completion through to maintenance that continues into the future. I set up the biographical journey against the backdrop of socio-economic history in order to demonstrate how the making of the road is a result of plans, determinations, and compromises. At the commencement of its construction, I revisit the relationship between promise, enchantment and infrastructural projects such as the road. I argue that the project of its construction facilitated the enchantment of the modern city that had emerged out of reforms. The study of “boring things” such as infrastructures (Star 1999) suggests that they are not intrinsically exciting in themselves. I argue that the insertion of personal stories into the history of the road orchestrated by governmental authorities makes the road more publicly relevant and emotionally appealing. The construction of the infrastructural part of the city is a way to demonstrate the act of materialising and delivering promise of progress.
36 Through the exploration of the politics of construction and maintenance, I also trace a parallel biography of the public which becomes multiple and ambiguous in the Chinese context and observe that there still remains a huge discrepancy between the public conceived by the state and the publics that exist in other domains such as the Internet. The purpose of highlighting the Chinese public(s) is another way of showing circumstances that render the road more than a “boring thing”. The level of concerns about the road is nonetheless contingent upon events and people, and that it demonstrates that infrastructure is conceptually relative and subject to destabilising impact of public opinions. On a positive note, public opinions about infrastructure can be effective in building conversations with the state. Chapter 2 focuses on the exploration of the surrounding neighbourhoods, which have grown and flourished largely because of the road. Taking a journey on the road also turns it into a living museum corridor through which I explore the developmental histories of the city. I study Shennan Road according to the comprehensive development plans that the government has formulated. These plans determine the infrastructural role of Shennan Road. This exploration serves two purposes. One is to produce neighbourhood profiles that give different sections of the road their characters. At the first sight, neighbourhoods surrounding the road are in general more developed and economically more valuable than most other parts of Shenzhen. Detailed inspections reveal that areas surrounding the road are not all equally developed. I observe that some developments are more prioritised than others. Through the exploration of the exiting connections with the road, I also highlight the disconnections of the less glamourous parts of the city where the residents (most of whom are renters) are increasingly being ‘planned out’ and ‘priced out’ of the city’s future. Chapters 3 and 4, act as a hinge of the dissertation, between context and ethnography. I study the road as a visual anthropologist with the acknowledgement of the visual manifestation of the road. With the task of documenting the fieldwork and representing the road, I argue that the exploration of different perspectives enables me to represent the road beyond its infrastructural role in facilitating movements, and the symbolic role in being a public image of Shenzhen. In Chapter 3, I reflect upon the method of walking in different modes and the making of the audio-visual counterparts to the dissertation. I demonstrate how the
37 different ways of walking generate ethnographic knowledge that is informed by different perspectives and that I suggest engagements in different modes of walking allow the creation of different city images in mind. As a heuristic approach to discovering the road and its surroundings, I suggest that while the method of walking allows me to move with others in space, and the pause- and-observe method as a result of walking also enables me to move with time at a nodal point, an idea borrowed from Lynch (1960). Lastly, I consider the importance of being a floating-ethnographer3 in the reconfiguration of doing participant observation on the road, through which strangers crisscross each other. I suggest that nodal points become critical space where the idea of strangers can be explored. In Chapter 4, discussions focus on seeing, image-making and building a visual conversation that puts the state-envisioned city image into question. I compare ways of seeing and hearing the city from top-down as well as bottom up. Instead of re- constructing a hierarchy, I suggest this comparison brings awareness of what is required to grasp the city and the road from a particular viewpoint. Secondly, I further the discussions with the addition of using a camera in the process of walking and maintain that camera, an extension of the ethnographer, is equally situated and an agent of subtle change. Finally, I reassess the role of visual outcomes – a short film and a photo book, in relations to the written text. After Chapter 4, I put a pause to the dissertation with the film as I intend this to illustrate a direct visual response to the city image constructed by the state. The film puts questions the image of the city and invites different ways of imagining the city in its glamour and dirt, physical smoothness and unevenness. The photo book continues the visual narrative offering clues about the conflicting images of the city. These visual clues are framed within the images which provide the window through which outsiders can be acquainted with the world in question (MacDougall 2006). Chapter 5 presents the ethnography of street food vendors whom I observed over an extended period of time on a footbridge over the road. Although they are not
3 The idea of floating is a term often used to describe the domestic migrants who travel across the country for work – the floating population. As a result of the household registration system, people are born either with an urban registration or non-urban registration, which remains fixed to the place of origins rather than following the person’s place of residence. Floating thus denotes to the status of moving from one place to another without a permanent place of residence.
38 representatives of all vendors in Shenzhen, they nonetheless provide an important entry point through which I gain an insight into how the road is a destabilised and destabilising space through its parts such as a footbridge. The chapter looks at the spatial stories of negotiations inscribed by street vendors onto the road and problematizes the road as a public good. In this chapter, I approach the social selectiveness of infrastructure (Amin, 2014). The road is not a public good offering open space for all users and as a state-space, it is intended to be infrastructural to some but not others. The ethnographic materials suggest the dubiousness of public space (Massey 2005) and that street food vendors are not amongst those who are deemed desirable as far as the urban management authorities are concerned. The publicness of the road is thus defined by the state rather than by its openness to all users, as a manifestation of democratic ideals. This chapter provides further insight into the relationship between intentions and unexpected consequences. The road is intended to uphold the city image and facilitate the circulations of goods and people within the city centre. However, one of the unintended consequences is that the road becomes utilised as a leftover space by people making a living. It therefore plays a role beyond what is intended and because such role is unintended, it remains questionable as to how long such role lasts. The analysis therefore indicates infrastructure such as the road is not in itself socially selective; it is intended to be so by the state through the imposition of regulations. This difference is important. In response to the enchantment of the city that is supported by the road, this chapter begins to show what happens afterwards – enchantment does not promise security. Instead, different kinds of uncertainties about the future become the factor confronting people who occupy an economically less privileged position. The migration to Shenzhen, a city full of promises, indeed opens another door that leads to more uncertainties than security for some people. Ironically, it is uncertainty that continues to force people to be spatially mobile and flexible. In the final chapter before conclusion, the ethnographic attention shifts to those are situated within the space-time of traffic on Shennan Road. Firstly, I present the road as a state-conceived moral space (via legal mechanism) that is also equipped with surveillance technologies. I describe the moral space of the road as a system that defines the expected and the unacceptable behaviours through the formalised language of regulations. With the ethnography of traffic which has its own spatial and temporal
39 configuration, the moral space of the road is challenged by the presence of multiple and diverse individual bodies coming from different corners across scales. Traffic thus brings together people of differences which co-ordinate as well as come into conflict with one another. The moral code of such state-space is also challenged as a result. Contrary to the rhetoric of productivity, the concept of time is also reconfigured by the experience of waiting in traffic, which renders time as experienced rather than spent as a resource. Instead of considering the time spent in waiting as unproductive, I argue that the process of waiting in traffic reconfigures the experience of time. Waiting is anything but inactivity. That Shennan Road is infrastructural to car culture is obvious. However, its infrastructural promise for speed and progress (Virilio, 2006 [1977]) is challenged by the very by-product of car-dominant culture – traffic and congestion. The chapter thus moves onto the focus on the disruptions on the road that contribute to worsening congestion during rush hour. Surface disruptions (ranging from road accidents, managerial malfunctions to disruptions due to other infrastructural projects) bring to light not only the impediment of progress but also the lack of uniformity of progress on the road. I argue that this kind of surface disruptions implies when one kind of progress – expansion of underground rail network, is being made, another kind of progress is compromised – the process of traveling on Shennan Road. When more novel kind of infrastructural projects such as underground railway systems take precedence, roads become comparatively unreliable in maintaining efficient and smooth circulation of goods and people. Finally, in conclusion, besides a summary of the discussions I have carried out throughout the dissertation, I look also ahead at the relationship between the future and the temporal practices of the present. The question concerns the extent to which the future matters to people. I draw attentions to the visual roadscape that displays a range of architectural characters that temporalize spaces along the road. I put forward the road provokes different temporal imaginations about the future. Looking up from the ground level at the skyscrapers that line up on both sides of the road also accentuates the contrast between experienced reality at the present and imagination of distant future.
40 With ethnographic materials, I argue that the relationship between present and future is not always a linear progression of time. Lastly, I present two implications of this whole research on Shennan Road that are worth pointing out: 1) the various roles the road plays, are not always sustained but ephemeral; and 2) the study also prompts the reassessment of ‘the social’ not as a pre-given quality of the association between people and infrastructure, but that it is actively produced, sustained and even broken by people’s interaction with it.
41 Chapter 1: Historical accounts of the road
Introduction By way of a common focus on ‘otherness’, Cohn argues that anthropology studies otherness in space while history studies it in time (1980). In this chapter, I carry out a study of the road in time through its history, which is considered by the chapter as a product invested with political intentions. The first part of the chapter sets out to explore the road represented in state- perceived history. I present stories about Shennan Road from construction through to maintenance in putting together a biography of the road. The second part focuses on the idea of the public in the contemporary Chinese context. I explore the difference between the singular Chinese public formulated by the state and the much more diverse and fragmented publics that exist in domains such as the Internet. I ask what history can reveal about the roles the road has played in city-building projects and promotions of the city. As a result, I make the following observations which in turn suggest that each developmental phase emphasises a specific kind of modernisation, which produces a time-specific conception of modernity. With the status of being China’s first and biggest SEZ, Shenzhen epitomises the spirit of economic reforms, with the promise of change (ideally for the better). As Shenzhen began to develop and expand, Shennan Road played the role of directing economic opportunities into its surrounding areas. The road thus was born out of the economic necessity to facilitate the growth of the city (Edwards et al. 2009). As part of the wider infrastructural projects across the city during its first phase of development, the road played an infrastructural role in facilitating spatial transformation of territorialised developments. State-constructed history also reveals that the road plays the symbolic role of breaking with outdated mentalities that are considered as superstitions and the road thus embodies the state conceived modernity. The road is also intended to support the city image which reflects a modern China. Historical development of the road depicts how it has grown into a road of necessity and become a manicured road that puts on display Shenzhen’s economic success. As a miàn zĭ gōng chéng (image project), the road has undergone a series of makeovers on its surfaces and roadside spaces, which have
42 become increasingly dominated by high-rise offices and residential clusters. The road thus plays a role in fascinating and enchanting visitors. However, in the process of finding out the history of Shennan Road, I find stories that are used by the state to make the road more publicly relevant and appealing beyond the visual representation of the road. Here, I bring stories to the foreground and discuss in details the sources of the information that makes up the historical content in the chapter. I begin by making the distinction between official and unofficial stories. Official stories are available in museums and published in official documents by state authorities. Unofficial stories come from personal stories that are used to be parts of the stories of the road. However, the distinction leads me to address the questions of why these stories are available and what purposes they serve for the road and the city at large. I argue that the publicly accessible sources for obtaining stories about the road are instrumental to building up a particular (favourable) image of the road as a state practice and representation space. Seeing that power lies in governmental authorities that determine the publication of history, the dissemination of official stories about the road works toward a state-orchestrated imagination and glorification of the road and the city. In a way, the road is made spectacular from the beginning of its time. However, the distinction between what counts as official and unofficial stories no longer holds, as history is often conflated with state-utilised stories that make the road more publicly relevant and emotionally appealing to an extent. Besides a biography of the road, I also trace a parallel biography of the Chinese public(s). Although a macro perspective sees the road as a state apparatus to support the wider project of transition from command economy to market economy, I also explore ways in which the public(s) change as a result of such structural transformation. I look at how the public is defined by the state as a singular collective, which is depicted in the stories as a collective of supporters who embrace the state governance. Yet in other domains, the public becomes a mass of multiple and fragmented publics. Specifically, I explore the Internet as a space where the state meets its publics on issues regarding the road, which is a site where state practices become observable to people. It is a domain that reconfigures the road from a state-space to a subject that generates
43 more conversations that do not exist in official physical domains such as museums and government publications.
The road imagined through the state-orchestrated history
Finding history As an ethnographer, my experience in the field allows me to produce my own stories that bear traces of my own socio-cultural dispositions. Similarly, stories I find during fieldwork also present themselves as cultural products that are born out of the socio- political circumstances. Although ethnography is about studying “life outside a controlled environment” (Murchison 2010: 4), I suggest that it is also about the study of life that is being controlled by other actors such as the state within that particular environment. The partial transition from central command economy to controlled market economy does not reduce the state to the role of merely a facilitator. Lest we forget that the state remains a loose system with agents and governmental bodies that continue to exercise power over other actors (Pieke 2004). Before the fieldwork commenced, I obtained historical information about the road and the city mainly from secondary sources such as books and news reports that had been available on the Internet. However, when my fieldwork began, besides spending a considerable amount of time exploring the road on foot, a brief chance encounter with a retired journalist provided a direction – the history of the city and the road. The retired journalist said to me that knowledge about the history of the city was the proof of a real citizen. He also emphasised that any research about the city should begin with its history. Therefore, I began to explore the history on display in the Shenzhen Museum. Initially, I thought that the museum would be the ideal place where the city’s visitors could learn about it from its ancient past through to the contemporary history of glories and successes as China’s oldest and biggest SEZ. To some extent, I did learn a great deal about the city. There is a permanent exhibition hall dedicated to the display of the developmental history of the Shenzhen SEZ. However, having walked through the exhibition hall, which was divided into themes, I found there was little information about Shennan Road itself. This contradicted my assumption about the political and
44 economic importance of Shennan Road. Where Shennan Road appears in the exhibition hall is in the section about the infrastructural developments in Shenzhen. This section displays not only roads (despite a brief mention of Shennan Road) but also seaports along with other infrastructural projects that were required for building a new modern city in a reformed China. This is the message conveyed by the exhibited stories. Amongst all the infrastructural projects that were going on during the early phases of construction, Shennan Road was one of them, but it was not the only one claiming all the glory. Yet questions remain. What makes the road important? Why then is it included in the list of the Top Eight Sceneries of Shenzhen (Shenzhen Archive 2004)? Why has it attracted a high concentration of grand architectural projects with international reputations? Eventually I came across a book that was written specifically about Shennan Road. The book is named Dà Dào 30 (Li 2009). Dà dào literally means ‘big road’ in Chinese. The book was written as a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the SEZ. Below is the history of the road in chronological order that I have extracted from the book.
The Shenzhen SEZ was established on 26 August 1980. Originally, it comprised four administrative districts: Yantian, Luohu, Futian, and Nanshan. Apart from Yantian District, which saw the use of foreign capital for building the Yantian Port, the other three districts became the centres where industrial estates were built to kick-start the export-processing industry. The construction of Shennan Road began with the purpose of connecting Luohu, Futian, and Nanshan districts, which made up the centre of the Shenzhen SEZ. Between construction and completion, it took over ten years for the road to become what we see today. The first section of Shennan Road was 2.1-km long and 7-m wide and was completed in 1980. At the time, it was not the first road but the longest road in Shenzhen. The first expansion began in 1982 and was completed in 1985, with the width expanded to between 50 and 60 m. Then in 1987, Shennan Road was extended westward again to a length of 6.8 km and the beautification process also began. In May 1991, the road was further extended westward with the addition of another 18.8 km, reaching the western border of the original SEZ. By 1992, the road had grown from the original 2.1 km to almost 30 km long.
45 The whole of Shennan Road comprises three sections starting from the eastern end: Shennan Dōnglù (Shennan Road East), Shennan Zhōnglù (Shennan Road Middle), and Shennan Dàdào (Shennan Avenue/ Boulevard). Starting in 1996, works again began with more beautification: the addition of exotic flowers and trees in vibrant colours. Finally in 1997, when Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese government by the British, the western section of Shennan Road (later named Shennan Dàdào) was further widened to accommodate eight lanes in total. That was the last major structural work on Shennan Road. Along with the road, surrounding neighbourhoods prospered and became the most sought-after commercial, financial, leisure, educational, and residential centres. On average, Shennan Road has been expanded sideways to between 140 m and 150 m, with 30-m wide green strips on both sides and 16-m wide flowerbeds in the middle. The widest part of Shennan Road is now 350-m wide4 and the whole strip of road intersects with 48 roads running along the north–south axis. In the subsequent years running up to 2007, Shennan Road, especially the avenue section, has undergone more beautification, mainly with the addition of more manicured green spaces on the road and designed lighting on surrounding skyscrapers.
The city image: stories of the revolutionaries and progressives When the history of the road appears in state-sponsored publications and permanent exhibitions, different stories are added to the process of road development. These are not just any random stories about the road. They are stories that depict a revolutionary journey of the road, representing the spirits of reforms. They tend to stir up emotions such as pride in Shenzhen’s economic achievements. Despite my academic training in conducting research critically, I was not completely immune to the emotional impacts of the exhibition. After walking through the spatially condensed history of its development, I left the exhibition hall with a sense of respect for what the city has achieved.
4 I later found out from local planners and urban researchers who knew about the widening project that parts of Shennan Road were widened also because there was a plan to build light rail above ground along the widest parts of the road in support of the underground railway system. But the overground railway was not built in the end.
46 Similarly, when I read additional stories about the road, they prompted me to reassess the question about the importance of the road. There is usually a road or a street that bears a significant symbolic value for the city in which it is situated. Shennan Road is important for the city beyond its role in connecting territorialised developments. The history of physical growth indicates that the road is infrastructural to spatial and economic growth of the SEZ. Stories about the road thus make it emotionally appealing and publicly relevant. Starting from the first phase of construction, there is a story that represents the road as a revolutionary road that breaks with the past and strives toward a modern future. I first came across the story when I read Dà Dào 30 (Li 2009). The story goes as follows. When constructions began in a village in Luohu – the most eastern district where the road began – local villagers opposed strongly against it. They saw it as a violation of the fēng shŭi (geomantic systems) of the village, because the equilibrium of energies would be disturbed as a result of the proposed road cutting through the heart of the village. According to the book, the villagers finally gave way after a series of negotiations and the road became a metaphor for overcoming ideological hurdles that were in the way of progress. In the 1980s, Shenzhen exceeded expectations – its growth went far beyond what other major cities in China had achieved (Zacharias & Tang 2010). Knowing what the city has achieved economically and knowing about the revolutionary spirit that propels economic development enables the story to sit comfortably in the official history of the road. The revolutionary story of overcoming local superstitions complements with the revolutionary image of the city. The author of Da Dao 30 is a well-regarded businessman in Shenzhen. The book is published by a local State-sponsored publishing house called Shenzhen Press Group. The book is not simply a glorification of Shennan Road, but also, more importantly, through its focus on Shennan Road, celebrates the success of the economic reforms in transforming a small place of 30,000 people into a mega-city housing over 10 million within the space of three decades. The road makes this success visible in a literal and metaphorical sense. More stories about the determination and progress associated with the road can be found in the book. Another story concerns the construction team that made the road possible. The team that carried out the initial stage of construction comprised 600
47 labourers who came from a neighbouring region called Lufeng. The story depicts a scene where there were no modern machineries available for the construction work, which was left in the hands of these labourers. There were no lorries for transporting materials and the workers had to make do with makeshift funnels made of metal sheets to spread the asphalt mixture on the gravel-stone path. I later came across the same story in a documentary that was also produced to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the SEZ (iFeng.com 2015a). A former construction worker appears in the documentary, where he recalls the working conditions he and his colleagues had to endure. What I find interesting about these stories and the sources of stories is the conflation of individual stories with the official history, especially when these stories are used in documentaries, which are intended to validate the glories of the city. It is not a question of whether these stories reproduce the reality. Rather, they raise questions about the authority of these sources and their roles in humanising state-formulated history and the road. Li’s representation of Shennan Road is, to a considerable extent, also a representation that meets the expectations of the state. Claiming that Dà Dào 30 is written from a personal perspective does not suffice. It would be more appropriate to consider the book as a state representation that relies on the credibility of the author to make it more publicly relevant. Therefore, it is not accidental. Besides writing the book, Li was also invited to a public seminar hosted by the Shenzhen Centre for Design, which was founded by the Urban Planning Land and Resource Commission of the Shenzhen Municipality (Shenzhen Design Centre 2013). By the same token, individual stories used in a state documentary also make the representation of the road from a state perspective appear more personal. In this case, stories serve the purpose of supporting the state’s effort in depicting the road as a sustained reflection of the glorious image of Shenzhen. They thus make a powerful tool for evoking imaginations about the road in the audience. The dramatisation of the history of the road with individual stories adds an enchanting side to the road. These stories can also be found in the archival documents published by the Shenzhen Archive, another state-sponsored organisation which was established in 1979 when Shenzhen was granted the administrative status of a city. Stories that were written into the developmental history of the city and the road can be found at the Shenzhen Archive. Published documents are mostly available on the Shenzhen Archive
48 website. Yet, apart from these publicly accessible publications, individuals without official (state) sponsorship or professional affiliations are denied access to more archival documents as primary sources. After several attempts, I was either denied access or redirected to the Shenzhen Museum without further assistance. Amongst the publications by the Shenzhen Archives, most of the stories used in the documents are incorporated into essays written by staff members of the organisation or anonymous citizens whose names are not revealed in publications. These ‘processed’ stories in publications further support the point I have made about the political value of individual stories that are weaved into official history. In 2008, an article was published in the Shenzhen Archive Journal depicting the origins of the name Shennan Road. The author who wrote the article was a member of staff at the Shenzhen Archive. The author describes how he came across a historical document written in 1979 entitled “A Few Suggestions for Shenzhen’s Urban Planning” (Hong 2008). He reveals that this document was written by three technical experts from Shunde, another neighbouring city in western Guangdong. Amongst the suggestions for urban planning, one specifically addressed the name of Shennan Road. They suggested, according to the article, that the road should be named Shēnnán Dà Mă Lù (Shennan Big Road). This suggestion was based on the need to accommodate the massive increase of migrant population in Shenzhen. It was a pre-emptive suggestion. The author then gives his positive evaluation of this suggestion and praises the progressiveness of these unknown individuals, whose names are not revealed in the article. Another article was published in 2010, which marked the thirtieth anniversary of the SEZ (Lü 2010). This article was written by a Shenzhen citizen named Lü Xiang and it is a personal account of changes on Shennan Road. In the account, he recalled the people he had met on Shennan Road and the street scenes that no longer exist today. He described a scene that comprised a small Cantonese eatery and a photograph and printing kiosk that used to sit amongst the seven- to eight-store-high buildings along Shennan Road. Thirty years later, he revisited the road and found that these scenes were no longer there; only memories remained. As people read these stories, they add to Shennan Road an air of enchantment through imagined nostalgia. They are imaginable also because street scenes such as the one described above were very common during the early 1980s and therefore relatable. These stories play the important role of letting people experience the history of the road
49 in their imagination. However, they are orchestrated into a state vision of the road. Stories such as the ones I have presented thus far are part of what the state intends the road to be perceived. In short, these stories are intended to enchant people with a collective imagination of the past and vision for the future. The history of the road presented to people reveals the past, which stands for hardship, which in turn makes the present success more manifest and comparable. In their article addressing the enthusiasm for roads in the Peruvian context, Harvey and Knox explore how people subscribe to “a generalised sense of social good” represented by the road that in fact holds a range of differential hopes and expectations (2012: 522). Through the exploration of three promises of emancipatory modernity – speed and connectivity, political freedom, and economic prosperity – Harvey and Knox observe in the construction process that counter-forces often contradict and defer these promises. They conclude that “the constant deferral of [infrastructural forms to contain unruly forces] … strengthens the desire for them and constantly renews the sense that sometime soon they will appear and life will change for the better” (Harvey & Knox, 2012: 534). The Peruvian example demonstrates that hopes and expectations held by different actors often compete with each other and thus jeopardise the overall progress in materialising and delivering the promises. The capacity to enchant, in the case of roads in Peru, feeds upon the failure to bring what was promised to the local communities, who long for the arrival of the roads. In other words, people are enchanted by what they do not get, and the cycle repeats. In the case of Shennan Road, it is a different manifestation of enchantment. I argue that enchantments emerge out of the contrast between a beautified road that is nominated as the face of Shenzhen and a road with a humble beginning overcoming all odds as depicted in history. It is this contrast between the imagined histories of rocky journey and seeing the city completely transformed that adds to the road’s capacity to enchant. In the case of Soviet architecture and infrastructure, Humphrey observes that “ideology is found not only in texts and speeches; it is a political practice that is also manifest in constructing material objects” (2005: 39). In the case of Shennan Road in the contemporary Chinese context, it works the other way around. Socialist ideology is expressed in state-utilised stories that are incorporated into the official story of the
50 road. The stories make manifest the remnants of revolution (Feuchtwang 2002). Therefore, these stories add the road’s capacity to enchant with socialist ideology. So far, the publicly available stories predominantly represent Shennan Road as embodying the promise of change that would lead to a better and more prosperous future. I have argued that these stories are intended by the state to present the road not only as infrastructural to materialising spatial transformations but also as a site of imagination that adds to Shennan Road’s capacity to enchant. I have argued that state- utilised stories added to the history of the road make it more appealing to the spectator and thus evoke imaginations of its history in which ordinary people took part. State- utilised stories thus become a useful tool to promote the revolutionary and progressive image of Shenzhen. I also argue that these stories of ordinary people’s participation in building a revolutionary road also contribute to constructing a unitary image of the collective Chinese public supporting the reforms directed by the State.
A collective public vs. multiple publics Dalakoglous argues that the narration and circulation of stories he recorded on the Albanian-Greek cross-border motorway demonstrate people’s dynamic life in post- socialist South Albania (2010). However, the narration and circulation of state-utilised stories of Shennan Road offer a different example of the socialist ideology. In this section, I present stories about the road from perspectives other than the state’s. Unlike the stories that Dalakoglou analyses in the Albanian context, the stories I analyse in this section involve the emergence of the Chinese public(s). In exploring other perspectives of representing the road, I focus on public engagement in issues regarding the maintenance of Shennan Road in its post- completion days. State-utilised stories do not suffice in telling us much more about the publics beyond what the state intends to reveal. It is therefore necessary to look for the emergence of publics on the Internet and the much more ephemeral ‘public sphere’ that emerges out of everyday conversations taking place outside. In this section, I make references to public discussions found on online social media. I also use them as elicitation materials in conversations with people during and after the fieldwork period. News reports about more roads and highways being added to the whole road network in Shenzhen and thus forging its multidirectional connections with
51 neighbouring cities have become a daily phenomenon. However, what does it mean for Shennan Road to be in its post-completion stage? In its post-completion days, Shennan Road has seen its surrounding environment becoming increasingly saturated with more (re-)developments that continue to extract economic opportunities and values from any available gaps. It has brought relative prosperity to these neighbourhoods, from the low-income to the affluent. Maintenance including horticultural works is incorporated into the everyday life of the road. Works have been continuously carried out in the beautification and spectacularisation with the installation of neon lighting on surrounding skyscrapers and more manicured green spaces. Beautification projects with the support of high-ranking government officials making public appearances continue to attract media attention. What has the public got to do with the road? Star remarks that when infrastructure breaks down, it becomes visible or noticeable (1999). I have highlighted that the state-utilised stories about the road bring it into the foreground. Yet public discontents also bring the road into the foreground, where people talk about it and, in some cases, voice their criticisms of state practices in urban managements. In 2007, a blog post made the news with its criticisms regarding to the unnecessary expenditure on maintaining Shennan Road. The English translation of the blog title is “Shenzhen, How Much More Can You Squander?” (Anonymous, 2007). The blog post complains about the excessive expenditure of taxpayers’ money on public projects. It criticises the unnecessary spending on updating and constructing yet more ‘hard’ infrastructures at the expense of ‘soft’ infrastructures as such healthcare and education. In response, the official explanations for maintenance expenditure, as reported by the press, revolve around the need to invest in the upkeep of city image, which has to match the image of a global city. While some members of the public express their disapproval of excessive spending, the government is also under pressure to minimise expenditure on the road (Sina News 2007). The division between what is deemed unnecessary and necessary expenditure is evident. For instance, over the years, many parts of the roadside curbs have been damaged due to long-term exposure to the weather and human activities. As a result, the maintenance authorities reassessed the situation and resolved to using granite, instead of concrete. Granite was favoured over concrete because of its durability, and visual aesthetics, without considerations for the potential safety hazard it would bring
52 on rainy days, when the surface would become very slippery. Besides the fact that granite costs more than concrete, road engineers also stated that the use of granite as an alternative to concrete was not necessary. Despite the educated opinions of road engineers who possessed sufficient knowledge of materials science and expertise in solving technical problems, the government remained firm in its decision. In this case, public opinion was critical of the excessive use of taxpayers’ money on upgrading the road, and was supported by the opinions of engineers. Nevertheless, the government stood firmly by its decision and emphasised the importance and therefore the potential benefits of spending what was necessary on material upgrades for a city that was striving to become a global city. However, this kind of conversation is carried out mainly in the domain of the Internet. When I raised the subject during conversations with different people, opinions about the blog post and the topic in general were less enthusiastic. Compared to the image of the publics painted by the stories about the construction of the road, the public I encountered appeared to be less uniformed. I brought up the issue of overspending when I was having dinner with a friend who worked as an urban planner in Singapore. She expressed her disapproval of spending unnecessary amounts of money “on the wrong things”. However, she did acknowledge the need for the city to keep up appearances by maintaining its exterior. For the image of the city, which after all represents the state, miàn zĭ (the face) is still very important. With the example of the blog post and the discussions it triggered in the domain of online media, I have pointed out that critical voices against the practices of urban management are active in this particular domain. However, using materials found on the Internet to elicit information from members of the publics in face-to-face interactions also suggests a considerable discrepancy and inconsistency between the publics on the Internet and the publics in person. Habermas observes the gradual shrinking of self-sufficient estate economy with the growing influence of long-distance trading that has transformed the local market. Along with societal transformations, the public also emerged initially as the public authority of the state, and the public of the private sphere in the form of civil society emerged “as a corollary of a depersonalized state authority” (1989: 19). The “private sphere was born as a distinguishable entity in contrast to the public” and it was the bourgeois people who “occupied a central position within ‘the public’” (1989: 19-23).
53 The Habermasian definition of the public is an informed concept that is culturally and historically specific to the European context (of major powers such as Prussia, France, and Great Britain). In the Chinese context, the idea of the public (gōng) has also undergone a series of historical changes in its meanings: conceptual stretching and contraction in the shifting between the public that is related to the state as a tool of legitimation and the public that emerges out of the practice of political participation by members of society, especially after the fall of the last imperial government under the Qing (Rowe 1990). Amongst the recent discussions about the public sphere and civil society in China, most attention is directed to the place of Chinese intellectuals in their ambiguous relationship with the state on the one hand and the rise of labour movements as a result of the increasing exploitation in factories on the other (see Goldman 2002; Chan 2012; Chan & Hui 2014). Although the absence of a democratic state in China does not prevent the emergence of the publics, it is an important point in considering the fragmented Chinese publics. In the discussions about the emergence of the public, Habermas also highlights the birth of the press (1989). The press is a tool for both publicity and for expressing public opinions. For the public, the press becomes the domain where private matters can become a matter of public interest. The stories I have mentioned in this chapter have appeared in the press (books, newspapers, and documentaries) and are also used as a propaganda tool by the municipal government. Nowadays, the press not only manifests in material form but also exists in digital form. Following Habermas’s remarks on the effects of societal transformations, I also make a case for the impacts of the increase of information transactions on the Internet, upon the forms in which the publics emerge. While the government can use the Internet as a space for state publicity, it is also an effective domain through which the public can seek empowerment and a degree of protection (Esarey & Xiao 2011). Despite that, the Chinese government has devised tight control on the accessibility of information. It therefore affects the ways in which the state interacts with the publics in the domain of the Internet. Below, I present a case study of some sinkholes that have caused widespread concerns in Shenzhen to substantiate my point. Since 2001, there have been fifty sinkholes across the city. In 2013, there were widespread concerns about continuous occurrence of sinkholes. Nine of them claimed
54 lives within a year. Amongst these sinkholes, one was found on a section of Shennan Road in Luohu. Although this particular sinkhole was not large in comparison to others and no lives were lost, it was notable enough to trigger public discussions revolving around public safety and the “uselessness of maintenance” (Nandu News, 2013; Takungpao News, 2013). After another sinkhole claimed the lives of five people, the local press opened an online public forum where all the sinkholes were listed and located on a digital map (Shenzhen News, 2013). There is a questionnaire for members of the public on the online platform. Despite several attempts to contact the journalists whose names appear on the website, there was no response to my enquiry about the results. Without further disclosure of the results, it is hard to see the extent of public engagement in the discussions. Nonetheless a short and seemingly informed conclusion has been published on the website, with a brief emphasis upon the importance of the government “doing extra homework (bŭ kè)” as a way to learn from previous mistakes. The Internet becomes the arena where the publics find a strategic existence to offset the tightening control over public opinion and therefore to “undermine the support basis of the seemingly stable authoritarian regime” (Tang & Huhe, 2014). The cases of both the blog post and the sinkholes suggest a vertical interaction in which people express their discontent (within limits) and the state reacts, at least by appearing to take action in an attempt to construct an image of a harmonious society (hé xíe shè huì). But there remains the question about the capacity of the Internet and the potential of the ‘digital revolution’ in China. While Tong et al. argue that the development of online social media provides a space of counter-hegemony that challenges the authority of the state (2013), Su questions the extent to which the Internet can empower people and the discrepancy between the virtual public sphere and the world outside social media (2015). Through a series of case studies, Su argues that the Internet, especially the domain of social media such as microblogging sites, remains the space where the State and some of the fragmented publics negotiate their influence in dominating public discourses. However, my point about the publics being more elusive and fragmented is further supported by Rauchfleisch and Schäfer (2015), who argue that there are multiple public spheres on the Internet rather than one unified virtual public sphere.
55 The appearance of the road and the disappearance of surface materials through the occurrence of sinkholes strongly reflect the state’s appearance of ‘doing something’ and the disappearance of public trust in the state’s ability to deliver public services to the standard expected by the general publics. The relationship between the state and the people has been unstable historically, especially since the Tiananmen protests in 1989 amidst a series of events of political unrest in the Eastern bloc outside China. Internally, the Central Government engages in a constant battle between political fractions, while externally the state has to constantly manage undesirable voices for the sake of political legitimacy (Fewsmith, 2008). In widening the scope of consideration, the politics of the construction and maintenance of Shennan Road reflects the dilemma faced by the state in creating the image of economic growth and prosperity with projects such as public infrastructures on the one hand and the failure to meet the expectations of greater freedom of expression on the other.
Conclusion The city continues to see its surroundings become crowded by more real estate developments and more flyovers above ground along with more underground railway lines added beneath the surface. As simply a road, Shennan Road has served its primary function as an infrastructure facilitating the movements of goods and people. Yet, being Shenzhen’s city centre thoroughfare, it also plays the additional role of being the public image of the city, which is sustained by the state-formulated history but at times challenged by the publics, especially in the domain of the Internet. As far as the government is concerned, maintaining the road means keeping up the appearance of a city that strives to be not just another Chinese mega-city but a global city. In this chapter, I have explored the representation of Shennan Road from the perspective of the state and argued that the conflation of state-utilised stories and the official history of the road contributes to the dramatisation of history. Dramatisation not only humanises the road and makes it more publicly relevant but also invigorates it with enchantments of the city and reforms at large. Through the exploration of the road in its post-completion stage, its special status of being the city’s spectacular thoroughfare also reveals the road as a constant subject of state practices to which the publics respond in different ways.
56 In the second part of the chapter, I have explored the public as portrayed in history from the perspective of the state and how this state-perceived singular collective becomes multiple and fragmented on the Internet which is itself a contested domain. Although the absence of a democratic state does not prevent the emergence of the publics, their emergence takes place in a domain over which neither the state nor the publics have full control. The road is never idle. It continues to be used by commuters and it continues to see changes in its surrounding environment. More importantly, it continues to play the role of being the public image of the city. However, as the city develops, the society is also transforming. Habermas’s observations of the publics in the cultural context of Europe provide a useful lens through which we learn the social and political impact of societal transformations. Likewise, as the society transforms in Shenzhen, public opinions about state practices such as maintenance of the road have become critical and active in a domain produced by the process of modernisation.
Figure 5 Shennan Road at night
57 Chapter 2: A road according to plans
“Master planning is about the value of space. Urban design is about the look of space. In Shenzhen, there is very little space for architecture.” Jie, a British-trained Chinese architect
Introduction This chapter focuses on explorations of the contents and characters of the environments surrounding Shennan Road. I look at how planning and developmental models influence the relationship between Shennan Road and its surroundings. I discuss in detail how spaces are represented by plans and how the state intends the road to connect these spaces. The chapter explores what kinds of connections the road forges. I specifically focus on what can be seen from the road in order to find out what is disconnected from it. The exploration brings forward the issue of the unevenness and inequalities in urban developments that reflect the wider developmental challenges facing Shenzhen. Nonetheless, I underline an issue with the exploratory study of the surrounding neighbourhoods: to what extent do the surrounding environments of Shennan Road reveal the futures that the government was and has been planning for Shenzhen? Since the early 1980s, the municipal government has been using five-year plans to set up a series of developmental strategies and agendas for the city, within a national framework set up by Zhōng Yāng. Five-year plans have been used in China since the establishment of the People’s Republic and they continue to be used as a way to set up national developmental agenda for economic policies across all administrative levels. Each of these five-year plans projects a future image for Shenzhen and each is slightly different from the previous. Unsurprisingly, as the city becomes more economically successful, the government’s ambitions for the city grow. The latest ambition is to elevate Shenzhen’s international status to that of a global city, rivalling its closest neighbourhood, Hong Kong (Urban Planning, Land and Resources Commission of Shenzhen Municipality [UPLRCSM hereafter] 2009). I also consider the road as a living museum corridor and observe that the road and its surroundings reveal material footprints of Shenzhen’s developmental trajectories over the last three decades. But they also evoke a sense of uncertainties as to the challenges in planning strategies and implementations that confront the city and
58 the kind of future (or futures) lying ahead for people of different social and economic backgrounds. The structure of the chapter is as follows. Firstly I introduce the neighbourhoods along the road in a linear manner from the eastern end, Luohu District, through Futian District to Nanshan District, its western end. I explore the extent to which each of these districts is influenced (or not) by urban planning. The purpose of this is to demonstrate that the road’s characters are in turn influenced by how its surrounding neighbourhoods have been developed. My observations suggest that the developmental reasoning is also time specific. One can work out the period in which a neighbourhood was born by firstly looking at the spatial arrangement of its urban fabrics. Secondly, I move on to discussions about the areas disconnected from the road. In doing so, I point out that disconnection gradually becomes disappearance. By disappearance I mean the gradual disappearance of exiting neighbourhoods that are deemed outdated or undesirable by the planning authorities but profitable for redevelopment. Along with these neighbourhoods, some if not most of the exiting tenants (those who do not own properties) also have to relocate, often further away from the city centre with little or no compensation. Finally, I close the chapter by offering some reflections upon the exploration and end with a brief account of a local non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Shenzhen and its efforts in raising awareness of the vital social functions of urban villages in the city. It is local grassroot efforts such as this that make these neighbourhoods that are hidden from public attention, visible again.
Neighbourhood profiles During the first phase of development of the Shenzhen SEZ, there was not yet comprehensive planning to organise where developments should be or how they should proceed. As a result, developments were mostly unplanned. In order to bring together these developments under a unitary management, the municipal government began to introduce what is known as the “clustered linear” model (Zacharias & Tang, 2010). This model was implemented by the Comprehensive Plan for Shenzhen 1986–2000 (the 1986 Plan, hereafter), which the municipal government began to formulate in 1984 (UPLRCSM, 2010b). This particular model
59 emphasised the infrastructural role of Shennan Road as a traffic corridor connecting all clustered developments. Besides Shennan Road, two other expressways were subsequently built, one lying to the north of Shennan Road and the other to the south, in order to ease the traffic congestion on Shennan Road. Together, these three arterial roads form a stack of traffic corridors connecting the western and eastern sides of the SEZ. Given the geographical shape of the original SEZ of 327.5 km2 in 1980 (49 km along the east–west axis by merely 7 km along the north–south one), the conception of the 1986 Plan was also a practical response to the geographical conditions of Shenzhen. This first comprehensive plan for the SEZ also had a lasting impact on the subsequent comprehensive plans. As a traffic corridor, Shennan Road thus laid the foundation for the city’s car culture, which remains prominent today. In comparison to Dalakoglou’s Albanian road in transition from socialism to post-socialism (2012), Shennan Road embodies the market economy and the car culture that comes with it. In this section I present the three administrative districts from the eastern through to the western side: Luohu, Futian, and Nanshan. In a linear manner, I explore along Shennan Road, which comprises three sections: Shennan Road East, Shennan Road Middle, and Shennan Avenue. This linear exploration displays the concentration and intensification of developments along the road. But the apparently linear connection by no means suggests that Shennan Road, as a traffic corridor, has brought equal developments to all surrounding neighbourhoods. This section makes manifest that the municipal and local governments remain in the central position in orchestrating the experiments in spatial and economic planning in Shenzhen through to the present day. I learnt that economic reforms that began over three decades ago were not intended by the Central Government to signal a weakening of its power. Reforms have made the state a partial market facilitator and participants in the form of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) for example. The state is participating in the system of a market economy along with other actors such as private enterprises, foreign investors, and the floating population to mention but a few. However, instead of letting the market be the invisible hand, the state becomes the one that offers the invisible hand as the director and facilitator of a market economy that is monitored and partially controlled by the state.
60
Figure 6 Spatial layout of a part of Luohu (Official maps from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/xxgk/csgh/fdtz/)
Figure 7 Spatial layout of a part of Futian (Official maps from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/xxgk/csgh/fdtz/)
Figure 8 Spatial layout of a part of Nanshan (Official maps from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/xxgk/csgh/fdtz/)
61 Luohu District: where the journey begins Before urban developments and economic growth began, the lack of infrastructural facilities prompted a wide range of physical constructions upon which the economy was built (Ng & Tang, 2004; Bruton et al., 2005; Zacharias and Tang 2010). Luohu District is where the journey on Shennan Road begins. It was the first district of the SEZ to undergo urban developments. Luohu was prioritised above all else due to the severity of recurrent flooding at times of heavy rainfall. Consequently, getting Luohu out of the ‘deep water’ became the first move of the developments. Rebuilding the sewage system and constructing a proper road (starting with Shennan Road East) were amongst the most immediate projects to begin. Another reason for prioritising Luohu has to do with its proximity to Hong Kong. At the time, Luohu Railway Station was the only train station connecting Shenzhen with the rest of China on the one hand and Hong Kong on the other. It is the first point of entry – the southern gate of China, through which foreigners enter the mainland coming from Hong Kong (Ng & Tang, 2004). Apart from resolving the issues of flooding (which still continues to be a problem today in some parts of Luohu), the topography of Luohu was originally dominated by hills, which posed another challenge to spatial developments. As the district was at the frontline of the economic development and urbanisation in the SEZ, Luohu also became known as the birthplace of ‘Shenzhen speed’. According to the district-level government website, Luohu has been praised as the birthplace of record-breaking developments in Shenzhen’s (and possibly China’s) developmental history (Luohu District Government, 2015). For example, the construction of Guo Mao (Shenzhen’s International Trade Centre) made the new record of building “one storey every three days”, which gave rise to ‘Shenzhen speed’, a phrase that made Shenzhen famous in China. From then on, it became a widely used benchmark for the rest of China and a slogan incorporated into the branding strategies for the city. The speed of growth was not only manifest in the physical constructions. The early phase of development was dominated by constructions, and there was no carefully thought out master plan until the formulation of the 1986 Plan to systematically orchestrate the clustered developments. The most important agenda at the time was
62 growth. That is why the spatial patterns of Luohu looks considerably less regular in comparison to Futian and Nanshan Districts (Figures 6, 7 & 8). Another matter that also went beyond what the municipal government anticipated was the dramatic increase in the population. The massive influx of domestic migrants into the SEZ and its surrounding areas also accelerated the speed of economic growth by adding to the much-needed workforce in the manufacturing construction industries. Besides the speed of construction, the 150-m high multifunctional high rise also became the material manifestation of economic reforms and innovations. With an American-inspired revolving restaurant and sightseeing platform built on the top floor (which Deng also visited during his southern tour of China in 1992), Guo Mao became the ultimate example of a great leap forward in the reform era and therefore one step closer to the Western standard of modernisation. With the first office of Shenzhen’s Stock Exchange set up in Guo Mao, the building became an embodiment of success from inside to outside. The construction materials – aluminium alloy curtain wall, and the installation of state-of-the-art computer-controlled operating systems in the building also flaunted the economic ambitions of Shenzhen (Shenzhen Design Centre, 2014: 71). However, the temporal dimension of materials should not be overlooked, as what were perceived to be innovative at the time have now become overshadowed by new technological innovations. With the underground railway connected to Guo Mao, people arrive at the interior of the building as they exit the underground station. The shopping centre at the bottom of the building is still thriving with consumers, but a passer-by outside would hardly look up and admire the glory that the building once emanated. Consequently, there is a question regarding the extent to which materials withstand the passage of time in their capacity to enchant. Innovations in technology and architectural design have become increasingly normalised, rendering the previous glories of so-called rare materials “not so special any more” (Buck-Morss, 1992). With reference to Georg Franck’s Economy of Attention, Schmid et al. offer a perspective that considers the city as “a battle field for attention” (Schmid, Sahr, & Urry, 2011: 2). This is not only a characteristic of the so-called postmodern city. For a city at the beginning of its modernisation process, signs and symbols are as important as the contents. In order to keep up with the appearance of growth, new investments continue to fund new infrastructural and architectural
63 projects. The capacity to enchant does not withstand the passage of time and it is therefore imperative for the local government to carry on attracting more investments, which in turn add to the enchantment of the city. The road plays an important part in supporting this façade. This becomes more evident as the exploration proceeds westward into the financial, political, and cultural centres in Futian and Nanshan. In the following, I provide two vignettes of my explorations on Shennan Road East. In particular, I focus on what is present and absent from the road as a way to draw a comparison between my expectations and observations during the process.
Vignette A I was on Xinxiu Road, which was connected with the most eastern end of Shennan Road East. In front of me, across the road, stood a row of seven-storey- high apartment buildings in 1980s architectural style. Between the road and the buildings stood a stretch of metal-fenced walls over 2 m high and topped by metal spikes. I headed westward towards the beginning of Shennan Road East. As I was crossing a bridge over Shawan River, the wind grew stronger and I saw a man and a boy slowly walking up the riverbank in the rain. When I reached the other end of the bridge, the man and the boy also reached the top of the bank on the street level. […] The pedestrian paths on both sides of the road were roughly paved with square concrete tiles. It was late morning, and shopkeepers were sitting beside their shop doorways looking out onto Xinxiu Road and talking with neighbours or on phones. A small eatery selling street food of the north-western regions looked quiet and undisturbed as a waitress sat with her legs crossed next to the food counter. The food smelled sweet but oily. Pedestrians began to rush as the rain became heavier and the wind stronger. Looking up at the roadside trees, I thought that at least the tall leafy trees were reducing the rainfall. The sound of the gushing water from the river became weaker as I walked further away. “Where is Shennan Road?” Looking at the map, I knew I should be near but there was no signpost telling me that I was. (Extract from field notes, 25 October 2013)
64 Vignette B I kept walking and it looked as though I had reached the end of Xinxiu Road and the beginning to Shennan Road East. The road seemed to open up as it came to a split, with one side remaining on the ground and the other going up a flyover. Tall leafy trees were replaced by a long stretch of hedges, over a metre high, lining both sides of the road. The hedges blocked my view of Shennan Road East. With the road on my left, to my right I saw a row of new-looking traditional Chinese architecture. […] I later realised that it was the Shenzhen Antique Market, as I noticed that the shops I walked past were all selling jewellery made of jade and other precious stones and minerals. […] I continued westward but Shennan Road was pulling even further from me on the left. I came to the bottom of a footbridge. The rain still had not stopped. The wind continued to blow strongly. I was struggling to keep my umbrella still while trying to film. When I got to the top of the bridge, I saw the flyover – Shennan Road was back in sight again. On my right, I saw more apartment blocks that looked slightly different from the ones I had seen on Xinxiu Road. They were taller and more densely packed. I had come to the entrance of Huang Bei Ling village.5 As I began to walk down from the bridge, I saw small shops on the roadside again. They were just like those I had seen next to Xinxiu Road. Now that I was on the street level again, the road disappeared behind a thick layer of greenery. […] The rain had finally started to ease. I carried on walking until the view ahead began to open up again with fewer trees and Shennan Road East was back on my left hand side again. Shennan Road widened to six lanes on each side. Without the hedges, the sound of passing traffic became much louder. The roadside pedestrian paths had also opened up. […] The road was wide enough to accommodate small trees along the middle axis. I looked up. There were no more seven-storey apartment buildings. The buildings were becoming higher and larger. Their presence was
5 Huang Bei Ling village is an urban village that has long been regenerated. Without the village sign, I would not have been able to tell it was an urban village as I could not see the handshake buildings typically found in urban villages. These buildings still exist today but they are mostly fenced off from the road by newly built high-rise office and residential buildings.
65 imposing. As residential buildings began to recede from my sight, I found myself in the shadows of heavy-looking office blocks. At the same time, I also felt the skyscrapers further up the road gleaming even under the thick grey clouds in the sky. (Extract from field notes, 25 October 2013)
From the above, Vignette A illustrates a different kind of roadscape from Vignette B. In particular, the physical composition of spaces between the road and the edges of the surrounding neighbourhoods are different. The pedestrian path next to Xinxiu Road, for example, demonstrates a range of small-sized local shops serving the surrounding neighbourhoods. On the contrary, the surface of the pedestrian paths next to Shennan Road East is comparatively smoother and the width wider. The beginning of Shennan Road is underwhelming, despite the fact that the road itself is wider and the buildings on both sides of it are taller. The transformation of roadside spaces is one of increasing sensory standardisation rather than mere purification (Sennett, 1992). For example, the presence of greenery slotted into the pedestrian paths has two primary functions: one is to please the eyes and the other is to minimise traffic noise by screening it off, preventing it from penetrating through to the neighbourhoods on the other side. From a road enriched by street lives to one defined by the state regulatory mechanisms, one would assume that the road also becomes sensorially regulated. However, looking up from the ground level, the view above becomes increasingly dominated by towering high-rise buildings. The sensory direction towards the visual spectacles of the city also indicates the emphasis upon the visual experience of the city. As one travels further west into the commercial centres of Luohu, foreign and Hong Kong designed architectures also begin to mark their presence on Shennan Road East as visual statements. They are not only statements of individual practices but also a statement of the economic performance of the city, and the success of which becomes the political achievement of the state. Buildings of architectural statement are also engaged in competition with each other. I suggest that the concentration of architectural statements makes certain sections of Shennan Road different from other sections with relatively more vernacular utterances, as opposed to architectural statements. The-tallest-building-yet continues to
66 fill the city skyline and claim media attention that is often short lived. Di Wang Tower – a glass and steel 69-storey (389.95 m high) skyscraper located at the meeting point between Shennan Road East and Shennan Road Middle – was completed in 1996. The name Di Wang means “the king of all lands” in Mandarin, as the land upon which the skyscraper was built was the most expensive land traded at the time. In 2011, a 100- storey (441.8 m high) skyscraper designed by TFP Farrells, a British practice, replaced Di Wang as the next tallest skyscraper until another takes over. During the time of my fieldwork in Shenzhen, the construction of the next tallest skyscraper was already well underway. With Shennan Road reaching westward, it becomes part of the visual strategy, directing one’s attention onward and upward. The road is enchanting also because of the visual spectacles of these architectural statements above one’s head. The visualisation of economic success by these skyscrapers poses a strong visual contrast to the imagined history of the road. The might of monumental architecture can be likened to nature’s might, giving a sense of the sublime. Furthermore it has to do with the distance between the person who experiences the architectural statement within close proximity and the experience of it from a distance (Kant 1790, cited in Buck-Morss 1992: 8). That makes these high rise buildings a sight of sublimity as one looks up. This kind of urban sublimity of light- reflecting façade of skyscrapers, I suggest, conceals the increasing population density in the city. Looking up at these towering skyscrapers, it is difficult to tell who is behind the façade. One can only guess. That is what skyscrapers do – they attract attention to the form rather than the content. Coming back down, Luohu was originally dominated by rural settlements so its layout is identified more with its walkway systems. The urban fabrics of Luohu are dense but also full of evidence of control over them, superimposed by the local government. Although many of the narrow streets remain, they look tamed by the imposition of street regulations. Nonetheless, walking along Shennan Road East today discloses the material standoff between high-rise buildings lined up neatly next to the road and neighbourhoods behind the high-rise screens. Studying the map of Luohu with Shennan Road East being the central focus reveals the cutting straightness of Shennan Road, which poses a significant contrast to the narrower neighbouring streets. In comparison, the layout of Futian is very different from that of Luohu.
67
Figure 9 Skyscrapers in Futian District
68 Futian District: the domination of planning With Di Wang marking the end of Shennan Road East, the exploratory journey continues onto Shennan Road Middle, leading me into Futian District, which sits to the west of Luohu District. In comparison to Luohu, which is known as the old Shenzhen, the Futian seen from Shennan Road Middle and Shennan Avenue appears more organised. Although Luohu was the first district to be developed, Futian emerged with a higher developmental ambition and master planning. It became the financial and bureaucratic centre of the municipality. It is where both the municipal government and the Shenzhen Party Committee are located. As a result, Shennan Road Middle and the avenue section are intended to have more responsibility for showcasing the best of the city to private enterprises and investors. The better the (investable) image, the more favourably it reflects on the municipal government. As the road reaches further west, it becomes known as Shennan Avenue, which goes through the most important bureaucratic, financial and commercial centres. Earlier, I have pointed out that Shennan Road East sits between regulated orderliness and the less car-friendly layout of the streets in Luohu. Exploring Shennan Road Middle produces a different kind of experience. In Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett explores the history between body and cities in an attempt to argue against the lack of awareness of our own bodies as a result of the sensory deprivation in modern cities (1994). Sennett takes a historical journey starting from the conception of naked bodies and body heat in the Athenian context and continuing on to the Roman obsession with visual order and control under the shadow of Christianity, the belief in bodily geometry, and finally the modern scientific understanding of urban space in relation to the body. He demonstrates how bodies have been historically closely related to their environment and that they correspond with each other. Given the rise of individualism and especially freedom and comfort, the relationship between the body and the urban environment in which it is situated becomes distanced and seemingly affectless. The body becomes desensitised in the urban environment where order is installed. As a result, Sennett suggests, the relationship between the body and cities is moving further away from its historical roots as Western civilisation evolves and develops. The problem of sensory deprivation in our urban environments finds similar arguments in The Uses of Disorder (1992). In this book, Sennett’s discussion revolves around the new white, affluent, and unhappy adolescents who are being purified. The
69 concept of purification runs throughout the book and Sennett argues that disorder in the jungle of the city is, after all, better than the state of controlled order and purity. Through both works, Sennett argues that the problem of sensory deprivation becomes instrumental for sustaining the state of order and purity. To some extent, Sennett’s description of the experience of a modern city finds its visual manifestation in the map of Futian. Comparing the map of Luohu with that of Futian, it becomes clear that the layout of roads and streets in Futian is much more organised and guided by the predictable pattern of grids, or what Zacharias and Tang call “a chequerboard plan” (Figure 7), which emphasises clearer spatial demarcations between areas of different functions (2010: 223). The layout of Futian thus demonstrates a huge departure in spatial planning from that of Luohu. In theory, I am inclined to agree with Sennett on the consequent impact upon our bodies and subsequent perception of the city as represented by Shennan Road and its organised surroundings. Simmel also makes a similar argument about the impact of overstimulation by the urban environments that surround us (1950). However, it is necessary to draw a distinction between constructing a sensorially regulated environment external to the body as Sennett describes and developing “an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment” (1950: 410). In practice, the relationship between the body and the environment does not always remain constant – the body is not always desensitised. Although Sennett’s historical account which is based on the socio-geographical context of Europe provides a useful guide in considering the relationship between the body and its environment, he describes a change in time. I am interested in an anthropological account of the relationship between the body and the surroundings in a spatial sense. Firstly, urban environments change in space (as travelling either on foot or in a vehicle along Shennan Road illustrates) and time (as neighbourhoods change through time); and secondly that our bodies respond to the changing environments and are engaged in the constant changes in sensory ‘status’ – a change of environment can again re-stimulate a desensitised body, which in my opinions, should not considered as docile. The relationship between the body and surrounding environment is an important point in considering the following discussions about the relationship between the body and the city via the road. From Shennan Road Middle, the journey
70 continues on the most manicured part of Shennan Road: Shennan Avenue. This section of Shennan Road goes through areas of much lower density but with a higher concentration of skyscrapers. More importantly, the areas alongside the avenue section are the result of commissioned master planning with international association. The 1990s began to see rapid developments of Futian as the centre of Shenzhen’s financial, governmental, and cultural activities. Unlike Luohu, where rural and semi-urban settlements had already been established, Futian was a massive open space dominated mostly by farmlands. In the language of developers, Futian was a huge expanse of shóu dì (developable lands). From the planning perspective, it was much easier to implement spatial developments with a specific function assigned to each gridded space. From Shennan Road Middle to the avenue section, the road also becomes wider. Visually, the avenue section presents an image of Shenzhen that is marked by capital accumulation materialised by the skyscrapers lining both sides of the road. Li describes this section of the road satisfying the visual need to impress, with a wide road lined with green trees and towering buildings, but becomes uninviting for human use (2010). Materiality matters in this case. Concrete, for example, consolidates not only human conquest over nature but also state power over people. Harvey argues that “concrete is a substance that has a charged presence in the history of the modern built environment” (2010: 29). The concrete-paved pedestrian paths of Shennan Road can also be perceived in the same light. The hardened surface of concrete paved path also makes it uncompromising and even impenetrable. Here, I argue that the intense heat in the atmosphere that the concrete paved paths absorb and emanate turns the materiality of concrete into one of hostility to bodies, to the point of imposing “infrastructural violence” (Rodgers, 2012). Drawing on Stewart (2011), I further argue that the seasonal atmospheric conditions become the active agent in moderating the experiential quality of the pedestrian path on the roadside, which can be tolerable at times but also hostile at others. Stewart describes, “the senses sharpen on the surfaces of things taking form” (2011: 448). Beyond the visual, the intensity of heat becomes obvious through tactile perception with one’s skin. During the peak of the summer seasons, heat surrounds one’s body as one stands on the concrete-paved path. The thick green trees only help a little in easing the intensity. The now-ness of experience is about enduring the heat and “your life [now] is a stuckness of some sort” (Stewart 2011: 449).
71 The layout of Shennan Road through Futian District is also a result of planning that gives precedence to the increasing prominence of car culture and the government’s aspirations for Shenzhen to be a global city, which is made manifest in the Ninth and Tenth Five-Year Plans (Ng & Tang, 2004). Following the 1986 Plan, the municipal government began the next developmental phase with the formulation of the next comprehensive plan in 1996 (the 1996 Plan hereafter). One of the important messages of the 1996 Plan is that the SEZ will be further expanded with the inclusion of Bao’an and Longgang counties by upgrading their administrative status to district level (UPLRCSM, 2008). The 1996 Plan emphasises spatialised functions, meaning that gridded space on the map is to be assigned a specific function in supporting the development of Shenzhen as a whole. Building on the clustered model of the 1986 Plan, the 1996 Plan envisions the expansion of the network of road infrastructure and mass transit systems such as the underground railway network in connecting not only the eastern with the western side but also the northern with the southern side. This developmental characteristic is also reflected by internal spatial logic of the centre of Futian and the continued emphasis on traffic corridors. An area worth highlighting is the section of Shennan Road that goes past the municipal government, which marks the centre of the district and the city. Sitting to the north of Shennan Road is the municipal government, a cultural quarter (where the central library, city music hall and a mega book store are located and popular), and Lianhua Hill Park at the northern end of the central axis, where the statue of Deng Xiaoping stands facing southward, looking over the government headquarters. To the south of Shennan Road sits the Futian Central Business District (CBD), designed by the New York based practice Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). As the central north– south axis intersects with the east–west axis along which Shennan Road runs, this area bears a resemblance to the layout of the Forbidden City in Beijing. Another prominent characteristics setting Futian and Nanshan apart from Luohu is the incorporation of more green spaces. According to the 1986 Plan, a total of 140 km of green belts were planned. The immediate environment of Shennan Road in this section consists of green spaces, which continue along the road until the western end in Nanshan District. Apart from parks and public spaces, most of the green open spaces are not intended for public use. They play a decorative role in sustaining the image of the
72 road. Yet inaccessibility also turns these green spaces into effective barriers between, for example, the road and residential areas or civic institutions such as the municipal library. Earlier, I have discussed one of the reasons for the reduced level of comfort when walking on the concrete pavements. From walking exercises, I also discovered spaces where urban design failed to materialise. I decided to walk along the paths as closely to the road as possible. By sticking with this plan, I discovered that parts of the walking spaces were interrupted by the imposition of green spaces (Figure 11). This reminded me of the irony of the commitment given in the 1996 comprehensive plan to create uninterrupted urban fabrics. It also reveals where the priority lies: in the visuals rather than the practicality of designs. The exploration also informs me of the representational spaces, with each showcasing a particular facet of the city. For example, a neighbourhood called Xiangmihu is situated to the north of Shennan Road. This neighbourhood is mainly a residential area. However, it is known to be one of the most expensive areas, especially due to its proximity to two of the high-ranking primary and secondary schools of the municipality. At the same time, it is also known for housing the biggest Korean community and is therefore one of the well-known destinations for Korean restaurants. As a result, the areas surrounding the road increasingly become known for serving particular developmental and civic functions. With the journey along Shennan Road continuing into Nanshan, this design logic becomes more notable.
73
Figure 10 A section of Shennan Road (Futian)
Figure 11 An interrupted pedestrian path next to Shennan Road (Futian)
74 Nanshan District – where does the future(s) lie(s)? The avenue section through the centre of Futian mainly illustrates the image of Shenzhen with architectural statements, structured grid-spaces and manicured green spaces. This part shows that the remaining section through Nanshan District plays the role of a corridor connecting the compartmentalised areas and demonstrating a branding strategy of Shenzhen. So far, the eastern section of Shennan Road through Luohu district shows the process leading to the formulation the 1986 Plan which emphasises on building industrial estates for the manufacturing industry, and that Shenzhen’s economy should revolve around producing representational spaces accordingly. Then Shennan Road Middle and part of the avenue section in Futian district depict a different developmental logic of the 1996 Plan, which began the process of expanding the original SEZ with the inclusion of new administrative districts and the attempt to build city-wide networks with more defined spatial compartments assigned with specific functions. This section of Shennan Road also demonstrates the city’s transition from reliance on the export industry to diversification into other industries. The remaining journey along Shennan Road takes us through more distinct neighbourhoods. The road goes through three neighbourhoods. The first is called Shahe and is home to the so-called Overseas Chinese Town (OCT), where inner city themed parks, real estates, cultural quarters gather and co-exist with one of Shenzhen’s biggest urban villages, Baishizhou, which in fact comprises five natural villages. To the west of Shahe, there are two more neighbourhoods called Yuehai and Nantou. The immediate surroundings of the road in these two neighbourhoods are designated areas for research and development in science and technology on one side and the city’s own university, Shenzhen University, on the other. Then Shennan Road ends as it passes by a historic fortress called Nantou Gu Cheng (Nantou ancient city) and merges with another arterial road leading into the heart of Bao’an District in the west. The rest of Shennan Road through these neighbourhoods displays a different Shenzhen characterised by culture, education, science, and technology innovations. Building on the 1986 Plan, the 1996 Plan faces the challenge of carrying out urban and economic integration while incorporating more green spaces between clustered developments, improving residential environments, strengthening the provision of infrastructural facilities, and creating more leisure and cultural
75 destinations. The 1996 Plan thus aims to improve the overall image of Shenzhen in order to attract more people and investment. In Nanshan, the remaining section of Shennan Road shows the success of these attempts. The exemplary area showcasing Shenzhen as a desirable city for living is the so- called OCT, which was built based on a Singaporean model. Walking along Shennan Road through the OCT today, one will find the immediate surroundings dominated by greenery and roadside decorations promoting the themed parks located next to the road. Travelling along Shennan Road through the OCT gives rise to a different experience from travelling through Futian or Luohu. As the journey proceeds, the road enters the area of science and technology parks and the northern part of the university campus. Although we remain on the same road, the surrounding environment has changed again. Passing by the science and technology park on one side and the university campus on the other introduces another side of Shenzhen: education, research, and innovations. The 1996 Plan coincides with the Ninth and Tenth Five-Year Plans, which have made advancement in science and technology research and innovation an important mission. The creation of functional spaces for education and research is integrated into the attempt to increase the force of production of the city’s economy and the city’s ability to compete with other cities on both domestic and international fronts. Especially when the Tenth Five-Year Plan was formulated, China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Shenzhen has not only benefited from this but has also been exposed to stronger competitions. The planning strategies since the 1990s have focused on building Shenzhen into a world-class city and then a global city. When the journey along Shennan Road finally comes to an end, we come to a stop outside the ancient fortress of Nantou Gu Cheng which is located on the northern side of the road. The ancient city is one of the oldest parts of Shenzhen is also considerd an urban village. Standing outside the ancient city, it is hard to imagine that it was located on an estuary that no longer exists because of land reclamation. Nantou Gu Cheng was built in 331 AD and has been historically known as the birthplace of Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Macau. Until 1911, when the local government headquarters moved eastward because of the construction of the Kowloon–Canton Railway, the ancient city had been the place where local political factions fought against each other. The ancient city was left in the hands of farmers and migrants from then until the
76 1980s, when the district government began to put forward plans for restoring parts of the city. As the exploratory journey comes to an end, I am taken back to the common ancestral place of Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau. Not only has the journey showed me the different neighbourhoods that surround the road at the present, it is also a journey that provokes imagination of the city’s history as well as future. In the next section, I reassess the road’s role in connecting territorialised developments and ask what the road has delivered and for whom.
Disconnections and inequality Having explored the surrounding environment of Shennan Road, with the knowledge of the planning models that have influenced the economic and urban developments in Shenzhen, I have learnt that the role of Shennan Road facilitating spatial and economic development changes along with the environment. It connects developments and dazzles visitors and investors. When one part of the road opens up the view of a city, another part is immersed in the greeneries of the OCT. Yet its role, so far, has been determined by the municipal and district governments in their production of development strategies and planning models. Yet the consideration that the road is part of the urban economic development of Shenzhen and being the city’s thoroughfare, begs the question of what is hidden from travellers’ view. What of the city is disconnected from its thoroughfare? It is through the disconnections from the road that I aim to explore the inequality of development. In this section, I continue to make references to the current development strategy, which aims at stretching Shenzhen’s capacity to impress and surpass domestic and international competitors. I present a detailed discussion by revisiting some areas that have yet to be highlighted in the previous section. I also bring attention to the uncertainties that challenge the city and the future to which it aspires. Shenzhen’s transformation and achievements in economic and urban development over three decades have been unprecedentedly impressive. Despite the speedy developments, the city is facing problems such as a shortage of lands and a fast- growing population until recent years (Bruton et al., 2005). These problems are pushing the municipal and local governments to reconsider the use of limited spaces in the city. One of the long-term solutions involves urban regeneration of neighbourhoods and
77 industrial estates that are deemed undesirable for the city’s image. I focus on case studies of some of these neighbourhoods that are located next to Shennan Road and what has been done to disconnect these neighbourhoods from the view on the road.
Urban villages Urban villages are known as Chéngzhōngcūn in Mandarin, which means villages inside the city. The original meaning of urban village – a term coined by Taylor (1973), denotes to a small and self-sustaining urban settlement that has efficient infrastructural facilities and is home to people of different social and economic backgrounds. In the context of Shenzhen, urban villages do not reflect exactly the descriptions above. They emerged as a by-product of the urban developments in Shenzhen amid the intersecting forces of the municipal government, the market, and individual opportunism. In the 1990s, Shenzhen continued to experience rapid urbanisation, which led to a series of land acquisitions of farmlands, leaving farmers with only their houses and the lands occupied by their houses. With no more farmlands, villagers had to seek alternative means to maintain their livelihoods. As a result, they turned to their own houses by adding more storeys and creating affordable rental spaces to house the huge influx of domestic migrants seeking cheap accommodations. Eventually, more and more high-density blocks of flats over 10-storey high emerged, giving rise to the wò shŏu lóu (‘handshake’ buildings). These buildings were built to achieve the maximum capacity of the land, leaving very little space between buildings (Figure 13). As a result, each building is so tightly built against each other that neighbours can shake hands with each other through their windows. The narrow space between buildings has also popularised the image of a thin strip of sky above, representing the darkness of urban villages. The general layout of an urban village consists of a main street into the village and small alleyways leading into other parts of the village. Through the years of Shenzhen’s urban development, urban villages have played an important role as the transitory and transitional space for migrants. The municipal and local governments in Shenzhen have long considered urban villages as cancerous areas of the city due to their tarnished reputations for poor infrastructural facilities, high crime rates, prostitution, illegal constructions, and so on. For private developers in partnership with the local governments and village committees, they are a land of opportunities for profit. However, over the last fifteen years, urban researchers and
78 academics have begun to reassess the social function of urban villages, which, they argue, play a positive role in supporting the rapid urbanisation of Shenzhen and other Chinese cities (e.g. Zhang, 2001; O’Donnell, 2008; Wang, et al., 2009; Bach, 2010). The two urban villages to which I bring attention in the discussion here are located next to Shennan Road. One is Gangxia and the other Baishizhou. Gangxia is located in central Futian, to the south of Shennan Road. Baishizhou is located in Nanshan and is split into a northern and a southern part by the road. They are not the only urban villages located next to Shennan Road. The journey on foot along Shennan Road has helped me to locate urban villages that are hidden from view by screens of high-rises on both sides of the road. As a general characteristic, these hidden urban villages are often found next to affluent gated communities that pose a stark visual contrast to the villages (Figure 12). The same is true for Gangxia, which is located in close proximity to the Futian CBD on the southern side of the road and the municipal government on the northern side, and Baishizhou, which is surrounded by the luxurious residential estates and themed parks of the OCT. The difference between Gangxia and Baishizhou is that the former was one of the first villages in Futian to be regenerated, while the latter has been listed as one of the biggest regeneration projects in the city and demolitions due to start. What interests me about the urban villages next to Shennan Road is not just the scale of urban regeneration. The impact upon the road itself in terms of it being a city image project also prompts increasing physical standardisation of its surroundings. This concerns not only the disconnection of the villages from the road so they are out of sight but also the government’s determination to ‘upgrade’ these villages so that they will match the ideal image of Shenzhen as a global city. As a legacy of uneven urban developments, urban villages have emerged in parallel to other urban neighbourhoods but are perceived by the government as backward and have thus been left out of the modernisation project. Consequently, urban regeneration becomes a way for the government to rectify what it considers as the temporal distance between the urban and the rural. Disconnection is not merely about disconnecting urban villages from the road so they are out of sight. It is also about the disappearance of cultural fabrics that are unique to urban villages. This disappearance eventually lowers the availability of affordable housing, forcing out those who cannot afford the higher rental prices. What is
79 left of urban villages is their names as a result of the replacement of low-income neighbourhoods by high-end housing catering for the rising affluent middle class.
Figure 12 An urban village being surrounded by high rise buildings (Luohu)
80 Regeneration of redevelopments Urban villages are not the only category undergoing urban regeneration. Another example is the regeneration of Huaqiangbei, which is a bottom-up redevelopment of an old industrial estate known as Shangbu Industrial Estate, built in the 1980s. In 2013, large-scale construction to expand the underground railway began and closed the entire Huaqiang Road North, which was connected to Shennan Road. It was hard to see what was being built behind the construction screens, but the sounds of heavy machines filled the everyday soundscapes of the area. Huaqiangbei has been known as the biggest trading market in Shenzhen and China for electronics and the heartland of the recently emergent shān zhài (electronic knock-off) economy (Keane & Zhao, 2012). It is worth mentioning that the Huaqiangbei we know today is the result of bottom-up regeneration and grassroots innovations that have earned Shenzhen’s reputations of being entrepreneurial and encouraging the growth chuàng kè (innovator) culture (Lindtner, et al., 2015). In the 1990s, many manufacturing industries relocated out of the original SEZ to the outskirts or other cities where labour cost is lower. As a result, these old estates were left empty and became spaces for individual opportunists to set up their private enterprises, which gave rise to a new commercial district built upon the already established material fabric of the estates. As Wang and Xu (2002) explain, the reasons for the growth of commercial activities in these industrial estates are lower rents, close proximity to potential customers, and the absence of regulations to control the reuse of estates. Huaqiangbei not only became the city’s largest trading market for electronics but also saw a dramatic influx of fashion retail and wholesale businesses along with the growth of hospitality industry in the area. Yet, this kind of unplanned bottom-up redevelopment also caused concerns among planners, who saw illegal construction becoming increasingly prominent. The lack of planning also meant a lack of uniformity and therefore chaos from the planning perspective. However, as Zacharias and Tang (2010) point out, the success of this bottom-up regeneration presents opportunities for better planning in order to attract more investment in building more high-end housing and hotels. Today, the major regeneration plans are focusing on the appearance of Huaqiangbei, with more attention being directed towards the renovation of buildings
81 alongside Shennan Road and the main high street that intersects with the road. Bearing in mind that the emergence of the chuàngkè culture has been built upon the foundations established by the shānzhài economy that grew out of Huaqianbei, it is too early to judge how regeneration of Huaqiangbei will impact upon the small businesses and the innovation economy. What is clear, however, is that the government’s effort to reinvent the city is a way to bring visual standardisation to its urban developments, which are showcased alongside Shennan Road.
Conclusion: future(s) reconsidered While the surrounding environment of Shennan Road is slowly changing because of ongoing regeneration, the road itself is also undergoing changes because of the expansion of the underground railway network. The road remains one of an important traffic corridor. It is a road that is intended to uphold image of the city and that it continues to remind us of the present dominance of car culture. Shenzhen is now in the second half its Comprehensive Plan for 2010–2020, which emphasises the importance of building a sustainable economy, a harmonious society, an international city, and stronger connections with the rest of the Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong (UPLRC SM, 2010a). Although the government is trying to elevate Shenzhen to the status of a global city, how it is possible for Shenzhen to achieve this by Sassen’s definitions (2005) is another question. What concerns this chapter, after all, are the changes that the road brings to its surrounding environment because of its technical and symbolic roles as a traffic corridor and a city thoroughfare. In this chapter, I have studied the road’s surrounding environments under the influence of three comprehensive plans of 1986, 1996, and 2010. The exploration provides a window through which I have learnt how the city has emerged and developed. It is not intrinsic for the road to be responsible for the changes, but as an infrastructure it provides the conditions for change and it means change. What I have tried to demonstrate is that the road, as an integral part of the comprehensive plans, puts on display how urban spaces become representational forms of planning (Lefebvre 1991). At the same time, the focus on the elements that are disconnected from the view of the road also indicates a contrast to the social production of space. Attempts to revert socially produced spaces to top-down representational spaces raise further concerns
82 about the future laid out for the people who are planned or priced out by these regeneration plans.
In closing the chapter, I reflect upon the explorations with a brief account of a local NGO that attempts to use public art projects to raise awareness of the social function of the urban villages some of which are gradually ‘planned out’ of the city’s future. By ending the chapter in this way, I intend to discuss more about the idea of future that is conceptualised differently by the government’s comprehensive plans and people’s lives that are and will be affected by these plans. In September 2013, I began my fieldwork on Shennan Road. Before I arrived in Shenzhen, I established contact with an American anthropologist who had been a long- term resident in the city and she is one of the founders of a local NGO called Chéngzhōngcūn (CZC) Special Forces. The group is comprised of academics, urban researchers, and artists. During the period I was in Shenzhen, I attended their events and took part in an art project organised by the group in Baishizhou, where they rented a room as an artist studio and for seminars, exhibitions, gatherings, and so on. The room would otherwise be occupied by migrants (individuals or families). This room occupies a symbolic space where ideas and artistic practices reside and are informed by lives in the urban villages that surround them. I have argued that low-income neighbourhoods such as urban villages have been increasingly hidden from view of the road. Many of them are hidden behind the high- rise gated communities along both sides of Shennan Road. For someone travelling on Shennan Road by car, it is difficult to realise how closely located some of the urban villages are to the road. Because of the city image envisioned by the municipal government, urban villages are gradually being ‘planned out’ of the city’s future. They are either redeveloped or demolished. The emergence of this NGO marks a grassroot- initiated attempt to make these urban villages ‘visible’ to public attention again. It does not have the power to change any developmental plans of the city but what it has succeeded doing is raising awareness through the use of social media and local press. “We can’t stop [the developers] from taking over the valuable spaces of urban villages, but we can at least slow down the speed of change and make it as painfully long for them as possible.” This leads to my final discussion about the idea of future(s).
83
Industrial capitalist societies are inescapably wedded to innovation and progress. Change rather than stability is the order of the day. In this dynamic world of universal mobility, standing still means falling behind. (Adam and Grove 2007: 1)
These are the opening lines of Future Matters. To some extent, they seem to capture what Shenzhen is going through – continual reinvention with innovations in order to stay on top of the game – the imagined game of modernity perhaps. However, it is a historical account of how the future is told, tamed, traded, and transformed through to how it is traversed today in the Western context. Although Shenzhen’s developmental trajectories have been influenced by many examples from the West, the state shows no sign of steering away from developing a ‘socialist economy with Chinese characteristics’. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve into identifying these Chinese characteristics. What is clear, however, is that while progress and change remain important, stability is also imperative, as far as the political survival of the CCP is concerned. After all, reforms were called for to save the CCP from being overthrown by its people and therefore to achieve stability. At the same time, stability is also important for keeping the economic growth going. According to the comprehensive plans I have presented so far in this chapter, they project a future of progress and innovation envisioned by the state. However, experiencing the road on foot tells a different story about the futures that are inspired on the ground level. In Chapter 3, I discuss in more detail how different modes of walking allow me to gain different perspectives on the road and the city through the corporeal experience of walking. The futures imagined by people I encountered during fieldwork are not always about the progress and change. For some people, the future they hope for is stability or at least, maintaining the status quo. For some others, they want progress and change of a different kind. In the wake of the approved plan to redevelop Baishizhou (by means of demolition), the Special Forces recently carried out a photography project for which they invited tenants in Baishizhou to write down on paper their wishes to remain in the village and to take photographs with these messages. Messages are simple, for they
84 express the tenants’ wishes for stability in their future. While urban redevelopments mean progress and change toward a better (more profitable) future for real estate developers and the local government, what accompanies their success is the instability of people’s futures. This therefore begs the question of where the power lies in determining one’s future. In contemporary Chinese society, working hard and saving up for a better future no longer defines the lives of the ordinary people. Working hard does not guarantee a future of prosperity and it becomes increasingly obvious that working hard is not a choice for many people who are struggling to make ends meet – they have to work hard. This widening gap between the future envisioned by the state and the futures wished for but not within the control of people at the bottom of the social hierarchy is grounded in the relationship between power and the production of future(s). It is this gap that the road continues to reveal by not revealing.
85
Figure 13 Handshake buildings in Baishizhou (Nanshan)
86 Chapter 3: On ways of walking and researching the road
Introduction The chapter brings together a comparison between studying the road in time with imagined history and studying it in space with emplaced experiences (Vergunst 2010). Bearing in mind how the government has intended the road to be experienced in relation to the city’s image, I suggest that engagement with the road in different modes of walking allows the creation of different city images in mind. I bring movement into the discussion not only because the road is a traffic corridor but also because it is a fluid form constituted by different perspectives. In learning about the different perspectives, I bring the method of walking to the fore. Walking is an activity that is integral to ethnographic research. For an ethnographer, exploring the field on foot is a way to familiarise oneself with the particular environment – it is a continuous interaction between an unfamiliar environment and the ethnographer. Secondly, the chapter is about how I gain different perspectives from different modes of walking and how walking becomes a heuristic approach to discovering where and when I spatially locate my participant observation. In researching the road, I adopt two modes of movement: one is to move with people through space with the walking methods; the other is to move with time, for which I station myself at a few nodal points on the road over a period of time to see the temporal changes of space. The structure of the chapter is as follows. Firstly, in the process of walking, I make use of maps that are produced by the government as a tool to navigate the representational spaces and I compare the practice of walking as guided by maps with the practice of dérive. However, I bring the role of flâneur into question: To what extent is the ethnographer, a flâneur? I focus on walking as a method deliberately designed for the fieldwork, instead of walking as an everyday leisure activity. The reason is that the general attitudes towards walking in Shenzhen are not the same as those, for example, in the UK. However, I suggest that the difference that a different social and cultural context makes to the simple act of walking makes the practice of dérive a productive method. I observe that
87 the practice of dérive challenges the power of representational space devised by the state and reconfigures it. A parallel comparison is drawn between walking in a straight-line fashion (along the road) and exploring on foot in a more spontaneous manner (on and off the road) (Ingold, 2007). In doing so, I learn that walking as guided by the seemingly uninterrupted pedestrian paths informs me about a road-space as planned by the state. Through the practice of dérive, which generates detours from the straight line of the road, I develop knowledge of the road and its surroundings with my own experience and shared experience with walking partners as the main reference points. I also explore a way of walking that involves the presence of others. Walking is an important tool to engage with people and together produce the space-time of coevalness. Through allocentric walks that centre on how other people make sense of the road and its surroundings, different perceptions emerge. In particular, I highlight a couple of professionals with whom I conducted walks and the exchange of ideas generated by these walks. I suggest that walking with other urbanists (researchers, architects, urban planners, etc.) gives rise to a community of researchers who reconfigure the road as a fluid and evocative subject. The second part attends to an important outcome of the walking method. This outcome is the awareness of where to pause for observations. Irving argues that “movement is a creative act of poesis” (2013: 292). In my case, walking is a heuristic approach to discovering where and when I pause and observe. Pause-and-observe is another kind of movement where I observe the movements not only of passers-by or passing vehicles but also temporal changes of the space in which I situate. Although my body may be stationary, my eyes continue to move to attend and glance around (Casey, 1999). By locating myself at a particular nodal point, I can have the time to slow down and study the people. Researching the road is not merely about moving along with others. More importantly, studying Shennan Road in this way speaks directly to the idea of non-place, which is popularly attached to transit spaces such as airports, train stations, and, in this case, roads. I do not intend to refute the connection between roads and non-place. I am more interested in the particular research nodes along the road that make it an assembly of social spaces that co-exist with spaces that render the road a non-place. I maintain that pause-and-observe engages with the relational dynamics of the road at
88 different points. I also suggest that maintaining the road as a non-place is necessary for the day-to-day operation of infrastructure. I also add that non-place is not only space specific but also time specific. In concluding the chapter, I reflect upon the contribution of the walking methods to the process of writing. I argue that the process of walking during fieldwork, in a way, was the beginning of the process of writing. Post-fieldwork writing itself also means revisiting the road in mind and therefore generative mind-walking (Ingold 2010b).
Walking guided by maps Walking along Shennan Road and into its surrounding neighbourhoods gave me the opportunity to learn about the physical manifestation of the developmental plans of the Shenzhen SEZ. Different modes of walking generate differential experiences. I highlight three modes of walking, namely walks informed by maps, spontaneous walks with the practice of dérive, and walks guided or accompanied by other people. At the inception of the research, I used official maps of Shennan Road and the three districts. The purpose was to get a sense of the geographical relations between the road and the city. Using a map facilitates the initial stage of drawing preliminary boundaries of fieldwork until ethnographic research redefines these boundaries accordingly. The road is represented mathematically on the surface to assist the practice of spatial planning of where I can go. For the ethnographer, the use of maps thus informs the preliminary formulation of fieldwork plans with background information about the city in general. Walking with a map is also an essential step of initial explorations in the field – the scoping process. Drawing on her experience in the field, Andrews demonstrates that the cartographic practice as a research tool enables the estranged ethnographer to find her space and to appropriate space in the field (2012: 220). The transformation from an outsider to an ethnographer who has learnt her way around the place also reminds me of my ethnographic experience on the road. My knowledge of the road informs the formation of emplaced knowledge and thus reflects my relationship with the road. But this is not a straightforward process. An official map demonstrates a visual flow between spaces (as intended to support the urban development plans formulated by the municipal government) but not the spatial relationship between people and surrounding objects (McKinnon, 2011). The
89 official maps did not inform me how to walk but told me where I might be. In practice, my eyes were constantly fixed on the map, while my feet continued to walk reluctantly. This then reflects the disconnection between the eyes and the feet. Besides the use of printed maps, I also used digital maps. With the advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS), which provides more or less precise information on one’s geographical location, people rely on the digital maps enabled by the GPS to navigate without any prior knowledge of the place. Navigating with a GPS is thus reduced to following lines and arrows, and the act of following a digital map bears a Foucauldian resemblance to discipline and restriction. Consequently, one might argue that the process of using a printed map of the road turns me into a passive map-user rather than an active mapper. The disconnection between the eyes and the feet prevailed in the use of a digital map. My reliance on the digital map ended up rendering it the main source of visual information. (Nonetheless, in situations outside my fieldwork, the use of GPS was useful for me to locate, for example, traffic congestions on the road through the coded language of colours superimposed on the map.) In his comparison between two theories of navigation, namely the theory of mental maps and that of ‘practical mastery’, Gell problematises Bourdieu’s practical theory as “logically unsound” and argues that the mental process involved in a stranger finding his or her way with a map, is the same as that in a native using personal experience in his or her navigation (1985: 278-279). He refers to non-token-indexical maps as spatial positions and token-indexical images as situated spatial knowledge and argues that we need both forms to know the surrounding environment (1985: 279). He explains that “mental maps consist of compendia of non-token-indexical spatial beliefs”, without which it would be “impossible to formulate navigational decisions” (1985: 282). Gell also adds that “in order to employ a map it is necessary to match images produced at particular map-coordinates with perceptual images of the surrounding terrains” (1985: 282). Considering the example of the etak system of Micronesian navigation, Gell argues that it is “a system of images derived from a map and is logically on a par with the cognitive processes which underly the most elementary kinds of way- finding in everyday context” and that “the essential logical processes involved in all way-finding … are identical” (1985: 286). According to Gell, the distance between cartographic abstraction and emplaced experiences is thus brought closer by this two- way process of learning, corresponding, and knowing. Gell’s analysis is a useful tool for
90 me to explore the road and its surroundings. The official maps assist the formation of my knowledge of the developmental logic that is manifest in spatial terms. They help me to make sense of the representational space conceived by the government. Wood, however, argues that a map is anything but representational (2012). He explains that maps are “issued by, refer to, acknowledge or otherwise perform the state” (2012: 300). However, in the case of Shennan Road, official maps do reflect the representational space conceived by the Chinese State. The digital maps I used in Shenzhen were powered by Baidu, a Chinese version of Google. The use of Google Maps or Apple Maps is limited within the Chinese borders due to the limited access. Therefore, walking with a Chinese-produced digital map also automatically or indeed digitally produces representational subjects. Furthermore, the ethnographer can also juxtapose his or her ethnographic knowledge of the road with abstract knowledge, in order to locate the ‘blind fields’, which are the poorly explored “misrepresentations and misunderstandings” between “a presentation of the facts and groups of facts, away from perceiving and grouping” and “a re-presentation, interpretations of the facts” (Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]: 30). In addition to the repertoire of knowledge, the ethnographer thus has the responsibility of finding and interpreting ‘blind fields’. As Lefebvre remarks, “what we find in a blind field is insignificant, but given meaning through research” (2003 [1970]: 31). Although I agree with Lefebvre’s argument to an extent, there is more of which one should be mindful. The meaning of a ‘blind field’ is far from being definitive. It subsequently affects the production of knowledge about the road and also the process of representation. I emphasise that although an abstract mode of representation may be a calculated product with state visions, one should not deny it of its function as a point of reference.
The practice of dérive Exploring the road on foot without official maps involves a different process, which in turn generates a kind of knowledge that is anchored in the situation rather than a back and forth between the map and the world around. The eyes and the rest of the body are also connected. Ingold argues that “knowing, like the perception of the environment in general, proceeds along paths of observation” and therefore “knowledge is regional: it is to be cultivated by moving along a path that lead around, towards or away from places,
91 from or to places elsewhere” (2000: 229). In this sense, I can consider my knowledge of the road and its surroundings as established in the construction of ‘region-based’ accounts on the road through walking, stopping, observing, and “being caught by the rhythms” (Lefebvre, 2004 [1992]) of a place. Nonetheless, this does not take any practical credit away from the use of maps, as they still provides basic information for anyone who is unfamiliar with them – they is a starting point. Yet one should also be mindful of what is abstracted out of one’s knowledge derived from maps, namely, the emplaced experiences afforded by walking – a tactile experience between the body and the surrounding environments. Walking along Shennan Road reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s discussions of Baudelaire’s Paris on the one hand and Haussmann’s Paris on the other (1999 [1982]). Shenzhen is not Paris – far from it. For an ethnographer, the kind of role I adopt in walking – as a casual stroller or as a follower of a plan – matters. Benjamin explains that the flâneur “stands on the threshold – of the metropolis as of the middle class” and that “he seeks refuge in the crowd” (1999 [1982]: 10). His understanding of the flâneur is of an ambiguous figure who is at home with not being at home. The city becomes interiorised as the home of the flâneur, where he dwells by leaving traces. Then from Baudelaire’s poetic Paris, Benjamin moves onto Haussmann, who aimed at securing the city against civil war – he designed the straight and wide boulevards in order to prevent the erection of barricades. I could walk the road with the imagination of the flâneur (one that Benjamin refers to), who sees the road spaces as poetic and ambiguous. Likewise, I could also walk it as if I were a Haussmannite, seeing the road as an absolute space of power. However, I was not doing fieldwork on a boulevard in Paris. I am constantly reminded of the obligation to be critical and self-aware (Soukup, 2013). While the vendors and security guards I observed on the road were thinking about how to make ends meet on daily basis, I was often considered as a student with the time and money to ‘roam about’ the road. The idea of walking as a Parisian flâneur in Shenzhen is, to an extent, socio- culturally out of place. I describe a couple of brief episodes below. Although they do not have a direct relation to the ethnographic research I conducted in Shenzhen, they are sufficient to support my point. After I arrived in Shenzhen, I got in touch with some old contacts in order to catch up and make use of the meeting as a brainstorming session for fieldwork. One of
92 these contacts was an old school friend whom I had not seen for at least three years. By that time, she had been married, had a child, and divorced. Amongst her friends, she had experienced “three life dramas by the age of 30”, according to her. We met up over dinner one evening. When I told her I was doing research on Shennan Road and that I was to walk it for my exploratory research, she was baffled. She found the idea of walking the road almost inconceivable, which surprised me, for I could not see why she could not understand it at the time. In retrospect, I did not understand her. Another episode was the time when I spoke to my cousin about my plans to walk Shennan Road; she also reacted with confusion. “Why would you walk the road?” This was the question I was asked. Increasingly, I realised that there is a different conception of walking. In Mandarin, walking reads as zŏu lù or sàn bù, but they convey different ideas. Zŏu-lù connotes walking in an instrumental manner – it is a mode of travelling from A to B. Sàn-bù means to take a stroll, which is a time- and space-specific activity that is done in a comfortable (e.g. green) environment such as a park or public square or along a seaside promenade at a time specifically set aside for the purpose. In the context of the UK for example, a similar distinction is made between walking as a mode of travelling and as a mode of relaxation. However, I was often told by people in Shenzhen that “if you can travel by car or public transport, there is no point in zŏu lù, and when you sàn bù, you find a nice place to do it” – not next to a polluted road that is not made for zŏu lù, let alone sàn bù. In simple terms, as a means of travelling, walking is the only choice if one cannot afford other means of transport. On the contrary, as a leisurely activity, its social position changes from lower to higher, especially among people who can afford the time to take a walk. Walking is also age specific: it is more common to see old people taking a stroll in their neighbourhoods on their own or with their grandchildren, after dinner in the evening. For young urbanites, however, going for a walk can also mean going hiking at weekends. The Parisian flâneur also belongs to a social class and and there is a gender bias towards most flâneurs being male. To some extent, it is not usual to find someone walking as a Parisian flâneur, especially along the road. My experience and observations made me aware of the subtle differences in the attitudes towards walking.
93 The kind of ‘wanderer’ or stroller that is closest to the Parisian flâneur in the Chinese cultural context would be the Chinese literati, who still exist in small number in contemporary China. However, these are literati who gather with their friends and wander around, admiring the natural wonders that surround them, as well as those who become hermits and retreat back to nature after becoming disappointed with the political system (Starr & Berg, 2007). Wandering in the Chinese cultural context has its own specific associations with the literati class. Therefore, instead of talking about walking as an everyday activity, I remain focused on the discussion of walking as a deliberately designed method – of lived experience (Whyte, 1980) – to serve the purpose of gaining different perspectives and experiences, rather than the sole perspective of the privileged researcher. Instead of harmony, as would be celebrated by the nature-loving literati, I intend the walking as a method to reveal more than harmony between people and the surrounding environments. In his article, Charles Soukup argues that the adoption of methodological flânerie is useful for studying and analysing a postmodern culture that is highly mediated (2013). With the example of a coffee shop, Soukup describes the contemporary postmodern culture in which people experience divergent “cultures” in fragments, ephemerally but routinely. In order to understand this culture, he emphasises his role as a postmodern ethnographer and embraces “the mobilized gaze of the flâneur” (2013: 228). He defines the ethnographer flâneur as a “mindful observer … shifting between a careful attention to cultural micro-practices and abstract conceptualizations of macro- structures” (2013: 240). To some extent, studying a road in a fast-growing city produced by reforms depicts the ethnographic practice with a postmodern overtone. Given that the road is far from being a conventional bounded community, I am constantly going between the road as planned and the road as lived. However, I remain cautious about this call for postmodern ethnography, because of the overstretched concept of postmodernism and because the lack of a definitive conception of the term renders it an intellectual black hole into which subjectivity leads. Since the crisis of representation, ethnographic practices and the products of ethnography are subject to scrutiny. Yet, the so-called postmodern ethnography takes the crisis of representation further, with further engagement in self-undermining, not just self-reflexivity (Pool, 1991). Therefore,
94 attaching the flânerie to the practice of walking is too inward looking and self- referencing for an ethnography that focuses on the multiplicity of perspectives. My attention now turns to the practice of dérive, which I suggest provides a more productive mode of studying the road. The ambiguous character of the flâneur is often compared to the practice of dérive. However, for the Situationists, who are known for producing psychographic maps of Paris, the practice of dérive goes beyond the solitary venture in and out of the urban fabric. Rather, it connotes “the search for an encounter with otherness” (McDonough, 2009: 10). Behind the practice of dérive, the Situationists also emphasise the reconnection with the city’s historical landscapes. To this extent, ethnographic research on a road benefits from this mode of walking and the encounter with otherness also anchors the fleeting ephemerality of encounters between strangers. Guy Debord remarks that “chance plays a role”, which ties in with the consideration of contingent sociality on the road (2009 [1956]: 79). However, it does not imply that this would be a chance encounter with just anyone and anything. Central to the dérive, Debord reminds us by quoting Marx, that “men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive” (2009 [1956]: 80). Walking as a method is therefore a practice that requires both attentiveness to others and room for chance encounter that would lead to the production of a different experience. It is not merely about wandering off from the road into the narrow streets of nearby neighbourhoods, but also about being led by other people’s perspectives that bring change in subtle ways. As a result, perspective continues to shift, but not as randomly as one might assume. Furthermore, I argue that the practice of dérive also opens up a way to reconfigure the representational space conceived by the state. It is a challenge to the overarching power of representational space but is not a subversion of ‘truth’, for there is no one truth. In “Journey to the End of the Night”, Irving points out that the Renaissance perspective implies a mathematical way of knowing the world and also points out what we might gain “by embracing the flux, contingency and instability of perception, or taking seriously the ephemeral insights and passing knowledge of the successive modes, especially the initial encounter” (2008: 155). Specifically, with reference to the ethnographic journey upon which an anthropologist embarks, Irving
95 also demonstrates that a journey as a series of successive experiences and acquired sets of knowledge that may contradict one another in the revelation of “the truth” (2008: 152). After all, there is not one truth and the successive modes of knowing allow the anthropologist to grasp the contradictions within. To some extent, one can thus argue that a journey on foot is less about what we know than how we know, especially when what we know at a particular time and in a particular space can be transcended or challenged by what we know in the next moment. However, this does not imply a hierarchy of knowledge production. Rather it is a process of interactions between the bodily experience and the surrounding environment with which we become familiarised and refamiliarised. This is particularly important in the representation of the road through the various journeys taking place. One issue that is worth highlighting here is the interaction between the linearity of the journey and the contingencies and instability in the discoveries one makes on the way. Similarly to the production of anthropological knowledge, the practice of representing the road should thus be conscious of the situations and events that might contradict an established perception of the road. The journey represented therefore provides the space and time for contradictions and challenges to emerge. Consequently, the journey means encounters between differences. Central to the practice of dérive is walking, and central to walking is movement. According to Ingold, movement is improvisatory, “open-ended and knows no final destinations” (2010a: S122). Ingold argues that the ground upon which we walk “undergoes continuous generation” and that “it is perceived kinaesthetically in movements” (2010a: S121–S125). The role of movement – of walking – is an important attribute of the process of knowing the surrounding world. Interestingly, Ingold compares the soft ground that bears the nutrients for life and in which plants grow with the hard-surfaced infrastructure “upon which the superstructure of the city can be erected” (2010a: S126). But walking allows Ingold’s wayfarer the space to see and experience the everyday life that unfolds along either side of the road. By Ingold’s definition, the road is a mark laid by the state over the ground, whereas a path walked by inhabitants rather than passengers is marked in it. Although the practice of dérive does not leave visible traces on the hard-surfaced urban streets branching off from Shennan Road, it draws metaphorical “winding paths” and conjures up the web of relational “threads”.
96 Ingold emphasises the importance of theorising the role of weather in the production of knowledge through movements. To some extent, this relates to Stewart’s “atmospheric attunements” (2011) in the process of dwelling in urban spaces. The weather and the atmosphere in which I walk contribute to the production of ethnographic knowledge that evolves with my movements through space. For this, I provide an example here. The process of learning the geography of the neighbourhoods along Shennan Road was carried out on foot. With the road as the main guiding route, I walked into the streets branching off from the road. Especially when I walked into an urban village that was located next to the road, the change of physical environment was noticeable as a result of the increased density of materials and intensity of sensory experience. The transition from the road to a neighbourhood street did not take long. But the change of environment had an immediate impact upon the atmosphere, which felt different in an urban village compared to the road. The weather remained constant within that short space of time, but because the atmosphere was charged with changes in physical environment, the experience of the weather varied. This is only possible through walking, which generates a different set of experiences from those of passengers in vehicles. Ingold also distinguishes wayfarers who do not follow a straight line from passengers in vehicles that follow a pre-determined route. Having built a taxonomy of lines, Ingold considers it far from satisfactory because there are lines that do not fit. Then what kind of line are the three straight long stretches that make up Shennan Road? With reference to the artist Paul Klee, Ingold compares lines that walk and lines in a hurry (2007). Going back to the section on walking with maps, walking becomes secondary to using a map that tells me how representational spaces are organised and connected. Using the road as a traffic corridor bears resemblance to Ingold’s description of joining dots on paper (clustered developments on the map). He argues that “to complete the pattern is not to take a line for a walk but rather to engage in a process of construction or assembly … welding together the elements of the pattern into a totality of higher order” (Ingold, 2007: 74). Essentially, what Ingold has described here mirrors the Shenzhen that the municipal government has been building. The experience of walking along the road without maps resumes the primary purpose of walking rather than the mere act of
97 making connections with the eyes. The tactile experience with the ground reveals the detailed textures that passengers in vehicles are unable to detect. The practice of dérive is the mode that produces a line that walks rather than connects. Walking as dérive thus leads into “the world’s continual coming into being”, and for an ethnographer who has also become an inhabitant, my traces also contribute to “its weave and texture” (Ingold, 2007: 81). Nonetheless, solitary practice of dérive is far from sufficient. Encounter with otherness through the practice of dérive also requires walking with others in order to discover the multiple perspectives that conjure up a city as “a mesh of interweaving lines rather than a continuous surface” (2007: 75).
Walking with others During the scoping process, I walked along Shennan Road mostly by myself, but as the fieldwork proceeded, it was also important to do the walking with other people, which gave me the opportunity to understand how other people perceived the road and the city. In discussing the limits of participant observations, Kusenbach observes that “independent, solitary observations – even done as insiders – are not well suited to access local culture as it unfolds through other members’ experiences and practices” (2003: 460). The shortcomings of conventional participant observations and interviewing thus prompt Kusenbach’s call for the “go-along method”, which requires the ethnographer to “take a more active stance towards capturing their informants’ actions and interpretations” (2003: 463). To some extent, the kind of walking along the road and in its surrounding neighbourhoods with either one or two people is similar to Kusenbach’s go-along method. To some extent, I walked with other people in a more literal sense. For example, I spent a period of time taking morning walks on Shennan Road with an informant who spent roughly 45 minutes walking along the road from home to work. These morning walks were part of the informant’s daily routine to work. As walking to work was usually a solitary time for the informant, my participation ended up causing inevitable interventions. An act as simple as starting a conversation within the 45-or-so minutes became noticeable for the informant. In particular, my attempts to relate our conversations to the road also revealed that he had not been consciously engaged with the road. A
98 consciousness only arose as a result of my intention to steer his attention toward the road specifically. The so-called ‘natural’ go-along method that I carried out with the informant in his daily routine produced experiences that were unexpected. Consequently, whether the method is ‘natural’ or not, any walks with people produce new experiences and walking with others is also an intervention that varies in degree. Another kind of walking with people is walks with professionals who work with space, for example architects or urban researchers. During the period of fieldwork in Shenzhen, I had the opportunity to meet these professionals at events organised by independent groups, governmental agencies, and/or educational institutions. One of the big events taking place at the time when I began my fieldwork was the 2013 Urbanism/Architecture Bi-city Biennale (UABB) hosted by the municipal government. Events such as this are intended to gather both domestic and international architects with an interest in Shenzhen and Chinese urbanisation at large. This particular event takes place every two years and is a way for Shenzhen to celebrate successes and highlight problems it has encountered in the process of development and redevelopment. My participations in public art projects set up by local groups also gave me the opportunity to meet interested researchers. Most of the academics and researchers I met during my fieldwork were concerned with the gradual disappearance of urban villages, many of which are located next to Shennan Road. Conversations that emerged out of the walks along parts of Shennan Road with some of these urban researchers and architects were thus more about the connection between the road and the urban villages than the road itself. This kind of walk worked was productive for both my walking partners and myself, because the walks presented an opportunity for theoretical and practical exchanges. These walks were arranged and specific. While they generated insights into how the road and its surrounding environments are perceived, through the exchange of opinions and comments they became place-making practices (Pink, 2008). Particularly, these practices generated intellectual spaces for a community of urban researchers. I suggest that the perspectives of researchers are equally important as a result of these walks. Exchanges with researchers of other disciplinary backgrounds led to informed opinions mostly revolving around the road in relation to the city, with the emphasis on the latter. This prompts me to ask: to what extent does walking on the road
99 evoke in researchers further critical thinking about the city? A walk I did with an urban researcher is worth mentioning here. I met Yu at a public seminar organised by a local urban research institute. Yu was US-educated and had only just started working in Shenzhen at the time we met. I later invited her to come for a walk with me from a shopping mall next to the road to an urban village where we were to have dinner in the evening. The section of the road that we walked along was Shennan Road East, in the heart of Luohu District. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, the density of urban fabric is high in Luohu, and Shennan Road East is not as wide as the middle or the avenue section. Walking out of the shopping mall onto Shennan Road did not feel like a dramatic transition. There was not a specific point at which we began talking, but we started talking about Shennan Road when she asked me what I was doing in order to carry out research on a road. After I had given an underdeveloped summary of the project, she told me that not many people would choose to research a road. This reminded me of the occasion when I had met a government official working in the municipal planning office who told me that the government was very concerned about urban villages and that any research on them would be of value to the government. When I told Yu about this, she agreed and then pointed at Shennan Road, saying “Look at the road and look at urban villages: as far as the government is concerned, they don’t match”. When we arrived at the urban village where we were to have dinner, Yu also said that “[Shennan] road is nice to look at but it does not belong to people. A street like this [in the urban village] is more alive with people having the liberty to use it.” But she quickly added: “Maybe we are too romantic to see the dirty water streaming onto the street.” Within the community of urban researchers, many are more concerned about preserving the socio-cultural diversity of the demographic composition of the city than with how diversity would affect the overall image of the city. This did not come as a surprise to me. It seemed to me that there was a degree of discrepancy between what the municipal planning office considered important for the city and what the urban researchers thought. Walking along Shennan Road with Yu did not resonate with the experimental side of Kusenbach’s go-along method. In retrospect, walking with people, for example Yu, often led to using the road as a reference point for talking about the city
100 at large. This occurred not only when I walked with Yu but also when I walked with an architect. Jie was a British-trained architect who had returned to work in Hong Kong. With his family living in Shenzhen, he was going back and forth between Shenzhen and Hong Kong almost on a weekly basis. When I conducted walks with him on the avenue section in Futian and Nanshan on two occasions, two aspects of the road came to his attention. One was the screening effect of the high-rise buildings on both sides of the road. Secondly, the walk along the avenue section in Futian district especially was an architectural showcase: “That building is designed by Terry Farrell; this is by Rem Koolhaas; the one nearby is by Urbanus” (a practice based in Shenzhen). As an architect, it was easy for Jie to spot these architectural masterpieces but he commented that “this is probably what a generic city looks like”. The term “the Generic city” coined by Rem Koolhaas, denotes “a city liberated from the captivity of centre, from the straightjacket of identity”; “it is the city without history”, “big enough for everyone” and “if it gets old it just self-destructs and renews; it is equally exciting – or unexciting – everywhere” (1995: 1249–1250). I asked what the role of Shennan Road would be in this apparently generic city. The response from Jie was thought-provoking. He said: “the road is a matter of curiosity – just as Koolhaas might say – it’s both exciting and unexciting.” Jie made no reference to the road as an infrastructure, but his response captured the essence of my experience in doing research on the road. It is a pendulum swinging between a road as a material form and an assembly of socially reconfigured relations. It is also a constant back-and-forth between expectations and realities. Regarding my understanding of the conflicting interests between what the municipal government wanted for the city and what the urban researchers did, Jie corrected me by saying: “It may just be an agreed disagreement but it does not stop the way the city is changing. Besides,” he added, “this is a good thing because it keeps conversations going. Whether they lead to anything tangible or not is another matter. But sometimes, conversations do lead to co-operations between the government and non-governmental organisations in resolving urban issues.” He later adds: “as long as you don’t criticise the CCP, you’re safe with the government.”
101 What Jie said was an important reminder for me as an ethnographer of how to keep the conversations with others alive. My experience in walking with people who were interested in the city suggested that walking on the road did not necessarily lead to discussions solely about the road. The walking and discussing also suggested that the road cannot be studied as a single subject but must be considered as an integral part of the network of subjects about the city. The road inspires conversations about the city and that being on the road and seeing what is around it also reveals how the seemingly contradictory forces may work together in influencing the way city changes. The walks I carried out with urban researchers or professionals such as architects made me aware of the issues that would appeal to the state, researchers, architects, and urban planners. The road therefore becomes an interesting subject matter evoking urban issues that concern different groups that may not always be in agreement with each other.
Nodes: pause-and-observe Conducting an ethnographic research on Shennan Road meant that I had to modify ways of doing participant observations. Walking rather than travelling in a vehicle was one of the ways in which I engaged attentively with the road as well as with its surroundings. In a way, I became more familiar with it. However, it turned out that studying the road did not mean a completely radical break from conventional ways of doing anthropological research. Of course there could have been many experimental ways of researching the road. But I went through a process of engaging with the road not just in movement. A part of the process is to spatially fix myself at a chosen point, following the walking exercises. Lynch compiles a list of five elements that make up a mental map with which individuals can actively explore a city (1960). Nodes, according to Lynch, are strategic points from where a person finds directions. Building on Lynch’s definition of a node, I use the walking method to discover research nodes. These nodes are not always the nodes that are defined by state-produced maps. In the rest of the section, I highlight two examples of the nodal points where I carried out research for a sustained period of time. The examples are a footbridge and a couple of bus stops. These nodes allowed me to orient myself towards the ways in which relations with the road are established. These nodes are not only interesting spaces from which people move on in different directions
102 but also spaces into and through which people travel from different places. They are points that see outward and inward movements. During the period of fieldwork, I frequented a footbridge over the road where I carried out a sustained period of observation of street vendors and the passing office workers from nearby office buildings. Amongst them I paid particular attention to the breakfast vendors who served the white-collar workers from nearby offices every day. The footbridge appeared dwarfed by the presence of high-rise buildings. These vendors positioned themselves at the same spots on one side of the footbridge so that pedestrians could use the other side as a passageway. Every day, the vendors faced in one direction with the towering skyscrapers above their heads and construction sites on the road below the footbridge. From the standpoint of the vendors, they spent most of the time looking ahead at the immediate demands of customers buying breakfast from them and downward at the job at hand when serving them. For them, the presence of the road was felt through the noise of construction and the slight vibration of the footbridge caused by the passing traffic beneath. On the footbridge, I had the perspective of looking at the road reaching into a vanishing point in the distance. I also gained the perspective of the vendors, whose view was more focused on passers-by who might buy breakfast. I observed the vendors, who were stationary, and passers-by, who were moving. The usage of the footbridge seems to indirectly make the road irrelevant, because the activities I analyse do not take place directly on the road. But the footbridge would not have existed without the road below. For the vendors, the footbridge is a space of opportunity; for passers-by, it allows people to cross the road safely. Locating myself on the footbridge thus allowed me to pause and observe the daily life of the footbridge in relation to the road. The footbridge would have been irrelevant without the road. Furthermore, the footbridge is what makes the road infrastructural in both intended and unexpected ways. The footbridge functions as a component of the road to facilitate pedestrian movements that are perpendicular to the movements on the road. In comparison to roads, which represent humans’ will over space, Simmel argues that the construction of bridges “symbolizes the expansion of the sphere of our will over space” (Simmel, 1997 [1994]: 66). Yet a bridge of any kind gives rise to relations that are not part of its technical function. With the use of strangers’ interior dialogues, Irving
103 shows that people’s interactions with bridges reveal them as complex sites that go beyond their technical function (2013). I demonstrate in Chapter 5, where I fix the ethnographic focus on the breakfast vendors, that the bridge becomes a space of refuge for vendors who have been previously evicted from elsewhere. However, instead of internal dialogues (Irving, 2010; 2013), I firstly provide details about the vendors in terms of where they came from and how they ended up on the bridge and secondly describe how their daily interactions with others on the bridge constitute a social space. People walk past and through nodal points every day. They are essential parts of people’s daily journeys. To some extent, they resemble Ingold’s dots on paper for us to connect, but they are also socially significant. By the same token, walking was an important component of researching the road, without which I would not have come across these nodes. At each end of the footbridge is a bus stop. From the footbridge, I observed how temporal movement of the day unfolded at these bus stops, with the passengers getting on and off buses. It was not just the bus passengers that came to my attention, but also the security guards who were stationed at bus stops on Shennan Road. With my attention fixed on these people whose job it was to keep roadside their designated area orderly, I began stationing myself at two bus stops: one near the footbridge, another in the OCT. Many of the people who cross the footbridge are bus passengers. The bus stop is located at the northern end of the footbridge. Most of the bus stops on Shennan Road serve over 30 bus routes. This one serves 35 bus routes in total and, besides regular services, there are two night buses, two sight-seeing buses, three peak-hour buses, and one airport shuttle. All 35 of these services connect this corner of Shenzhen to the rest of the city in all directions. Although there are the distinct moments of rush hour when buses are packed with passengers, the bus stop continues to see a steady stream of buses coming and going more or less until midnight, when it is occasionally visited by night buses. The other bus stop I observed is located in the OCT area. Unlike the previous bus stop, this one serves slightly fewer buses: 28 bus lines, but it goes through similar rhythmic changes to the other one. Bus stops became intriguing spaces because they were the places where I grasped the pulses of the city in its everyday life. Through the security guards, bus stops are reconfigured into spaces of boredom and loneliness or spaces of commercial
104 opportunities. These characteristics are only detectable by pausing, observing, and in the end stationing oneself just like the guards. Yet through observing and following bus passengers, bus stops became the space through which strangers crisscross each other repetitively. They are therefore at once a space of familiarity and anonymity. Walking pass bus stops would not suffice for the ethnographer to grasp these characteristics of the city. In considering its relationship with the road, a bus stop is where a journey begins and it introduces me to a community of commuters. Bus stops were the point where I oriented the research to people on the move by means of public transport, as opposed to people with private vehicles. From a bus stop on the side of the road to a bus on the road, I followed passengers and learnt about how people of different socio- economic backgrounds ‘met’ on the road (Chapter 6). The process itself was a mixture of moving with others with pauses and observations amidst movements going in multiple directions. Approaching the road in movement with pauses on the way makes studying these nodes an imperative part of the research. The examples of the footbridge and bus stops demonstrate firstly how they facilitate movements as functional components of the road and secondly how they are also charged with meanings produced by interactions between strangers, amongst whom I am one, however fleeting those moments are. I should also clarify here that the use of the footbridge and the bus stops as examples of research nodes on the road does not mean that I left other sites unexplored. It is beyond the scope of the chapter and the dissertation as a whole to analyse all the possible nodal points. Nodal points are inseparable from the walking method. Walking along the road discloses those social nodes and studying these nodal points reveals that the road reflects the city as possessing both confidence in delivering progress and uncertainties in how much of it really materialises for some people. The exemplary nodes I have discussed in this chapter continue to influence the formation of the remaining chapters in the dissertation. That is why it is necessary to feature them in this chapter.
105 Non-place and the figure of stranger Finally, the research nodes I came across as a result of the walking exercises also bring out two typical characteristics of the road that can be observed and grasped at these nodes. One is the idea of non-place. The other is the figure of the stranger that takes on a conception specific to the Chinese context. As a material form that facilitates movements of people and goods, the road would be considered as a non-place by Augé’s definition (1995 [1992]). Building on the assumption that a place is defined as “relational, historical and concerned with identity”, Augé considers that a space that cannot be defined as the above would be a “non-place”, which he puts forward as a product of supermodernity (1995 [1992: 77–78). However, Augé also clarifies that the non-place and the place alike never exist in pure form and that he contrasts “the symbolized space of place with the non-symbolized space of non-place” (1995 [1992]: 82). Steering away from the negativity of de Certeua’s non-place, Augé characterises the space of non-place as “established through the mediation of words, or even text” (1995 [1992]: 94). To some extent, the nodal points I came across as a result of the walking method which reconfigured the experience as that of (ethnographic) infancy can be seen as the space of non-places. On the footbridge, for example, there are road signs fixed onto its sides to instruct, prohibit, or inform road users beneath. At the bus stops, there are similar signs telling people where to go and what route to take in order to reach their destinations. Likewise, non-places such as metro stations are defined by words and texts telling travellers the kind of activities and items prohibited. Between “the symbolized space of place and the non-symbolised space of non- place”, I am interested in the figure of the stranger, who is similar to the figure of the traveller in Augé’s discussions. Through nodal points, people pass by and “those who pass by”, according to Augé, “do not stop; but they may pass by again, every summer or several times a year” (1995 [1992: 98). As a result, “an abstract space … can become strangely familiar to them over time” (1995 [1992]: 98.). Augé describes the figure of solitude: “alone, but one of many, the user of non- place is in contractual relations with it” (1995 [1992]: 101). Non-verbal and gestural dialogues between humans and non-humans such as ticket machines with which the traveller often interacts dominate the world of supermodernity. One characteristic of the metropolis in which we live is the figure of the stranger, who, like Augé’s traveller, is
106 simultaneously present and absent. The stranger can be “the passenger (defined by his [or her] destination)” or the “traveller (who strolls along his [or her] route)” (1995 [1992]: 107). Simmel argues that “to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction” (1950: 402). Instead of non-participation, Simmel contends that the objectivity of the stranger is a specific form of participation. This conceptual liberation of the stranger somewhat allows me to adopt the role as a stranger ethnographer who interacts and participates in the land of strangers whom I encounter on the road. At least, that was my assumption. However, the figure of the stranger takes on a different conception in the Chinese context where there is a limited freedom of movement. The household registration (hù kŏu) system has been in place since the late 50s. It is a population control mechanism that ties individuals to their places of birth. One legal implication of this mechanism is people can only claim welfare benefits from their place of birth, regardless to the place of residence. This has become increasingly problematic for domestic migrants who have to move to another place (usually a city) for work. In addition to this issue, there are two types of hù kŏu – urban and rural. While it is relatively easier for people with urban hù kŏu to move the registration from one city to another, especially for those with higher qualifications, it remains difficult for those with rural hù kŏu to change their registration. As a result, there exists the floating population who have to keep on moving without the needed opportunity or attractive incentive to settle in one place. The word floating should also be understood in a way relating to one’s mode of being, besides the understanding in a spatial sense. That is to do with the rural and urban identities carried by people with their respective registration. Although the idea of rural or urban identity should be taken as a fluid form – one can become urban, one’s identity is also constructed with past experience. The reconceptualisation of the figure of stranger is thus context specific. The differential embodiment of hukou – rural or urban – makes the figure of stranger as a one-type-fits- all idea insufficient for describing people living in the city. Similarly, the experience of non-place also becomes different for a stranger with rural registration than one with urban registration. For someone from another urban setting, the figure of stranger may be a norm. But for someone from a rural setting, the figure of stranger may be one that stands for loneliness or other kinds of negative emotion of the kind.
107 Ethnographically, the adoption of a stranger ethnographer would be better understood as one that adopts the mode of floating. This mode of being, albeit as a temporary measure to the extent of doing fieldwork, offers a way for the ethnographer to be a step closer to being in someone else’s shoes.
Conclusion In this chapter on the method of walking, I have explored different modes of walking: walking with official maps showing the representational spaces, walking with the practice of dérive, which allows me to explore on and off the road, and walking with people as an allocentric exercise that allows me to gain different perspectives. I have also discussed an outcome of the walking methods: the discovery of social nodes. I emphasise the importance of pause-and-observe during the process of walking. I have argued that these social nodes are the particular points where I pause, observe, and engage with people who pass through these nodes. They are socially significant spaces that also offer me research directions. I have intended this chapter to be one of the hinges of the dissertation between context (Chapters 1 and 2) and ethnography (Chapters 5 and 6). Through this chapter, I have demonstrated that doing research on the road means not only constantly moving along but also taking the time and space to pause and observe other movements that configure the road in different ways. The interchanges between moving, pausing, observing, and engaging redefine the practice of participant observations on the road. Walking, as opposed to travelling in a vehicle, also generates the grounded experience of the road and its surroundings. It accentuates the road as a fluid subject that evokes urban issues concerning different people. All the moving and pausing I did on and along the road involved the use of audio- visual methods with a camera and an audio recorder along with the conventional pen and paper. The mechanical equipment picked up elements that I failed to notice but to which I had to go back. The use of audio-visual equipment was thus a way for me to repeat my engagement with the road in mind. In the next chapter, I move on to discussions about the audio-visual components of the project. The aim is to produce moving and still images in order to speak to the city image produced by the State.
108
Figure 14 Graffiti on an abandoned underground entrance next to Shennan Road (Futian)
Figure 15 Another abandoned underground exit next to Shennan Road (Futian)
109 Chapter 4: Seeing, image making and visual conversations
Introduction In this chapter, I firstly draw comparisons between seeing the road and the city (through the framed lens of the camera) from high above (de Certeau, 1984), hearing the city’s rhythms from Lefebvre’s balcony (2004 [1992]), and reading and writing about the city on the ground, where the tactile experience with the road informs the process of image-making. Instead of suggesting a hierarchy, I suggest that the comparison makes me aware of what is required of us to experience the city from different perspectives. In particular, I am interested in the role of visual methods with the use of a camera during the process of walking. I begin with the idea of framing. I argue that framing, rather than being a restrictive mechanism, can generate an understanding of the framed world. The camera is situated such that it is part of encounters with others and therefore changes the relational dynamics within the space. In discussing the visual outcomes – a film and a photo book – I intend them to engage in a visual conversation in which I use images to put into question the image of the city envisioned by the state. I intend the visual conversation as a way to produce contrast between what is experienced and what is expected. Especially taking into account of the Shenzhen case in the history of development, the speed of growth is matched by the scale of physical growth. It is scale, I argue, that should be taken into consideration of the notions of the visual. I conclude the chapter with remarks on the role of visual counterparts in relation to the written text. Visual counterparts in this project do not duplicate ‘reality’; they are not the visual demonstration of the scientific specimen. While I contend that walking, reading, writing, and mind-walking are all part of one and the same ongoing process, which also applies to the process of image-making, the role of visual counterparts remains fluid depending on the audience, rather than the image maker. Finally, I also add a retrospective remarks upon what the particular context in Shenzhen might have informed other strategies with the same method of walking, by revisiting an art experiment I carried out during the time I was in Shenzhen.
110 Up, down, and up again: the road and the city from different points of view In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau sets up his research to bring the everyday practices – “ways of operating” – into the foreground, by studying the successive tactics deployed by "the network of an antidiscipline” (1984: xv). He is concerned about the marginality of the silent majority, for they are the ordinary practitioners who compose “the manifold story” (1984: 93). Instead of the concept city, he sees urban practices that constitute stories. He compares seeing the city from the top of a building or an aeroplane, with experiencing “the thicks and thins” of the urban stories as “text” (1984: 93.). In the opening of the chapter on walking in the city, de Certeau describes the view of Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre (1984: 91). He characterises this experience of “seeing the whole” as erotic pleasure and identifies the person standing high above looking down as a voyeur. However, looking down at Shennan Road from the top of a high-rise next to it does not always arouse the same sort of sensation – far from it. At the very least, I am not a young white male and I look down at the road with mixed feelings of admiration and unease. Yet thanks to the extra layer of being a person who was born and had lived in Shenzhen for some years, the road and the city in which it is situated evoke memories which contrast the present. However, de Certeau considers this way of seeing the city, from which the viewer is dissociated, as the totalising gaze of the Leviathan. This top-down gaze bears resemblances to Eyal Weizman’s influential article on the politics of vertical urbanism. Weizman considers the aerial gaze facilitated by aerial technologies that underline the contemporary politics of warfare (2002). He explains that “high ground offers three strategic assets: greater tactical strength, self-protection and a wider view” (2002). This way of seeing and organising the city also applies to aeromobilities (Adey, 2010) as well as the contemporary practice of urban planning. Graham and Hewitt (2012) observe that horizontalism continues to dominate urban research in theorising the horizontal relationality. I contend that this is a phenomenon that dominates not only the Anglophone world, as Graham and Hewitt remark, but also the contemporary Chinese practice of urban planning and development. Over the first decade of the twenty-first century, Shenzhen has seen a proliferation of skyscrapers and clusters of high rise buildings, especially along Shennan Road, as a result of the rapid growth of the property market (Shin, 2011). These
111 skyscrapers not only showcase the economic success of the city but also embody the prominence of vertical developments that continue to direct the growth of urban density literally upward. As I am looking down at the road, people who aspire to live ‘the high life’ are also looking up at the tall buildings surrounding them. Therefore, for the ethnographer, standing 20-plus storeys above ground is also an important position from which to consider the state as using these skyscrapers and high-rise gated communities to visually promote high living to the people and for me to imagine the upward aspirations of some of these people. Having a point of view is not only about seeing; it is also a process that involves hearing, which also evokes imaginations and mind-wandering with a different sense of scale. In Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre studies his city through its rhythms and praises the great invention of balconies, which allow one to situate oneself “simultaneously inside and outside” (2004 [1992]: 27). The balcony, according to Lefebvre, lets him observe the multiple rhythms in parts as well as in totality. He can dissect them in detail and in terms of interactions. However, Lefebvre’s Parisian balcony is not exactly the same as the balcony on which I stand – over 25 storeys above ground6. From my balcony, I grasp the rhythms of the road by looking at the flows of traffic throughout the day. Trying to hear the road is a different experience, which increasingly congeals into waves of white noise – this is what the road sounds like from above. Looking at the traffic below, the fast-moving vehicles appear to become slower as I ascend higher. People on the ground are also reduced to tiny dots within the limits of my sight. My balcony thus offers me a different sense of scale of the road in comparison to the city. Using a camera to capture the city that looks slow but sounds fast becomes a remote engagement with the road and the city. The camera at this point and at this height becomes at once an aerial gazing instrument that is scaled down by the view of the growing city. Yet when the camera moves down to the ground level, it becomes both magnified as a socially situated agent that reconfigures the social dynamics of which it is a part.
6 The flooring system is slightly different in China from that in the UK. The ground floor (of the UK system) is the first floor in China.
112 With a camera The practice of filming involves the practice of looking through the frame of camera lens. Looking at the road through the framed lens while walking did not come naturally to me when I first began using the camera. Initially, looking through the framed lens, I felt rather mechanical as I walked with the camera. Heidegger explains that the technology of enframing means “the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e. challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve” (1977: 20). With enframing being the essence of modern technology, Heidegger describes that the (framed) world is revealed to be one that is calculable and orderable. A frame is therefore an ordering mechanism that reconfigures the space in which I am situated by restricting it as a framed space. Jean Rouch makes similar comments regarding the visual restriction of framing: “I began to learn how little we see of the reality around us through the window of a camera, and that most of the content in the film is either unseen or invisible” (citied in MacDougall 2005: 253). Without being trapped by the objectivity–subjectivity dilemma, framing in practice means restrictions of vision, rather than annihilation of vision. However, it is not always a restrictive mechanism, for example, when the camera is fixed upon a particular space, or what Deleuze calls a set (1986), gazing down from above. By framing, I can capture the changes of the framed space. Thus carving a space with the frame allows the audience to see “the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded” and that “the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of the panoptic power” (de Certeau 1984: 95). By framing one particular space, the ethnographer witnesses the other journeys made through it, elevating the singularity of the space to a multiplicity of journeys. William H. Whyte’s film provides a convincing argument for it. In The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, cameras are set up to capture a public plaza within the camera frame and map the diversity of activities taking place within the mechanical boundaries of the framed space. Here, framing provides the lens through which a particular type of activity is highlighted. Furthermore, framing also demonstrates each space as a junction and a visual node through which journeys crisscross each other, where the ethnographer could spot
113 a connection to the next ‘node’. In other words, a particular kind of space emerges out of the definition through the camera. It is a process of ontological transformation regarding the space in question. Whyte highlights in his film that one of the activities in the public plaza is the simple act of watching other passers-by. The camera thus captures the co-existence of strangers who are interested in or at least aware of the presence of others without interacting with them. The technique of framing from afar thus allows visual patterns to be captured over time, as Whyte’s film demonstrates. Deleuze’s remark appropriately summarises this: “the frame teaches us that the image is not just given to be seen” (1986: 12). Besides the minute details of social life, it is equally important for the ethnographer to use a framed gaze to grasp the subject in question in its relations with other ‘framed elements’ outside the frame (Deleuze 1986). However, using a camera while walking is also a skill that the ethnographer develops. Throughout the dissertation, I emphasise the importance of studying the road from different perspectives in order to grasp the complexities embedded within them. I have discussed the fact that the method of walking allows me to get an insight into different perspectives. Questions remain. How does the use of a camera facilitate (or not) the encounters with people and what comes after these visual encounters? I am concerned about it as a situated skill that I have to learn as an ethnographer, especially in situations when encounters with people take place (Ingold, 2000). The camera is as much situated as I am. My encounters with people often registered the presence of my camera. As far as I was concerned, having the camera with me meant that I could take visual notes of anything that might be of use in analysis later or simply out of impulse as a photographer interested in urban life. Yet for others, being a person with a camera has many implications. Being seen with a camera attracted attentions, for example at a bus stop, on the footbridge, or in the middle of a busy square. There was a time when I was filming a group of female shoe polishers in a small square near the junction between Shennan Road and a street leading into an urban village. It was a busy square with people doing various things. Besides the shoe polishers, there were people sitting on benches, children playing, old people playing cards, street hairdressers, sales promotion staff from nearby shops, and so on. On camera, I caught people looking at me (or the camera), away, and then back at me again. It was not until I approached one of the shoe
114 polishers that I found out that they thought I was an undercover journalist. They seemed to be a little less concerned when I told them I was just a college student. Another occasion when I was mistaken for someone else, was when I started talking to a security guard at a bus stop. He saw me using the camera at the bus stop, and whenever I turned to him, he would look away from the camera. When I approached him with the direct question of what he thought of Shennan Road, he told me he thought I was a professional photographer, because he had seen a few of them around. On a different day but at the same bus stop, a young man who was waiting for his bus approached me, asked me if I was testing the camera, and told me that the company where he worked manufactured a component inside DSLR cameras. To some extent, the same goes for walking with a camera in terms of the kind of reactions it causes. However, moving with a camera is different from using it at a fixed place. Although I still caught passers-by looking at the camera, it did not cause the same level of curiosity or alertness. Occasionally, I would catch people following the direction in which I pointed the camera to find out what had aroused my curiosity. In such a case as this, the curiosity was not the camera but the ‘mystery’ in which I took an interest. The examples of encounter I have given so far demonstrate two things. The camera does facilitate encounters with people due to the reaction it causes amongst strangers. However, some of the encounters captured by the camera lead to visual behaviours (Newton, 1998). Visual behaviours in turn reflect the unstable boundary between a hyper-mediated world and the bubble of privacy of which people remain protective in public space. To stretch this a little further, the camera not only facilitates encounters with people but also makes manifest some characteristics of the road. Because the use of a camera occurred during the process of walking and pausing, audio-visual methods as incorporated into the walking methods thus become an extension of a heuristic act that is walking. The audio-visual data created then continue the walk from the road to my mind during the process of writing up the research.
Visual production and outcomes The process of making moving images is different from that of still images. The difference becomes manifest in the issue of representation and power, which arises especially in the process of filming. The process of editing begins as filming begins and
115 that it is controlled not solely by me but also by the people being filmed. A prominent feature of the film is the lack of faces, which is a deliberate act not by myself but by the people being filmed. The lack of faces in turn forces the focus to remain on the road and maintains the visual conversation that puts into question the image of the city constructed by the state. The other outcome – a photo-book which I use to reconfigure the road on the plane with imprints of different types of still images. I consider the photo-book as a visual dialogue between the road and elements that are expected and unexpected on it. As a whole, the process of editing a film and putting together a photo-book is not linear and the process of writing itself also influences how the outcomes of the visual counterparts take shape. With reference to Solnit’s idea of reading and writing as ways of travelling in mind, Ingold argues that both of these apparently non-visual acts do involve the eyes and the mind (2010b). Working its way backward, I argue walking with a camera is also a process of writing. In the following discussions, I elaborate on the outcomes of using audio-visual methods during fieldwork. The audio-visual counterparts to the dissertation are a short film and a photo book. I highlight a prominent feature in the film and examine the issue of representation and power, which relates back to encounters with people with the camera. Through the film, I draw on the road as a way into the city in order to produce a visual conversation. I intend to continue this conversation in the photo book, which is imprinted with images created by myself and found from secondary sources. I consider that still images play an important role in reconfiguring the road. The prominent feature in the film I wish to highlight is the lack of faces. This is not accidental but a deliberate act of the people I was filming during fieldwork. I have mentioned earlier that audio-visual methods highlight the uncomfortable boundary between a hyper-mediated world and individual protections of privacy in public space. The lack of faces in the film implies that I do not dictate the process of filming even though I am the one using the camera. For example, I filmed a bus stop security guard making handcrafted roses with palm tree leaves he had found elsewhere. In the film, I did not show the face of this security guard, upon his request. Although I reassured him that I would not use the footage in a way that could cost him his job, he was still being cautious, because making
116 and selling handcrafted roses was not part of his job and if he had been caught doing so, he would have been fired. Without my presence, he would still have been cautious. However, my presence with the camera made him more cautious and that was one of the reasons why he did not want me to film his face in any of the footage. I reassured him by showing him the footage afterwards. On my side, I was equally cautious for his sake and mine. To some extent, this deliberate act of not appearing fully in the film, as far as the guard is concerned, is an act of self-protection that I must respect. Yet an indirect implication is that he claimed his power in the process of filming. Although the subjects who appear in the film are not political activists or people whose lives may be threatened by my presence with a camera, I had to take precautions in case of any eventualities. However, the issue of representation and power in the process of filming is not a one-way process of me giving power to the subjects. As the example of the security guard shows, it is a power he claims for himself. Similarly, people such as the vendors on the footbridge were filmed in a discrete manner because of their concerns about unwanted attention from urban management authorities. This particular feature continues to inform the process of writing. In Chapter 5 especially, I discuss how these vendors occupy a double-edged position where they have to be visible to their customers but remain strategically unnoticeable in order to stay out of sight of street disciplinary authorities. The film in turn becomes a platform through which we can understand their position, which informs us of their perspective on the road as a public space that is not open to them. In comparison to making the film, I take a greater degree of liberty in creating the photo book as an artistic endeavour. However, I remain committed to representing the road from different perspectives, as informed by the fieldwork. In writing up the dissertation, I rely on using different perspectives to demonstrate the complexities of the social lives that take place on and around the road. But in representing the road with still images, the matter of perspective becomes a problem. The answer lies in the manipulation of still images. In a conventional sense, perspective is about the visual arrangement of space. In his refutation of Leonardo de Vinci’s interpretation of perspective as “a branch of geometry”, R. L. Gregory argues that perspective is beyond the geometrical but one that
117 concerns perception (Gregory, 1977: 170). He notes that “it is the artist’s task to make us reject the first reality while conveying the second, so that we see his world and not mere patches of colour on a flat surface” (1977: 170.) Gregory thus defines perspective as an idea that serves to give viewers “a certain shape from a certain point of view” and that “[the artist] does not draw what he sees – he represents his retinal images” (1977: 170-174). Consequently, perspective in representing the road with still images is about the message that each image conveys in relation to other still images. My manipulations of still images serve the purpose of building links between these images in order to use them to tell different stories that are attached to the road.
Of the notions of the visual Shenzhen’s development is unprecedented, in part because of the speed of change and the scale of physical transformation of the city, which is unmatched by any developments carried out before. The mega structures being built across China have also stretched people’s imaginations about what can be achieved. As the photo by Weng Fen suggests, the scale of change is made manifest in the contrast between the human body and the size, scale and materials of the surrounding built environment, offering an ever present and highly visible contrast between the vulnerability and motility of the human form and the massive steel, concrete and glass constructions that surround it. Bringing this scale of change and the drastic contrast between the human body and the built environments into consciousness involves vision, as “seeing not only makes us alive to the appearance of things but to being itself” (MacDougall, 2005: 1). Taking inspiration from MacDougall’s reexamination of the relation between seeing, thinking and knowing, in the visual project, my aim is to build visual conversations between what we see, what we expect to see and what is intended for us to see (in part through the use of still and moving images) that evoke and highlight the interrelated issues of contrast and scale. The idea of scale in the realm of the visual is particularly pertinent to the Chinese context. The size of China and the magnitude of urbanization and economic growth across the country make the consideration for scale a key point in visualizing, and understanding Shenzhen, including as an index and materialization of China’s modernist dream.
118 It is the interrelation between seeing, thinking and knowing that informs the visual strategies of walking, filming and photography. The visual orientation of looking up, ahead and back at one’s own feet as one moves through various urban fabrics generates a corporeal experience of the magnitude of urbanization, with a cinematic quality (Irving 2013). As the human body moves along the road, passing by industrial structures of different sizes, one’s sensations transform along the way. Yet, scale is not just about the contrast between the human body and the mega structures materialized by capital accumulation. When one stands on the road facing the skyscrapers near and far, the human body is also a ground for understanding the level of ambition of the Chinese modernist state. The result – the physical transformations that have taken place in Shenzhen – could be seen as almost intended by the state to fill one’s body with sensations of futurity and awe. The process of walking engages seeing and feeling the surrounding environments, in order for the body to find bearings of one’s position and understanding (with consciousness) one’s being. Walking is a process of life. However, as MacDougall points out, film and photography is about something (2005), whilst walking in this sense is a process of life finding the subject matters for the subsequent film and photographic images. There is the discrepancy between what is experienced and what is expected. This is not only pertinent for audience trying to understand the transformation of Shenzhen but also for those who were attracted by advertisements and media campaigns with which the city sells itself. Roadside billboards and massive LED screens are selling, day and night, to passers-by the lifestyle that each hard working citizen is expected to aspire to. These visually impactful images tell people that European style villas and high-rise apartments are anything but far away. They invite dreamers to dream. It is a contrast anchored on the difference between how China was once perceived and the social, economic and material changes that have taken place under the guise of modernity. Modernity is made visible by the film and photographic images. However, as one walks through life, modernity is everywhere challenged. That is because the process of walking involves more than seeing, despite that vision influences one’s perception of the city. In June 2014, I carried out an art project on the sounds of the city as a part of the collective project hosted by the CZC Special Forces (previously mentioned) based in the urban village called Baishizhou. I used the same methods of walking as I had been doing on Shennan Road to explore the sonic environment of the main high street in
119 Baishizhou. As a result of walking on daily basis, I produced a series of sound recordings that depict the richness of sonic environment of the street in Baishizhou, posing start contrast to sounds of Shennan Road. I had in mind a question while I was working on the project – what do the sounds of the road tell me by comparing them to the sounds of a street in an urban village. On the main street in Baishizhou, one could hear many shops playing Chinese pop music in high volume – it is a competition for shoppers’ attention between different shops through the music they play. Meanwhile, shop assistants are also clapping their hands and shouting out promotional messages that end up sounding just like rhythmic chants. In a faint but audible volume, there are kids playing in a nearby alleyway while there are some women with kids chatting with each other complaining about their daily struggle in the kitchen and their relationships with in-laws. In comparison, the sound of Shennan Road is much more monotonous and inconsistent (depending on the section of the road). Listening to the road and a street in an urban village with contrasting sonic environments constitutes a way of seeing, perceiving and understanding the city, without looking. The sonic environment of the high street in Baishizhou is composed of many layers of sounds that reflect the diversity of lives unfolding in the community. In comparison to that of the road, and the wider environment of the city, there exists a multiplicity in the sensory experience of urban environments. But the contrast in between two different environments prompted me to locate where they meet. Irving argues that “movement is a creative act of poesis that continuously generate complex amalgamations and juxtapositions of perception…” (2013:292). Walking along residential streets and car-dominated roads while attending to the changes of surrounding sounds informs one of the boundary spaces between different kinds of sonic environments. Irving describes that being on a bridge is situating oneself off the land, above the water and beneath the clouds – somewhat up in the air – and that “the mind and body have the potential to be subjected to various delirious effect…” (2013: 293). Likewise, locating oneself in the boundary spaces where two different sonic environments meet also provokes a temporary loss and subsequent recovery of orientations. Consequently, these boundary spaces become the nodes for sensory reconfigurations.
120 In retrospect, the production of the film, which bears resemblance to a Chinese scroll painting depicting a journey along a river, should be given more sensory ‘texture’ with the combined use of sound recordings, images and narrations of individuals’ stories. In expressing the idea of scale and contrast through the visual manifestation of the film, a journey along the road would be presented as multi-faceted, from the monotone in low frequency to the polyphonic dissonance that disrupts the rational modernist city. With recording technologies, the production of visual and audio materials taking forms in film and sound tracks is not an act of mere documentation or replicating a reality, but it becomes a generative tool to produce mediate experience of the city through the framed images. Using different audio testimonies as insertion to the film at points where what is seen on the screen becomes a mismatch of what is heard. Audio testimonies in this case become a reminder of the lives beyond the frame. The prominence of the visual components such as the manicured green spaces and the architectural designs on and along the road in fact prompts the use of visual methods and representations as a way to engage in a visual conversation that puts the public image of the city into question and to highlight the scale of transformation over the last three decades. In the everyday life, people are engaged in a visual dialogue with the environment in which they live by means of their eyes, cameras and smart phones. People respond to what they see with audio-visual media which in turn generates further sensations and therefore it is not just the “established professional anthropologists” who are responding to what they see (Wright 1998: 16). By the same token, the visual outcomes I have produced as a result of the fieldwork are not just representations in themselves but they continue to engage in visual conversations that arise out of them.
121 Break Here I put a pause to the dissertation by introducing visual components of the dissertation.
Film: A Road, available at https://vimeo.com/channels/szshennanroad (password: mcr2016); Photo book: Shennan Road;
I suggest to watch the film and go through the photo book before moving on to the remaining chapters of the dissertation.
122 Chapter 5: Spatial stories of negotiating presence on the road
Introduction In this chapter, I focus the attention on the people who use the road in a way that is unintended by the State but have managed to negotiate their presence. Specifically, I present a set of ethnographic materials of breakfast vendors on a footbridge over Shennan Road. Through detailed descriptions of their spatial stories of appropriating a bit of public space without the legal right or financial means to protect their right to space and negotiating their presence. I engage with Bourdieu’s claims about the mobility of people with capital and the relative fixedness of those without (1999 [1993]: 123-129). I argue that the street vendors, as the economically underprivileged people, demonstrate another side to Bourdieu’s argument. Spatial mobility for people of the more privileged position is afforded by choice. The vendors show a huge degree of forced spatial mobility as they are constantly under threat of eviction by urban management authorities. With vendors coming from another place from which they have been evicted, this footbridge over Shennan Road is a ‘leftover space’ for some of them. Secondly, I argue that the so-called visibility and invisibility of the underprivileged are not given qualities but that they are discussed in relative terms regarding to whom they choose to be visible or unnoticeable. Especially in the case of skirting around chéng guăn (urban management authorities), they have to adopt strategies to avoid being caught and evicted by authorities but remain visible to their customers for the time being. As a result, the spatial stories in the case of vendors and chéng guăn become a habitual game of negotiation of some kind, despite the fact that vendors are not in the position to foresee when they would be caught and evicted. I also suggest that the study of the vendors’ spatial stories on the footbridge problematises the road as a public good. In this case, I look at the idea of social selectiveness of infrastructure (Amin, 2014). The ethnographic materials make manifest that the road is not a public good open to all users, which in turn renders infrastructure destabilised. It therefore highlights the discrepancy between what the road is intended to include and exclude and the unintended usage by unexpected users. This unintended
123 and indeed an invented ad-hoc role of the road, to some extent, renders it a temporary ‘refuge’ space of non-place. In conclusion, I highlight implications of the constant state of disenfranchisement of people such as street vendors who have limited means of self-protection or protection by civil rights and that, to vendors, being temporarily not-yet-noticed by chéng guăn demonstrates a strategic self-dispossession of their ‘publicness’.
Site Portraits A footbridge over Shennan Road became a research site for a few months. There I observed and conducted informal interviews with two couples who were breakfast vendors during the morning rush hour. The footbridge is located directly above a part of the avenue section of Shennan Road in Futian District, with the nearest underground station called Chegongmiao. My interactions with the vendors were mostly restricted to the time when I helped them with setting up the stalls in the morning and packing up after service. At the time of fieldwork, the surfaces of some parts of Shennan Road were disrupted by the underground expansion projects that had been taking place. Before the underground projects began, this section of Shennan Road was straight and maintained in pristine state. A significant part of the road was closed and the open parts had to be rerouted and lanes redrawn. This section is often congested with traffic during the rush hour as a result of the disruptions. Besides the usual traffic noises, the addition of the noises and dust coming from the nearby construction sites on dry days gives a different atmospheric composition to this section of Shennan Road. Observations of the street vendors during this time were often accompanied by the background noise of heavy machines working on the construction sites, which were only a few metres away from the footbridge. On both sides of this section of Shennan Road, there lie two distinctive neighbourhoods. On the southern side is the neighbourhood of Tairan, which is an ageing industrial-cum-residential estate, and further south from which sits an urban village. The buildings immediately next to the road are all high-rise office buildings. On the northern side of the road, however, lies one of Shenzhen’s most sought-after and affluent neighbourhoods, Xiangmihu, which also houses the biggest Korean community in the city. In this affluent neighbourhood, one can easily find international chains such
124 as Costa, Starbucks, Burger King and Pacific Coffee. Both neighbourhoods are culturally diverse but on two different scales: national and international. The footbridge is occupied by different vendors at different times. In the morning, the footbridge was usually busy with people crossing and some stopping by the breakfast vendors to get their breakfast on the go. But in the late afternoon, there is usually a sales representative from a local gym promoting memberships with discounts. Except for the breakfast vendors and the fruit vendor, other vendors come to the footbridge with just a few things to set up their stalls which usually consisted of an empty sack spread on the floor with various items on it. In comparison, the setup of the breakfast stalls looks considerably more cumbersome and less easily manoeuvrable. However, there are also times when the footbridge is quiet, without any vendors around. Late at night, it is quiet. But because there are not any tall trees providing shades, the amount of time when the footbridge is left vacant during the summer, is when it is the hottest during the day when the temperature can reach at high as 38 Celsius degree. Since construction work on the expansion of the underground railway systems began, the breakfast vendors have enjoyed a surge in sales. Occasionally, even the other vendors buy breakfast from them. But for the odd vendors who sell miscellaneous items, sales remain few and far between. Some of them come to the footbridge around the same time as the breakfast vendors, hoping to catch the passing trade in the morning but unsuccessfully most of the times. There is always a vendor selling cardboard craft sets. From time to time, there is a young girl selling handmade Chinese knots in different decorative styles and sizes. Below I present a couple of descriptions of the scene.
It was almost 6:30 a.m. Shennan Road was relatively free from traffic, except for a few buses. As I looked eastward, the sun was rising and the light shone through the top of Ping’an [the tallest skyscraper under construction in Shenzhen at the time]. The footbridge was still rather quiet with just a few people crossing. Gradually, as time was approaching the rush hour, the footbridge started to look busier with more people crossing. The breakfast stalls had already started serving the passing trade. The pace of life, or indeed work, was much faster than it looked from above. […]
125 The sweet savoury smell of steamed buns filled the footbridge as if there were an invisible dome over it keeping the smell lingering in mid-air. It was early in the morning and I heard people murmuring softly against the hard sound of construction in the background. The traffic was getting heavier below. The sound of people’s footsteps crossing the footbridge was also joining the morning symphony of work. On one side of the footbridge, there was a constant stream of passers-by. On the other side, the Zhangs and the Fans [breakfast vendors] were working fast and hard to serve the hungry workers. The space was tight but orderly. There was no shouting across the space to be heard. The couples were working closely together to get things done. When one order was done, they quickly moved onto the next. (Extracts from field notes, 13 October 2013)
Mr and Mrs Zhang are one of the couples selling breakfast. They originally came from a village in Hunan (a province of the Chinese hinterland). Mr Zhang came to Shenzhen in June 2012 to work in a factory in Bao’an District in western Shenzhen. Before moving to Shenzhen, he had already worked in other major cities in southern China, such as Guangzhou, Zhuhai, and Dongguang between 2009 and early 2012. Three months later, Mrs Zhang joined him in Shenzhen and started working as a waitress in a restaurant. They became vendors in early 2013. They rent a room of about 20 m2 with a small kitchen in an urban village near Tairan, to the south of Shennan Road. Every morning, they set up the stall at 7:00 a.m. ready for the morning waves of workers. This footbridge is one of the three in this section of the road offering direct ways to cross the road aboveground, but the only one that is wide enough to accommodate vendors and pedestrians. People use the underground to get to the other side of the road too, but there are more distractions on the way and the routes are not as direct. The Zhangs sell dim-sum at their stall, which offers between six and nine types of steamed food, including steamed buns with sweet or savoury fillings such as barbecued pork, pork and cabbage, and other vegetable fillings. There are also steamed dumplings, the Zhangs’ bestseller. Mr Zhang buys ready-made dim-sum from a local wholesaler. Every morning, Mrs Zhang gets up at around 4:00 a.m. to prepare the trolley and the canisters for the
126 steamer. She boxes up the food and Mr Zhang loads the small electric cart on which they ride to the footbridge. When they have finished in the morning, they go home. Mrs Zhang works at home and sometimes assembles plastic flowers for a nearby factory that outsources their orders. Mr Zhang goes and does a few odd jobs in the neighbourhood for an extra bit of money to keep up with the rent. Every now and then, Mrs Zhang calls her parents in her home village to check on her children left behind in the village, looked after by their grandparents. In comparison to their previous jobs, working as street vendors provides a significant degree of independence for the Zhangs. It also gives them the flexibility to do other jobs that might come up when they finish the morning business. Mr Zhang is a well-connected individual in his neighbourhood and his connections often provide him with sufficient temporary jobs to get extra bits of income. On average, the Zhangs make between 5000 and 6000 RMB a month and two- thirds of their monthly income is sent back home to pay for their children’s school fees and other household expenditures. In theory, the Zhangs should have the flexibility to go home when they wish, without having to wait for the national holidays when the demands for coach and train tickets are high. In practice, the need to make just enough money to get by means that they have to spend the majority of their waking hours doing different jobs, which vary and are not always regular. It helps that Mr Zhang is a well-connected individual in his neighbourhood. Like many other migrants, they can only reunite with their family during chūn jié (the Chinese Spring Festival – the lunar New Year) or the summer when their children can visit. Apart from the days they spend in their hometown, the Zhangs’ life in Shenzhen basically revolves around making ends meet on a daily basis. As there are other breakfast vendors and miscellaneous vendors, the Zhangs always make sure they known their place and remain in their space. There is no explicit agreement made between vendors, but everyone seems to know his or her place once a mutual acknowledgement is established. One group of breakfast vendors has a mobile DIY oven set up and sells freshly baked flat bread with pork and vegetable filling. The other breakfast vendor specialises in different types of steamed buns in small and large sizes. All three groups of breakfast vendors, including the Zhangs, line up on one side of the footbridge, serving the passing office workers every working day.
127 The Fans are another couple I introduce here. They are in their late fifties. They have a 21-year old son who is attending college in Guangzhou, studying Information Technology (IT). Mr Fan takes pride in the achievements and aspirations of his son, who works hard for better opportunities in life. The IT industry in Shenzhen has grown rapidly, making it the centre of the country’s IT industry after Beijing. Many well-known IT companies have set up their headquarters in the city. Every morning at 2:00 a.m., Mr Fan gets up and starts making steamed buns with Mrs Fan and preparing multi-grain porridge, soya milk, etc. for breakfast. Unlike the Zhangs, the Fans have been breakfast vendors for over eight years. They relocated to the footbridge just a few months before, as they were evicted by the chéng guăn in their neighbourhood. Compared to the street where they used to sell breakfast, according to Mr Fan, the footbridge is a safer place to continue their vending business. Although the relocation meant losing many of their old customers, the footbridge is nonetheless a better location for them for now. Despite that they have found the footbridge as a temporary refuge space, they are not certain as to when they will be evicted from the footbridge. Nor do they know where they will relocate to. Although the Zhangs have been lucky enough to not have experienced eviction yet, it seems inevitable that they will one day have to confront chéng guăn if they get caught. It is becoming increasingly difficult for vendors to find trading space without the certainty of knowing how long they are allowed to be there. For vendors, they have to constantly watch out for chéng guăn. For chéng guăn, they have the responsibility to keep streets clean and tidy and that makes evicting illegal vendors a part of their job. As a result, vendors have to be constantly ready to relocate should chéng guăn appears.
Fixedness and mobility Bourdieu draws a link between people with capital and consumption of space. Differentiated space projects differentiated society (1999 [1993]: 124). In the case of Shenzhen, a typical example demonstrating the material contrast between differentiated spaces is that between urban villages and the high rise gated communities that surround them. Especially in the OCT, Baishizhou sits in close proximity to affluent gated communities that have emerged over the last three decades, replacing the farmlands that used to surround the villages of Baishizhou.
128 Bourdieu argues that “an agent’s position in social space is expressed in the site of physical space where the agent is situated … and by the relative position that their temporary localizations, and especially the permanent ones … occupy in relation to the localizations of other agents” (1999 [1993]: 124). He further states: “the value of different regions of reified social space is defined in this relation between the distribution of agents and the distribution of goods in social space” (1999 [1993]: 125). In relation to the spatial difference between urban villages and affluent gated communities, Bourdieu’s explanation seems to make sense. To put it simply, gated communities see a concentration of goods that reflect the higher social strata that residents occupy. Likewise, urban villages also see a concentration of goods that are of lower social strata and therefore consumed by people of lower strata. Physical and spatial differences reflect social differences, and vice versa. With the example of Paris, Bourdieu compares the Left Bank with the Right Bank, from the perspective of playwrights, painters, and critics, “as the opposition … between avant-garde art (off-Broadway theatre) and ‘bourgeois’ art (Broadway shows)” (1999 [1993]: 126). In the example of Tairan and Xiangmihu, between which the footbridge is located, the neighbourhoods are the opposition between small eateries frequented by people of lower social strata and restaurants frequented by those of higher strata. I was invited to morning yum cha (breakfast/ brunch) with some family friends at a Cantonese restaurant in the Xiangmihu neighbourhood. Having breakfast in a leisurely manner in the grand hall of a Cantonese restaurant poses a stark contrast to having breakfast on the go, bought from a vendor. During breakfast with family friends, I asked them about breakfast vendors and one of them replied, telling me to write down what he said, as shown below.
When you are a young dă gōng zăi (working boy) or dă gōng mèi (working girl), you are constantly under the time pressure of arriving at work early and leaving work late. When would you have time to think about what to have for breakfast, let alone how you would enjoy the most important meal of the day? Look around you, have a look at the kinds of customers sitting in this hall enjoying their breakfasts. We are people who have time and can afford to take time to enjoy our breakfast with family and friends. We can afford it, but [those young urbanites] can’t. At least, not in the same way. Likewise, when you have time and can afford
129 to enjoy breakfast at your pace, why would you get it on the go from a vendor in the street?” (Extracts from miscellaneous quotes, undated)
There is a difference between being able to sit down and enjoy breakfast properly without concern about the time and having to buy breakfast on the go under the constraint of time. In this case, this difference concerns social position and spatial mobility. Bourdieu argues that “the power over space is also … a power over time” and that “possession of a physical space … is a way of holding at a distance and excluding any kind of undesirable intrusion” (1999 [1993]: 127). He observes that “the ability to dominate space, notably by appropriating the rare goods … distributed there, depends on the capital possessed” and that “capital makes it possible to keep undesirable persons and things at a distance at the same time that it brings closer desirable persons and things, thereby minimizing the necessary expense (notably time) in appropriating them” (1999 [1993]: 127). One important point in Bourdieu’s argument is the difference in the degree of mobility and flexibility afforded by capital. He argues the people with (financial, social, and cultural) capital have more power to dominate and therefore claim the desirable, with power over space. Therefore capital allows people a huge degree of flexibility and therefore the choice to be mobile and fixed as they wish. In regard to those with a lack of capital, Bourdieu argues that “it chains one to a place” (1999 [1993]: 127). Here Bourdieu seems to describe a phenomenon where being rich is having options of where to go and being poor is being deprived of choice. This implies a causal relation between people with capital and people without, where the former makes the choice and thus hinders the latter with no choice. The lack of capital may render people spatially immobile to a degree, in terms of where they can live. But I diverge from Bourdieu with the argument that the lack of capital, to a great extent, also forces people to be spatially mobile and flexible on a regular basis in order to seek opportunities for better livelihood. When there is a lack of choice as a result of the lack of capital, people are forced to move further afield in search for opportunities. Yet one note of clarification is that it is not a lack of choice as a result
130 of the rich possessing it, but a lack of choice as a result of the State making the space inaccessible to ‘illegal traders’. Looking at the life journey of Mr Zhang, for example, it becomes manifest that, as a migrant, for his work and livelihood, he has had to move from one city to another in search of better opportunities over the years. As breakfast vendors, the Fans have to move from one location to another as part of their engagement in the spatial negotiations with the authorities. It is a not a phenomenon specific to the Chinese context but one that also applies to other cultural contexts such as Ghana (Asiedu & Agyei-Mensah, 2008). Bourdieu is concerned about the political construction of space, which “favours the construction of homogeneous groups on a spatial basis” (1999 [1993]: 129). In the case of Bogota, Donovan demonstrates the formalisation of street vending; therefore, attempts to spatially fix vendors in government-built markets would not always improve their conditions and livelihoods (2008). The forced mobility of vendors raises a question about what kind of space Shennan Road is. As a transit space, it is a non-place and it is even more so when it is a temporary ‘refuge’ space for vendors who are deprived of the rights to use it without the threat of being evicted at a time unpredictable to them. That the road, as the city’s thoroughfare, is also a heavily regulated space exacerbates the degree of uncertainty for these vendors.
Regulation of space and people According to Article 22 of Chapter 3 of Management and Regulations of City Image and Environmental Hygiene of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, it is forbidden by law to “use roads, roadside spaces, footbridges, pedestrian pavements and other public spaces for stacking items, food and non-food vending for commercial purposes” (Shenzhen Government, 2010). In other words, it is illegal for street vendors to carry out informal commercial activities in public spaces such as roadside spaces or in this case the footbridge. The punishment for illegal vending in public spaces such as the footbridge is 1000 RMB per square metre and the confiscation of all vending items and apparatuses if it is deemed a serious offense. For food vendors whose monthly incomes are unstable and at times unprofitable, such a fine could easily topple their businesses.
131 Regulations such as this instantly put the Zhangs, the Fans, and other street food vendors alike in the category of the undesirable Other who do not conform to the city image envisioned by the State. However, it is not as simple as this. Despite such a heavy penalty, it was still common to see breakfast vendors, trading in the morning across the city. I later found out that there had been a nation-wide project called “Safe Breakfast Campaign” to promote an infrastructure for an economy of safe breakfasts and that in Shenzhen a similar project had begun as early as 2000 (Shenzhen News, 2014). This project was initiated by the State in order to combat the problem of food safety. As a State-initiated project supported by a holding company that distributes trading rights to franchisees, the project is not considered as a violation of the regulation. Franchised vendors are given permission to trade at a set time in the morning (until 9:30 a.m.) and have to trade at a location designated by the company. Vendors who are affiliated with the project are considered as legal, whereas those who are not would be considered illegal. Franchised vendors are equipped with vending sets and project logo so that they are visually differentiated from vendors who are not part of the project. By this legal and visual definition, independent vendors such as the Zhangs and the Fans would be considered as illegal; thus they would be subject to fines and even confiscation of all their items should they be caught. Furthermore they would be the first to be blamed for causing trouble if problems were to arise regarding food safety. This arbitrary categorisation of the legality of vendors adds a layer of ambiguity to the regulation: the double standard of allowing certified franchised vendors to trade but not the others. The emergence of vendors who fake their vending rights by claiming to be part of the movement when they are not further puts other independent vendors such as the Zhangs and the Fans at risk of being perceived as the real trouble-makers (iFeng News 2014). As a result, the cycle of blame and ambiguity continues. There is a perception of street food vendors as gōng hài (public vermin) – a phrase that came up in a conversation I had with the Fans at the end of their breakfast service.
Mr Fan: Compared to the street where we used to trade, the footbridge is a lot safer. For one, we are not in anyone’s way. It is a footbridge so there aren’t any
132 cars on the footbridge. The authorities cannot kick us away. We are not making a mess here. We tidy up before we go. [Meanwhile, Mrs Fan was serving a construction worker from the nearby construction site.] Mrs Fan: But the authorities still see us as gōng hài (public vermin). […] They think we are irresponsible and uncivilised. We are not that bad and we don’t sell food that is not hygienic. Mr Fan: Exactly. That is basic business ethics. You can’t serve bad food to people. Otherwise no one would come back. I have been in Shenzhen for years now and we are not very educated but we know what is right or wrong. I just wish the authorities would understand us a bit more and try and see it from our point of view. We don’t have enough money to buy or rent a space and we are trying to make a living after all. […] I sat on my little plastic stool next to the Fans. I was taking notes on the morning traffic. The breakfast vendors were enjoying another morning of busy service. I saw a well-dressed woman who looked as though she worked in an office. She had just finished paying for her takeaway breakfast from the Zhangs. She came up to me and asked what I was doing. It was not the first time I had been asked the question, nor would it be the last. I told her I was doing research on Shennan Road and she looked more confused than ever. I quickly asked her what she had bought for her breakfast. Then I found out that she was a regular customer at the Zhangs and the Fans. Mr Fan told me that she did not always buy the same breakfast every day, so she alternated between vendors depending on what she fancied that morning. (Extracts from field notes, 17 October 2013)
This brief mention indicates one thing: that the woman is a returning customer, which means that she has not suffered due to eating the food sold by the breakfast vendors. Contrary to the perception of food vendors as unethical traders selling unhygienic food, the breakfast vendors on the footbridge do enjoy a level of customer loyalty. However, knowing that does not protect the vendors from being perceived as vermin. A well-known Chinese saying provides a fitting analogy here: “one mouse dropping ruins the whole pot of porridge”. For the breakfast vendors, it does not matter
133 how many are selling unhygienic food; as long as one does, all will be considered to be doing so by association. “We can’t go around announcing that we are all clean when some of us are not – we are making ourselves look guilty by claiming that we are not.” The idea of gōng hài provides a useful entry point into the understanding of the relations between space usage and regulations. Specifically, I draw on Douglas’s idea of pollution belief and the figure of the adulterer in the ethnographic case studies she compares (2001 [1966]). Douglas describes pollution ideas working at two levels: instrumental and expressive. At the instrumental level, pollution ideas are used by rulers to create a sense of unity and order which has to be defended against the dangers conceived by the rulers. Pollution beliefs or danger beliefs thus play the instrumental role of coercion that forces the shaping of good citizen. At the expressive level, pollution beliefs also express hierarchy of the society in question. The adulterer, by Douglas’ definition, is the transmitter of pollutant that puts the innocent at risk. The regulations against street vendors are formulated on the basis that vendors are inherently messy, dirty and disorderly. Regulations such as the one prohibiting street vendors from trading in spaces specified in text thus create pollution beliefs that at one level produce a common experience of order, and at another level, ostracise vendors. The moral code expressed by the regulations thus creates a unitary subject of ‘public vermin’ to which the authorities consider vendors to belong, even though independent vendors such as the Zhangs and the Fans find such determination unfair but unable to refute. With the example of the Nuer, Douglas points out that “whenever danger follows secret adultery in a social system in which someone has the right to claim damages if adultery is known, the pollution belief acts as a post hoc detector of crime” (2001 [1966]: 135). In other words, signs of pollution such as illness or skin disease, as a result of incest in the case of the Nuer, become the indicator of wrongdoing. Furthermore, it is not the adulterer who suffers from the externalisation of punishment such as skin disease, but his or her contacts – people of immediate relation – such as the injured husband. This analysis bears a degree of resemblance to the case of the breakfast vendors. Here I present a similar scenario in the case of breakfast vendors. Suppose someone buys half a dozen dumplings for breakfast from one of the couples. No one can know
134 how hygienic the food sold by this particular vendor is until something happens to the person who bought the dumplings. Unfortunately, the person falls ill and experiences unpleasant symptoms of food poisoning. According to pollution belief by Douglas’s definition, “moral support could be set against [the vendor]”, and this moral support usually means legal punishment or outright eviction of the vendor (1968: 200). However, that would be the end as far as legal punishment goes. Douglas also highlights that “a new kind of relation between pollution and morals emerges when purification alone is taken to be an adequate treatment of moral wrongs” and that “the whole complex of ideas including pollution and purification become a kind of safety net” (2001 [1966]: 138). “Easy purification” such as fines and confiscation in the case of some breakfast vendors would not be enough to impose absolute order and therefore “enables [some other vendors] to defy with impunity” (2001 [1966]: 138.) Nonetheless, I am more interested in the figure of the adulterer or the polluter in Douglas’s discussion at the end of a chapter.
Ultimately India’s lower castes used to keep in their place because of similarly effective social sanctions, and all the way up the edifice of caste political and economic forces help to maintain the system. But wherever the lines are precarious we find pollution ideas come to their support. Physical crossing of the social barrier is treated as a dangerous pollution, with any of the consequences we have just examined. The polluter becomes a doubly wicked object of reprobation, first because he crossed the line and second because he endangered others. (2001 [1966]: 140)
I have so far drawn internal divisions amongst breakfast vendors whom I put into three categories: enfranchised vendors (permissible), independent vendors (‘illegal’) and self- proclaimed enfranchised vendors (illegal in-betweeners). Now, I dismantle the categorical division between them and put them all together again under the commonality of breakfast vendors. From the point of view of the people (including the State) who are concerned about food safety, the vendors are urban vermin because they are ‘the polluters’,
135 because enfranchised vending is no guarantee of food safety. That is to say, they cross the line of causing disorder and endanger other people through their unhygienic food preparation. By categorically uniting breakfast vendors, I reconsider the social stratum they occupy as a whole and continue the discussion about the undesirability of these perceived ‘polluters’ and their place in society in the final part of the chapter.
Social selectiveness of infrastructure vs. strategic ‘invisibility’ In this section, I reassess the so-called visibility and invisibility of the underprivileged people such as the vendors and argue that these qualities are not given. There remains a degree of agency on the side of the vendors in dealing with everyday uncertainties. Through the Zhangs and the Fans I learnt that independent vendors often have to make use of their ‘invisibility’ to remain out of sight and therefore unnoticed by urban management authorities. With his observations of an airport security checkpoint, Pütz looks at the phenomenon of civil inattention in a situation where there is bodily proximity between the security guards and the airline passengers (2011). He observes that civil inattention (a term borrowed from Erving Goffman) creates the experience of non-place that is popularly associated with airports through non-events. Pütz also identifies that a central characteristic of security checkpoints is “the tendency to hide from view by appearing unremarkable or uneventful” (2011: 158). Although the footbridge is not an airport, where efficient operation is a high priority, they do share one thing in common: a desire to avoid attracting unwanted attention. In a different urban context in China, Huang et al. show an interesting case of street vendors in Guangzhou who have emerged in resistance to the exclusionary street-vending policies and demonstrate that vendor activism becomes an important factor in “the transformation of the exclusionary street-vending politics to the ambivalent or post-revanchist one” (2014: 171). What this particular case demonstrates is that visibility is used strategically to challenge urban revanchism, a term coined by N. Smith (1996, cited in Huang et al. 2014). The proposition that the ambivalence of the post-revanchist approach to management of urban space, suggests that the ultimate objective remains “securing prime city spaces” and reveals “the nature of urban political responses to the subordinated” (2014: 187). I suspect that similar resistance would arise if the
136 conditions were to make it urgent for street vendors to take action in Shenzhen. While street vendors in Guangzhou demonstrate their agency and their visibility as the public in action, I argue that the independent breakfast vendors who are not protected by civil rights resolve to employ strategic invisibility in their appropriation of space on Shennan Road. Considering street vendors as a class, Simone provides a brief reminder of the need to reconsider the matter of ‘illegality’ (2005). This idea of illegality urges further explication of what lies behind the ‘illegality’ of street vending, especially street food vending, which has suffered from the notoriety of being an urban ‘polluter’. Yet why would the vendors risk being ‘illegal’ in the first place? Amin (2014) highlights the symbolic power and social selectiveness of infrastructures with observations of imbalances between infrastructural provisions in different neighbourhoods. In response to Larkin’s seminal article on the poetics and politics of infrastructure, Amin focuses his interest on “the social power of infrastructural visibility [and] the affordances of infrastructural invisibility” in a Brazilian context (2014: 140). Amin demonstrates the complexity existing in between by presenting stories about how infrastructure becomes visible when the poor try to set up their own settlements with the help of professionals such as architects and pro-poor activists in designing, rendering, and building and demonstrates that infrastructure becomes invisible when life has gradually changed for the better. Amin also observes that infrastructure becomes visible again as a violation that cuts through the heart of the community and threatens to dismantle everything that the residents have built as a commons. Amin’s article on the liveliness of infrastructure emphasises that infrastructure is not something that is intrinsically socially selective or discriminating. Back on Shennan Road, for example, it is not the road itself that does not welcome the presence of street vendors. As a public space, it should be open to all users. However, the city image envisioned by the municipal government does not include people such as street vendors. The issue of food safety also renders food vendors especially dangerous to society. As a result, the road becomes a contested space where conflictual forces collide and the force that wins is the one with political and economic power – the State.
137 Finally, I contend that the discrepancy between what the State has intended the road to be – a pristine and orderly image of the city – and the way in which the road is used to serve individualised purposes destabilises the idea of infrastructure and renders it in the position between societal forces. Not only is the road infrastructural to assisting movements of people and goods, accelerating growth, connecting developments, and maintaining the city image, as the State intends, but also, people can engage with it in ways that are unexpected but not always welcomed.
Conclusion In this chapter, I have analysed breakfast vendors on the footbridge over Shennan Road in three aspects. I have argued that the lack of capital often forces people such as vendors to be more spatially mobile and flexible in order to cope with evictions without the certainty in knowing when it will happen. Through the spatial stories of appropriating the space on footbridge, I have demonstrated that vendors’ use of strategic invisiblity to negotiate with space regulations and managements that formalise them as the undersirable gōng hài. I have attended the idea of gōng hài with Douglas’ pollution beliefs and the figure of the adulterer or the polluter in order to challenge the unitary category of gōng hài under which vendors are considered as a class. The use of strategic invisibility is a way for the vendors to self-dispossess their ‘publicness’ as an attempt to dissociate themselves from being identified as vermin. For the vendors, they have to ready to move in case of evictions. For the time being, the footbridge (and therefore the road) provides a temporary refuge space for them. They learn to negotiate their presence by making themselves visible to their customers but unnoticeable by not creating mess, causing trouble or harming others. Despite the complexity in identifying who are the innocent and the polluters amongst vendors, they are left with no alternatives to being perceived as ‘public vermin’ by the State, formalised by regulations. As a regulated and socially selective space intended by the State, the road magnifies the undesirability of vendors. Yet as a refuge space, the footbridge becomes offers a temporary protection for these vendors who demonstrate their innocence by not harming people with their food. It is this stretching of the roles the road plays for the State on the one hand and vendors on the other, that renders the road as destabilised and destabilizing.
138 Chapter 6: The promise for speed and progress, compromised
Introduction In this final chapter before conclusion, I shift the ethnographic attention to the space and time of traffic. I suggest that traffic provides a useful lens through which I unpack the road as a moral space and how it is challenged by the multiplicity of individual bodies that embody different habitus(es). I approach the road as a moral space defined by the formalisation of disciplining signs and languages of State regulations imposed upon the road. Here I engage with Foucault’s idea of the docile body to study the production of a good citizen (1979) that is compliant with rules and how intolerance of ‘abnormal’ behaviours on the road is expressed. I then move on to explore how the moral space is challenged by the co-existence of individual bodies on the road. Here Bourdieu’s idea of habitus provides the framework to explain the complexity of differential habitus(es) produced in conditions of existence beyond the road. There is a different way of producing a different kind of body that destabilises the counterposition of the civilised and uncivilised assumed by the State-conceived moral space. Here I bring in the ethnography of traffic which reveals these differential habitus(es). Instead of having a top-down formalised regulations imposed by the State, there is a set of unwritten rules on the road. These unspoken rules are developed through individual habits that do not conform the formalised rules expressed by State regulations. Individual driving habits are developed and that these habits inevitably place constraints on other people on the road. There is a multiplicity and diversity of individual bodies that are engaged in constant negotiations with one another on the road. Traffic makes manifest the direct interactions between individually developed habits and the universal codes of State regulations imposed on the road. Traffic also brings together different people on wheels. It is through the space-time of traffic that social differences are made manifest especially by the social inequalities in the access to the modes of mobility .
139 Then I put the infrastructural role of the road under further scrutiny through the lens of traffic by exploring how traffic discloses the compromised efficiency of the road in delivering speed and progress. Here I attend to the common experience of waiting in traffic shared amongst different people. Being stuck in traffic immobilises the body. The inability to proceed and make progress as a result of congestions (which are also caused by surface disruptions) renders the time spent on waiting unproductive. However, as I take into considerations of the different ways of people making use of this waiting time for catching up on sleep, checking E-mails on the phone, or listening to the radio etc., the experience of waiting in traffic becomes experienced time rather than spent time as a resource.. Lastly, I conclude that the intended role of the road as a moral space reflects the State conceived as disciplinary space that imposes universal standards to differentiate accepted behaviours from the so-called abnormal ones by defining the counterposition of the civilised and the uncivilized behaviours. Yet there also exists another system – an organized chaos – produced by individuals bodies, in which people become each other’s facilitative as well as disciplining agents in co-ordinations and mutual restriction. Such system in turn produces a different kind of space that offsets the formal moral space conceived by the State. The discussions throughout the chapter highlight an irony of the road as an infrastructure. The modernist obsession of progress is expressed by infrastructural projects, which continue to produce higher expectations of progress. Yet new infrastructural projects such as the subterranean developments that attempt to meet higher expectations of progress also render the present progress being made on the road compromised.
Figure 16 Shennan Road at night (Futian)
140
Figure 17 Overlooking a jucntion on Shennan Road (Luohu)
Figure 18 Cars, buses and taxis in lines waiting at the same junction (Luohu)
141 The road as a moral space
Discipline and control In recent years, road regulations have been more strictly implemented with increased numbers of computerised systems installed, in combination with penalties (in the form of fines and/or points) imposed on drivers who violate the rules7. Following the usual fashion of imposing technologies such as speed cameras to control and monitor traffic and general road usage, most arterial roads in Shenzhen, especially Shennan Road, are heavily geared with material and human resources to ensure optimal compliance. For example, spatial segregation is imposed on the road with demarcated lanes to keep vehicles in lines. Solid lines are introduced on the road to permit a distinction from dashed lines. The difference is that solid lines prohibit vehicles from changing lanes, while dashed lines allow it. When I looked at Shennan Road, I would often see the traffic organised in a relatively orderly manner. As illustrated by the images in the previous page, vehicles are neatly lined up at the traffic light junction. At least the nearest 20 m or so of the road to the traffic light are marked with solid lines making the lanes uncrossable. Because there are traffic cameras installed at the junction, it is rare to see drivers crossing the solid lines in this area. With the example of Bentham’s panoptic architecture, Foucault introduces the disciplinary society as a product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the society becomes “a network of mechanisms that would be everywhere and always alert, running through society without interruption in space or in time” (1997 [1977]: 226). Panopticism, Foucault notes, is the mechanism of discipline: “a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power” and ultimately “a design of subtle coercion for a society to come” (1997 [1977]: 367). The idea of generalised surveillance thus marks the cornerstone of a disciplinary society. As a disciplining space with the installation of surveillance technologies, these apparatuses keep a watchful eye on the road users and capture the digital footprints of
7 A new regulation was announced in June 2015 to make Shennan Road “The Model Road for Strict Regulations” in compliance with Article 39 of The Road Safety Act and Article 36 of the Road and Transport Safety Act of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. The status as a “model road” means that all motorbikes, electric bicycles, and the like are prohibited from travelling or stopping on Shennan Road (Shenzhen News, 2015).
142 those who violate the rules. To this extent, the road embodies a panoptic system for exerting power over road users and catching out ‘abnormal’ behaviours such as speeding and cutting across lanes when and where people are not supposed to. This idea of discipline bears a degree of resemblance to Douglas’ pollution ideas as an instrument and expression of moral power over the society (2001 [1966]). The ‘abnormal’ behaviours of violating road regulations become a threat to the order installed on the road. The moral power over the road thus come from the need to keep these threats out so that order can be maintained. As a result, a top-down moral space is produced, defining what is right or wrong as far as the rules and regulations are concerned. The disciplining space of the road thus expects the formation of subjectivity that is expressed by the disciplined body which is also an extension of the machine on the move and vice versa. “The driver’s body is itself fragmented and disciplined to the machine, with eyes, ears, hands and feet, all trained to respond, instantaneously and consistently, while desires even to stretch, to change position, to doze or to look round are being suppressed. The car becomes an extension of the driver’s body, extraordinarily disciplined” (Urry, 2004: 31). With the emplacement of surveillance technologies and disciplinary mechanisms, the road is thus a space where drivers’ bodies are disciplined and trained to carry out an assemblage of behaviours that are expected by the regulations of the road. As a result, we see the production of Foucault’s “docile body” (1979), which is the prisoner of a society that is of our own making. Similarly, Auge’s characterization of non-place also resonates through the visual language of signs that direct or prohibit certain behaviours of which drivers should be aware. Building upon Foucault’s societies of discipline, Deleuze notes the transience of the model, the structural change, and a mutation of capitalism in twentieth century societies (1992). Institutions, Deleuze observes, are constantly being reformed and twentieth century societies are transforming into societies of control. In comparison to the Foucauldian environment of enclosure, Deleuze points out that societies are under the continuous and limitless control of corporations (1992: 6). In other words, there is a transformation from substance to virtuality, from visible enclosures to invisible webs of connections. Thus the road is the space of disciplines (spatial and directional arrangements in terms of lanes, surveillance, and speed cameras, public eyes upon oneself and others, etc.) and control (road signs with
143 warnings, banners with socialist quotes, speed limits, restrictions on which vehicles are permitted during certain hours of the day, exits, designated U-turn points, auxiliary roads, etc.). “Addressing simultaneously and indiscriminately every and any user, the signs that permeate non-places direct them to ‘communicate wordlessly, through gestures with an abstract, unmediated commerce’. They position users in relation to ‘solitary contractuality,’ prompting them to experience ‘solitude and multitude’. In so doing, they produce the ‘average man’, whose identity is reduced solely to that of tourist, customer, passenger, visitor, or more flattering – guest” (Gottschalk & Salvaggio, 2015: 7). To some extent, many of the abovementioned features can be easily found in the way people drive in relation to the systemic imposition of rules and regulations on the road. Indeed, the disciplinary and control mechanisms on the road have to an extent produced the ‘average [mobile] citizens’ who are simultaneously ‘immobilised’ and disciplined by regulating structures. At least, what was what I assumed. I obtained my driving licence in the UK and from the first day of receiving driving lessons, I was taught to drive and learn the driving manners that would be expected of me in this country. Gradually, I developed a set of skills and mannerisms (in bodily and mechanic gestures) that made me a British-trained driver. This identity did not become obvious until I started driving in Shenzhen where my British trained skills did not equip me to cope with the ways people drove there. That is not to say, every driver in the UK drives in the same orderly manner. There are exceptions too. Yet in Shenzhen, there was a different degree of surprises that happened almost on daily basis and for which I had not prepared myself. In terms of road signs, the knowledge I had acquired in the UK was transferrable and allowed me to understand the Chinese system. The sign language at least is almost universally understandable. What is differentiates them is the ways in which people respond to the systems.
The challenge of the individual bodies The State-conceived moral space of the road defines the expected and the unacceptable and makes clear that violation of rules would be punished. Here I introduce a taxi driver, Lao Zhang, whom I accompanied for a few rides with other passengers in Shenzhen. Through him, a different set of unwritten rules surfaces. Although these rules
144 do not subvert the moral space conceived by the State, they exist in parallel to the moral space and challenge the effectiveness of the moral power of the State-conceived space. Lao Zhang originally came from Hunan Province and had been a taxi driver in Shenzhen for almost ten years. Soon after he arrived in Shenzhen, he obtained a job working as a taxi driver in the city centre. He had been sharing his car with a fellow driver who came from the same province. The taxi company for which they worked was based in Futian. Usually, at the end of his shift Lao Zhang drove to an agreed location where he handed over the car to his colleague, whom I could not follow. Lao Zhang told me that that was probably because his colleague did not want any unnecessary attention, but Lao Zhang did not explain why. In general, the reputation of taxi drivers in Shenzhen was less than positive. In ordinary conversations about taxi drivers in Shenzhen, I often heard that they were reckless drivers who thought they ruled the road. In some respects, my own experience with some taxi drivers confirmed this reputation. However, Lao Zhang was anything but aggressive or impatient in his driving manners and the way he acted toward his passengers. One morning, I met Lao Zhang at a small eatery in Gangsha (an urban village next to Shennan Road in Luohu). Knowing that the morning rush hour had already begun, I deliberately asked Lao Zhang to go on to Shennan Road during that time in the hope of observing him as well as the other road users in the traffic.8
… It was about half past eight when we got onto Shennan Road. I asked Lao Zhang to head westward toward Nanshan District. The traffic heading eastward towards the city centre (Luohu and Futian) was usually worse than the traffic heading in the opposite direction. When we came to the junction between the road we were on and Shennan Road, we were immediately confronted by the slow-moving traffic. We had to wait at the junction for an opportunity to slot into a gap between cars to join the
8 Initially, Lao Zhang refused to go on Shennan Road during the morning rush hour because it meant that he would be stuck in traffic for a long time. I resolved to pay him the fare to make up for the time he would lose whilst stuck in traffic. Usually, he avoided Shennan Road when he could. But for the sake of the research and to make use of the time spent in traffic to do an informal interview with Lao Zhang, I considered that paying him the equivalent of the lost fares would make a fair exchange.
145 traffic. When we finally got onto Shennan Road, we were back in the rhythm of inching forward, pausing and inching. The numerous traffic lights along Shennan Road made the whole journey feel much longer. Without the need to rush, I felt relatively at ease with the congestion. But I could easily reflect upon the times when I had been stuck in traffic but desperately needed to get somewhere. I took a moment to look out of the taxi and observe other road users. Then I asked Lao Zhang what he thought of the traffic in the city centre. He sighed and told me, “It is a zuŏ yòu weí nán (catch-22) situation for us. Although we are not in a rush as much as the passengers, being stuck in traffic can easily double the journey time, and it does not necessarily bring us much more than doing a few short trips. Once we are stuck in traffic, it is very difficult to get out of it”. Meanwhile, as I took another look outside the taxi while we were moving slowly forward, Lao Zhang suddenly made an emergency stop. He pointed at a private car. It turned out that this car had pushed in suddenly from the left of Lao Zhang, who had to stop to avoid a collision. I was still a little shaken and baffled by how suddenly it happened. But everything returned to the state it had been in before. (Extract from field notes, 20 January 2014).
This kind of incidents happened quite often and it took me some time to get used to the driving manners in Shenzhen, which according to many people were much better than those outside the city centre. Lao Zhang told me that most drivers were more wén míng (civilised) in Shenzhen than in other big cities such as Beijing or Shanghai. “Especially on roads where [the transport authorities] have installed numerous speed and monitoring cameras to catch drivers who do not comply with the road regulations, you have to be more careful.” However, there remains a fundamental difference between complying with the rules as part of the habitus produced by the moral space of the road and acting accordingly when surveillance and speed cameras are noticed. Lao Zhang said, “People slow down when they see the cameras, but once they go pass the point, they speed up again”. As a result, the actual effect of these surveillance technologies remains much
146 more limited than one might have assumed. According to Lao Zhang, it is a common practice. In response to the negative comments made by people about taxi drivers, Lao Zhang was sympathetic towards his fellow drivers and critical of private road users who were equally guilty of disobeying the rules on the road. “You can still see people violating the rules when they are not supposed to. Especially when there are no cameras present, those [private car drivers] simply drive without any regard for other road users.” He added emphatically, “It is not just taxi drivers; people can’t blame everything on us. Those who drive expensive cars are not more wén míng than us who drive taxis after all. Just because we are not as rich, it doesn’t mean that we are not wén míng”. Bourdieu defines habitus as a product of a particular type of environment, “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” (1977: 72). He also highlights the modes of generation that affects the production of habitus. It means each mode of generation encompasses a particular condition of existence, which in turn defines “the impossible, the possible and the probable, [causing] one group to experience as natural or reasonable practices or aspirations which another group find unthinkable or scandalous, and vice versa” (1977: 78). This understanding of habitus is pertinent for understanding the relationship between the road as a moral space defined by State regulations and the usage of the road along with response to this particular moral space. Two levels of analysis are in place. Firstly, the State-conceived moral space of the road intends to produce the habitus that makes compliance with rules and regulations second nature to the body. I have demonstrated that in the previous section. The production of the expected habitus would only work in theory, because the moral space of the road overlooks the multiplicity and diversity of individual bodies that embody different habitus(es) produced by other modes of generation outside the road. While Foucault considers the docile body as subjected to the State, Bourdieu emphasises practice and considers the body as the bearer of habitus, which is “a product of the work of inculcation and appropriation” (1977: 85). There remains a deterministic relationship between the body and the system, according to Bourdieu. But he also circumvents the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism by arguing that the so-called individuality is merely deviant or variant – “diversity within
147 homogeneity” (1977: 86). However, a city does not exist on just one system but multiple systems co-existing and mutually influential and such co-existence produces an image of a singular entity such as a city. The road as a moral space reflects this image and it is traffic that reveals the differences challenge this image. When a person who does not drive in a respectful manner, for example, s/he would be judged against the moral high ground of other rule-abiding citizens produced by the moral space of the road. A sense of embarrassment may result in those who feel guilty about ‘making a mistake’ by going into the wrong lane or making the wrong turn (Katz, 2000; Thrift, 2004). Such embarrassment is not only a result of the honking of frustrated drivers from behind. It can also be understood as a form of abnormality that the disciplined body and the disciplinary space do not tolerate. However, embarrassment would only felt by the person if s/he has the same set of dispositions as the rule-abiding citizen of the moral space. For people who do not possess the same habitus, it is not necessarily embarrassment that results but other sensations such as stress and even annoyance. Here I introduce Mr and Mrs Zou whom I met through a friend. During a conversation I had with Mr and Mrs Zou, Mrs Zou kept commenting on “the bad driving manners” of Mr Zou. Mrs Zou said that there had been many occasions when Mr Zou “accidentally went through the red lights and got caught speeding, especially on Shennan Road”, where speed limits were mostly kept between 50 and 60 km per hour. While we were discussing the topic of driving manners, Mrs Zou emphatically pointed out how embarrassing Mr Zou was and that his ways of driving were not what a civilized citizen would do. Mrs Zou was a strong character and always said how hard they had worked to get to where they were now: they were both retired and had made a decent living from working as civil servants and engaging in the property market. For Mrs Zou, material wealth was only the first step of going up the social ladder. “Having a materially prosperous life does not give you a moral prestige over people – you have to cultivate your civility in order to match your economic wealth”, she told me. Yet when I took the opportunity to tell her about the incident Lao Zhang and I experienced, she made a rather telling comment about being civilized that did not match what she had previously said about cultivating civility. “It would be ideal if people would reciprocate your civility, but in China it is a different gúo qĺng (cultural
148 situation).” She continued, “People do not repay you with respect; if s/he decided to be uncivilised, then s/he would just be so. People wouldn’t thank you for being polite”. As a result, “Your moral high ground makes no difference”. What Mrs Zou describes as the cultural situation in China is the co-existence of differences under an image of a homogenous society constructed by the State. Below the surface of the State-conceived moral space of Shennan Road, what Lao Zhang and Mrs Zou have unanimously agreed upon, is that there exist a multiplicity and diversity of bodies that embody different habitus. The counterposition between the civilised and the uncivilised is destabilised by differential habitus(es) that respond to the moral space of the road differently. More importantly, each individual body carries their own historical, cultural and social dispositions that in turn affect their definition of what is acceptable or not on the road.
The road and the delivery of speed and progress As a direct visual impression, an archetypal image of Shennan Road often represents speed and progress (Figure 16). Showing the road in time-lapse motion also gives one the impression of a sleepless city through which people and objects flow ceaselessly, with the road being a conveyor belt delivering endless energies into every corner of the city. It is as if time does not stop. During my fieldwork, one of the initial difficulties I encountered while I was carrying out street interviews with people on the road was that people would rarely stop and talk. Besides the people who walked straight past without acknowledging my presence, others usually responded by saying: “I don’t have time”. In retrospect, the chance of catching people on the move was considerably slimmer than when I attempted the same task at nodal points on the road where people appeared to have more time. Time propels movements. Yet in this case, time is something that people ‘own’ but that also belongs to no one. Although it is not exactly a commodity, there seems to be some value attached to the idea of time. But once it is ‘lost’, money cannot buy back the lost time. From the previous discussions about the moral space of Shennan Road, there is one aspect that is worth highlighting in this section. That is, the hindrance to making progress and saving time. The ethnographic of traffic makes manifest two aspects of the infrastructural role of the road. Traffic reveals social differences in the inequalities of
149 the access to modes of mobility, yet traffic also brings people on wheels together under the same temporal and spatial constraints that hinder the process of progress-making and time-saving.
“Time and money; efficiency is life” Shenzhen has been built upon the motto that “time is money; efficiency is life”.9 This motto did not emerge without causing discomforts amongst the conservative members of the CCP. But the motto proved to be an effective tool in mass-mobilising people, especially during the early phase of growth. In Beijing, ‘money’ also proved to be a powerful but daring political weapon with which Deng won his internal battle against the Maoist dogmatists. In Shenzhen, ‘money’ became the most important practical means of firing up economic growth. David Harvey states that “money is simultaneously everything and nothing” and that it is “the profoundest and most complete of all centralising forces in a society where it facilitates the greatest dispersion” (1985: 3). The ambiguity of money and the fundamental paradox within the idea are repeated in another remark made by Harvey: “It is a real or concrete abstraction that exists externally to us and exercises real power over us” (1985: 3, original emphasis). The concreteness and abstractness of money is also found in a famous Hakkanese10 saying: “Money can make the ghost push the millstone for you” (yŏu qían néng shĭ guĭ tuī mó). The ghost thus captures the abstractness of money (which is burned as an offering to spirits in the other world) and the millstone represents the concreteness of what money can do. The relationship between the person who owns the
9 The motto “time is money; efficiency is life” was first adopted by local officials in Shekou (a port town in western Shenzhen). Shekou was the place where the first foreign direct investment from Hong Kong made its way into the Communist territory. A local Shenzhenese called Yuan Geng (1917–2016), who was well-known in Shekou, made a famous statement, “xiàng qián zŏu, mò huí tóu” (move forward and don’t look back), to motivate the local officials to push forward in Beijing the proposal for foreign direct investments to be allowed in Shenzhen. This statement marked a historical turning point in local officials’ desire for growth, laying down the foundation for “time is money; efficiency is life”, which became one of the most powerful ideological tools in the history of Shenzhen. 10 The Hakkas are a sub-group of the Han Chinese in China. They come from the Hakka-speaking regions such as Guangdong and Fujian.
150 money and the ghostly figure is as intimate but alien as that between individuals whose “objective dependency relations” are sustained by money (1985: 3). The idiom also expresses the power of money through its ability to forge relationships between strangers that would otherwise have been impossible (Harvey 1985). With reference to Simmel and Marx, Harvey argues, the so-called democratic façade of money appears to have dismantled the boundaries between classes and brings everyone under the overarching presence of money (1985: 4). At the same time, the social differences between individuals remain present and the relations between them do not go beyond “objective dependency”. The bonds between them are impersonal and can be broken as easily as they are created. Harvey reminds us that there is “a deep tension between the individualism and equality which the possession of money implies and the class relationships experienced in the making of that money” (1985: 5). Similarly, Harvey argues that there is the same kind of paradox underlying the idea of time. When considering time and money, what they have in common is their elusiveness on the one hand and their socially ‘parasitic’ nature in that understandings of time and money cannot be achieved without their attachment to something. It is not difficult to discover that many people in Shenzhen live by the motto that time is money, but the ethnography materials also suggest that the other half of the motto is an effective reminder that the relationship between time and money is not as straightforward. Through Lao Zhang, I learnt that many taxi drivers in Shenzhen used to dāng bīng (served in the army), which subsequently explained the negative reputation of taxi drivers as ‘aggressive drivers on the road’. “Time and efficiency count a lot, especially for these [ex-servicemen]”, Lao Zhang told me during one of our conversations. When I brought up the motto, he agreed that it was “a very practical matter”. While precision and efficiency are second nature to these ex-servicemen, acquiring as much money as possible within the limit of time is equally important to them as taxi drivers. Lao Zhang also said that “because there are only so many hours to work before handing over the car, a lot of them have to make use of the time they have to earn as much as possible, especially when they have a whole family behind them”. Timekeeping is important, but timekeeping motivated by money is also important.
151 The revelation of the professional background of some of the taxi drivers in Shenzhen is an important reminder of their habitus, from the Bourdieusian perspective. The temporal and spatial practices (during driving) of these ex-servicemen exemplify the continuation of the habitus, which has accumulated over time, from the past into the present. Their background as ex-servicemen therefore adds a different dimension to understanding the perception of time from the perspective of these taxi drivers whose bodies and minds have been disciplined and militarised in a certain way. Before I started following Lao Zhang, I knew nothing about how the taxi network in Shenzhen worked, let alone the shift handover time.11 After a few episodes of trying to get a taxi before 5:00 p.m., I learnt from experience that unless I was going in the same direction as a taxi that was heading to the location of the handover, I would be refused a ride. Most taxis are rented out to drivers and one car is usually shared between two drivers who split the daily rent, which they call fèn zĭ qián (contributions).12 An agreement has to be made between the two drivers on where the handover should take place. Once the agreement has been made, it is considered an iron rule. This is a rule with which everyone has to comply, because there is a heavy penalty attached to non- compliance. Such penalty is usually a subtraction from the day’s earning. When the time comes, the driver has to make sure he or she is punctual so that the next driver can start his or her shift on time. In Shenzhen, taxi metre begins at 10 RMB for the first 2 km and then the bill will increase by 2 RMB per km after the first 2 km.13 With another 10 RMB for the fuel charge, taxi drivers immediately make 20 RMB for the first 2 km. This means that the
11 The vehicle handover time is decided by the transport authorities. In 2009, the transport authorities announced four sets of handover times from which taxi drivers could choose in order to avoid unequal distribution of income on the one hand and to avoid traffic congestion being caused, in part, by taxis that are waiting for the handover becoming concentrated in certain places on the other. However, many taxi drivers still choose to perform the handover in the afternoon for various reasons. 12 The daily contribution paid by each driver is not the same. Because one earns relatively more during the day than during the night, the day-time contribution is more than the night-time contribution. 13 There are two types of taxis in Shenzhen. One type is fuel-run, called a Red Taxi (identified by its colour); the other is electric and is called a Blue Taxi. Fares for electric taxis are usually cheaper and these taxis are not as numerous as those that run on fuel. The taxis referred to in the chapter are the type that runs on fuel.
152 shorter the ride, the easier the money comes. For the distance travelled (i.e. the ‘golden’ 2 km), “it is easy money”, according to Lao Zhang. He also said that having not travelled far, “you can still remain within the area you are familiar with and know the spots where you can take on passengers”. So far, we can get a sense of the complexity of making money for taxi drivers. Rather than the simple case of taxi drivers rushing around frantically to earn money, they operate within a system based on calculations weighing up the relationship between time and money. Time is not exclusively determined by the desire for money alone, although time is still money. During the time I was following Lao Zhang in the backseat, I noticed that passengers (including myself, on other occasions) jumped into the taxi expecting that they would get to their destination quickly and smoothly. More often than not, the journey was subject to delays caused by external factors such as congestions over which neither the taxi driver nor the passengers could control. Shennan Road is notorious for the numerous traffic lights installed to control the traffic by breaking it and slowing it down. Taking a taxi is based on the premise that money can buy time, speed, and therefore convenience. In situations when the external factors such as traffic lights or congestions impedes the progress of taxi drivers and passengers alike, time becomes more valuable as money becomes less useful. One morning, I made a plan to meet a girl for an interview in Futian. She set off from her home and took the underground train that runs beneath Shennan Road, heading eastwards to the city centre. In order to see the difference in the time it would take to get to the city centre, I decided to take a taxi. I got in a taxi at around 8:30 a.m. Inevitably, we were caught in the morning rush hour traffic. Congestion on Shennan Road was worsened by both traffic lights and surface disruptions such as lane closures as a result of the expansion of underground network. The combination of a narrower road and traffic lights makes traffic much worse than expected. There were times when I could have decided to get out of the taxi and take the underground, but I remained hopeful and kept thinking to myself, “Once we get through this bit, we will be fine”. It was not the case. When I eventually arrived at the meeting place, I was over half an hour late, which shortened the length of the meeting, because the girl had to be somewhere else after the interview. Constraints on individual journeys occur all the
153 time and demonstrate that in times like this, efficiency is an important aspect of the relationship between time and money. Harvey describes a story in which time, like money, becomes objective and measurable, especially with the advent of affordable technologies. He also points out Simmel’s stark accuracy in predicting the catastrophic impact of the malfunction of clocks upon the world order (1985: 9). Simmel argues that the universality of clock time makes the coordination of global time possible, and more importantly, that without coordination the city as a mega capitalist system would collapse (cited in Harvey 1985). But again, traffic offers a different way of thinking about time being spent. Congestions in traffic often disrupt the smooth allocation of time and space of contemporary urbanites.
Traffic, when and where social differences become manifest I have argued that road users have different ways of dealing with the imposition of rules. From the state of being shocked to getting used to the ways in which some road users find alternative ways to skirt around rules, as an ethnographer, I learnt how the process of normalisation allowed me to compare what was expected with what was actually practised. Inconsistencies and contingencies were common. In this section, I explore further the differentiated experience of being in the traffic and the experience of social difference that becomes manifest during the rush hour. I engage more with the ethnography of traffic from the points of view of different road users. Lao Zhang said that driving, for him, was a job; the experience of driving is therefore not always associated with a sense of freedom and status. In her ethnographic studies of taxi drivers and day-trippers in Kunming, a city in south-western China, Notar argues against the assumption that “mobility leads to freedom and enhanced status (2012: 281). Owning a private car in contemporary China is no longer the visual statement of one’s economic status in cities, since the rate of car ownership has increased exponentially. Having a car no longer means freedom. Despite the increasing awareness of the financial cost of buying and maintaining a car, people’s relationships with cars remain ambivalent. At least, the car culture in Shenzhen remains dominant. For example, Mr Zou acknowledges the increasing difficulty of finding parking space in the city, but this difficulty is not yet a reason for him to abandon the use of a
154 private car and opt for public transport. For him, “having a car still offers you the convenience you need”. The question, then, is the extent to which driving becomes a constraint. Notar demonstrates that taxi drivers are anything but free agents. For taxi drivers, she argues, driving is “entrapment” in labour time and the enclosed space of an iron cage (2012: 288). Similarly, Luedke’s ethnography of Chicago taxi drivers also observes that “the freedom of taxi driving … is a double edged sword” (2010: 4). Indeed, despite the fact that Lao Zhang took a relatively relaxed approach to his working life as a taxi driver, through him I learnt that being a taxi driver is a physically demanding job and could at times affect family life. Lao Zhang often told me stories about how long working hours had caused many taxi drivers health-related problems. However, the hard fact is that “a lot [of taxi drivers] have to work very hard for their families”, Lao Zhang reflected. For Lao Zhang himself, knowing the potential damages to health from sitting in a car for long hours made him think more carefully about it. The “iron cage” of modernity also applies to bus drivers who are bound to their driving seat for long hours of work (Urry 2004: 28). However, driving a bus does not always mean being in an “iron cage” for some. During my fieldwork, I managed to make the acquaintance of Ms Xie, who was working as a bus driver at the time. A woman in her forties, Ms Xie came from Zhanjiang, a coastal city in western Guangdong. She had come to Shenzhen during the early 1990s. When she finished school, she started working as a bus conductor, and after two years, she was promoted and received the training necessary to allow her promotion to the job of bus driver. She was one of the first women to become a bus driver. I usually met Ms Xie at the depot at 5:30 a.m., when her service began. Normally, there would be four other passengers waiting to get on the bus. Three of them started work much earlier than most urbanites, while the other chose to take the bus simply to avoid the crowd that would gather as the morning proceeded. Since I followed Ms Xie from the beginning of her morning shift, I had the opportunity to observe how the bus filled up with passengers through to the end of the rush hour. Ms Xie remarked that working long hours were common amongst bus drivers and that it was often a lonely job, especially for bus drivers working during the night. However, in comparison to the working conditions many years ago, “things have
155 improved and you would only appreciate the improvements when you have experienced the changes”, she reflected. Despite Ms Xie’s positive attitude towards her work, my observations of her shifts do somewhat validate the “iron cage” to the extent that unlike taxi drivers, bus drivers have to keep the service going. Taxi drivers still have a degree of liberty to decide when they want to take a short break if they are too tired to drive, whereas bus drivers have to be cautious even with the amount of water they drink. Ms Xie usually takes a small bottle of tea with her onto the bus at the beginning of her service. In the winter, it is less of a problem than it would be in the summer when the temperature can be very high. In comparison to the perception of taxi drivers and bus drivers as being ‘trapped’ in the iron cage of their vehicles, it is argued that having one’s own private car and being its driver or passenger induces the experience of being ‘cocooned and encapsulated’ (Urry, 2004). For the individualised entity of the private car driver, the private car is a “domestic, cocooned, moving capsule” (2004: 28). The car thus becomes the extension of the owner’s private world, encasing the owner/driver and his/her passengers in a world that is beyond the experience of driving; for passengers, especially, the car could also act as an extension of their domestic space of home; that is, the car is a moving home (Thrift 2004). Here I present a short description of being in Mr Zou’s car when we were stuck in traffic.
It was quiet inside Mr Zou’s SUV, although I could faintly hear the traffic noise outside. Without looking at what was outside the car, I would not have noticed we were in the middle of traffic, except for the constant moving and pausing of the car. As I looked out of the car window, I noticed that most of the front seat windows of the assumed privately owned cars were covered by dark tinted filters. Some cars even had all their windows covered with them. Then I noticed that Mr Zou’s front seat windows also had a layer of dark tint. When it was relatively bright outside, it was difficult to look into the interior of any vehicle. Likewise, I suspected that people outside the SUV would not be able to see what was inside. It was as if each private car was its own
156 private quarters on the move, despite the fact that all were stuck in traffic together … (Extract from field notes, 25 January 2014)
There was another occasion when I felt the car was a capsule that separated people inside the vehicle from those outside and highlighted the social difference between them.
As we were waiting at the traffic light, I saw a man with a walking stick who looked like he was in his late fifties, shaking a plastic bowl outside the car in front of us. “It’s another professional beggar”, Mr Zou said. I had seen beggars around the city but it was the first time I had seen one in the middle of a road. I carried on observing the beggar. He lowered his upper body to look closely into the car through the tinted windows. He was shaking his plastic bowl murmuring something that I could not hear. It was also hard to figure out whether he was bending his upper body to meet the eye level of the driver or whether he had a broken back. He was begging outside the car during the whole time and the driver did not open the window at all in response to the beggar. Nor did he make any gesture to tell him to go away. It was as though the beggar did not exist. (Extract from field notes, 10 February 2014).
I later found out from Mr Zou and other people that drivers and passengers had been warned about these professional beggars due to the risk of being robbed or injured by them. I had been told many times not to open the car window when anyone like the beggar approached the car. Keeping windows closed and cars locked provides protection from the potential dangers outside, which reinforces the argument about a private car being a protective cocoon that keeps its occupants out of reach of danger. Besides beggars, there were also hawkers who tried to sell things such as window wipers and other small items for cars to drivers. Over time, I also noticed young men on the road offering to clean the front windows at traffic lights; most of them were shunned. However, the same kind of roadside entrepreneurs would be perceived differently in a different context such as Ghana.
157 Klaeger’s ethnography demonstrates how Ofankor’s hawkers adapt flexibly to the rhythms of the traffic in the production of a “moving workplace” (2012). The brief encounters and interactions between hawkers and their customers on the move suggest that rhythms are “enmeshed” (2012: 550). Similar rhythmic patterns can be seen from the side of the roadside hawkers on Shennan Road in terms of how beggars and hawkers emerge when the movements of traffic come to a pause at a junction with traffic lights and retreat when the movements resume. However, what sets the two cultural contexts apart is that on Shennan Road, there is a lack of acknowledgement and engagement between the roadside hawkers and beggars and the private car drivers. Because of fears about potential dangers, drivers in Shenzhen choose to disengage rather than acknowledge the presence of the beggars and hawkers. The mistrust on the side of private car drivers points toward the distance between the social strata. Instead of enmeshment, as Klaeger’s ethnography suggests, civil disconnection becomes dominant in traffic. Yazici demonstrates how traffic in Istanbul provides an ethnographic lens through which class inequalities and social hierarchy become magnified (2013). Within the spatio-temporal configurations of traffic congestion, Yazici argues that traffic is when and where “cross-class encounters take place” and more importantly, socio- spatial segregation is not only fixed (in enclaves and gated communities) but also on the move (2013: 516). Taking a general view of Shennan Road, for example, I would also consider that “the inequalities of traffic are class inequalities” in a similar manner to Yazici. Similarly, Sassen also directs our attention to the so-called borderless world and reminds us that cities remain ‘bordered’ spatially and socially (2012).
Traffic, when and where people wait together Traffic therefore brings different people on the move within the same spatial and temporal configuration. Spatially, there seems to be invisible borders segregating people of different social strata. This section brings attention to the experience of time in traffic shared by these different bodies. That “time is money and efficiency is life” is a practical matter for a lot of hard working urbanites in Shenzhen, as Lao Zhang says. This motto conjures up an image of a city that does not stop; a city in which people keep on moving as if they make use of every waking hour productively. However, in reality, it is not the case. People spend
158 considerably amount of their time, waiting. Traffic is one of those situations in which congestations force people to wait, regardless of your background. When commuters and drivers alike are stuck in traffic, they are immobilised. Waiting does not mean inaction and the ways in which people spend their time waiting vary. Some commuters may listen to music while they wait for the traffic to ease. Some bus or taxi passengers may play on their phones so that they would feel time passes more quickly. Below I introduce two girls of different social backgrounds. Xiao Yan, an office worker, lives in an urban village in Futian. Every morning, she takes a bus on Shennan Road to her office in Luohu. She always sets off for work early by counting in the time of congestion in order to make sure she would not be late for work. She leaves her shared flat every morning without breakfast and walks for 10 minutes to her bus stop. Her morning bus journey usually takes between 45 minutes to just over an hour, depending on the traffic. Then she walks for another 8 to 10 minutes from the bus stop to her office, which is located on the twenty-first floor. During the rush hour when I was following Xiao Yan on the bus, she spent most of her time listening to music and looking out of the window. “Listening to music makes [the congestion] more bearable”, but she sometimes wished that she had her own car that would take her to work from door to door. “Having your own car means you can have greater control over your life.” Joyce, a financial analyst and a graduate of the London School of Economics, lives in Xiangmihu with her parents in one of the gated communities in the neighbourhood. She has her own private car, which she drives to and from work every day. Every morning, she finishes her breakfast at home with her parents, and takes an elevator from the twenty-eighth floor down to the basement, where her car is parked. Traffic congestion is normal for her and she appears to be tolerant towards it. She always has music on in her car. One thing she does when she is in traffic, however, is to share take and share photos of the traffic on social media. It usually takes Joyce about 40 minutes to arrive at work. Many of her colleagues of the same rank drives to work too. When she arrives at work, she parks her car in the basement of the office building. “I wish I was in a high enough position to have a parking slot reserved for me so no one else could use it; it would make life much easier.”
159 In order to find a parking slot, Joyce tries not to arrive at work too late. Otherwise she would not be able to find a free parking space. “Sometimes if you are lucky, you can find a slot next to the elevator, which would be the most ideal. But most of those near the elevator are reserved for VIPs. Most of the time, you would have to walk quite a way from it.” Waiting in traffic for both Xiao Yan and Joyce is a part of their journey to work from Monday to Friday. However, the infrastructural role of the road precludes the process of waiting, as if no time is spent for waiting. The experience of waiting is so common that it is somewhat internalised by the modern habitus. Waiting in traffic remains a stressful time. That is not because waiting is inherently stressful. Rather the process of waiting is made a stressful experience because of the expectation of the road to guarantee the delivery of speed and progress. Yet it is the stressful experience of waiting in traffic that prompts the need to open discussions about waiting in traffic. Javier Auyero demonstrates through the ethnographic study of poor people’s experience of time spent on waiting, that being made to wait puts people in a powerless position and thus produces the experience of “uncertainty, confusion and arbitrariness” (2011: 6). The relationship between waiting and powerlessness is also manifest in the experience of waiting in traffic. On Shennan Road, I have identified the combination of four main causes which together lead to congestions in traffic especially during the rush hour. They are traffic lights, surface disruptions, lane closures and individual driving practices that may impinge on other road users. Saying that these causes make people on the road in waiting powerless overlooks the fact that people experience and deal with the experience of waiting differently. Apart from powerlessness, there are other feelings produced by the process of waiting. For Xiao Yan, she has to tolerate traffic, because as a bus passenger, she is not in a position to do anything about it. Listening to music makes her time spent in waiting more tolerable. It does not mean she is made powerlessly. The experience of waiting in traffic is recurrent and in planning her daily schedule, she takes into account of the time spent in traffic. In this way, she gains her control of time in a different way. Also listening to music while she is waiting for to the traffic to clear transforms the experience of waiting into an experience of wandering in the mind for Xiao Yan. “I am not the one doing driving so I don’t need to look out for other cars.” Listening to music therefore takes away her attention to the road and the presence of other people
160 and objects. To some extent, listening to music on the bus thus shields her within a spatial-temporal configuration of her own. The same could be applied to Joyce being cocooned by her private car, but what she does differently from Xiao Yan is the act of sharing her personal experience through social media with other people. Again, powerlessness is not relevant in Joyce’s case. Through the sharing of her own experience, she finds use images to respond to waiting and to make it an intersubjective experience of time. In his critique of the rhetoric of productivity which “has imbued much thinking on how travel time is spent” and the effect of “quiescing time”, David Bissell opens up the epistemological space of the event of waiting (2007: 278). By attending to the engaged body-in-waiting and other bodily demands that waiting entails, Bissell argues that periods of waiting are “incipient rich durations” (2007: 279). The individual cases of Xiao Yan and Joyce seem to provide the support for Bissell’s argument. They embody a respond to the motto of “time is money; efficiency is life” by obviating the conception of time as a resource (Harvey, 1985). The etymology of the verb ‘to wait’ suggests a mode of attentiveness and anticipation. That means that the body-in-waiting still undergoes an internally active process of thinking, wandering, planning, etc. Even for taxi drivers whose live, as Lao Zhang describes, as the ultimate enactment of the motto, the time spent on waiting in traffic is also experienced through the act of resolving the current ‘stuckness’ of waiting by thinking of alternative routes. Rather than arguing that the time spent on waiting in traffic is wasted or unproductive time, it would be more appropriate to consider time being experienced intersubjectively (Gell, 1992).
Space of exceptions Finally, before I proceed to the conclusion of the chapter, I want to introduce another person who walks to work everyday from home and a significant part of his journey on foot is carried out on Shennan Road. Unlike other commuters on wheels, he is neither subjected to the moral space of the road nor the space-time of traffic. Indeed, his relationship with Shennan Road is one of non-engagement, but this non-engagement is just another way of using the road that in turn provides a personal space for this person. I met Xiao Zheng at a local performance art workshop. He lives in Baishizhou in Nanshan District. He works in the IT industry and his office is also in close proximity to
161 Shennan Road. Instead of taking the bus, he chooses to walk to work. He works five days a week and on a typical weekday he has to arrive at work by 8:30 a.m. Usually he spends a maximum of 45 minutes walking along Shennan Road (which was the most direct route for him) to work, so he makes sure to set off by 7:45 a.m. On weekdays, he buys his breakfast on the go from a newspaper kiosk that also serves steamed buns in the morning. The kiosk is located near to a bus stop on Shennan Road. As a person of routine, Xiao Zhang had built up a good enough relationship with the kiosk owner over time. Like most of the urban white collar workers, Xiao Zheng lives the rhythm of work (in the office) and rest (at home). As a recent IT graduate, finding a job in the IT industry was what Xiao Zheng had wanted. Living in an urban village (where he pays 1500 RMB a month for a room with his own toilet) allowed him some extra money to meet his needs beyond the basic necessities of living. Contrary to what I had expected, Xiao Zheng walked to work in a leisurely manner. The reason for allowing 45 minutes for the walk to work is for his own good. Xiao Zheng explained, “I like walking and it is the time when I take my time and relax”. The journey to work thus became the time and space when he ceases to be a hardworking urbanite rushing from place to place in the city. In one of our conversations during the walk, Xiao Zheng said to me that he had not talked so much for a long time. Without me following him, Xiao Zheng would be walking alone, thinking or just walking. When I asked him what went through his mind when he walked, Xiao Zheng had to think for a while before trying to articulate his experience. That was when I realised that for Xiao Zheng, the purpose of the journey walking to work was simply for him not to engage in too much thinking. Instead of considering this moment of the inactivity of non-thinking as something passive, I am more inclined to see it as a daily practice of momentary non-engagement, which also transforms the space of the road into a strategic void, as far as Xiao Zheng is concerned. Harvey uses Marx’s example of a factory system to demonstrate how factory workers’ lives are determined by their working time. To some extent, this is also true in Xiao Zheng’s case to the extent that he structures his personal life according to his work life. We could argue with the brutal fact that one’s personal life is void between work times within a cycle.
162 To relate back to the relationship between time and money, the time Xiao Zheng spends working should be proportionately reflected by his reward, which is his salary. Likewise, his salary should in theory be reflected by the amount of time he spends working. However, in practice, this is not the case, whether we are discussing Marx’s factory system or Xiao Zheng’s workplace. The capitalist logic in a factory system is based on the exploitation of workers in order to extract as much as physically possible from them. By the same token, the same can also be said of Xiao Zheng’s work, where his superior could exploit him in the same way. In Harvey’s explanation of the primary, secondary, and tertiary circuits of capital flows, they make up the relief mechanism of surplus capital. By that definition, Xiao Zheng’s personal time spent on the journey on foot to work should be considered as recreational time to revitalize himself so that he can perform better at work. However, for Xiao Zheng, the time spent walking to work is a way for him to claim his own time. The act of walking to work thus illustrates Xiao Zheng’s tactic of manoeuvring within the temporal structure determined by his work time. E. P. Thompson argues that people fight over time within the confinement of industrial capitalism (cited in Harvey 1985: 8). Harvey also argues that because time has become such a scarce resource, it is important to make sure that it is well spent to achieve the maximum level of return (1985: 10). Yet Xiao Zheng’s attitude does not suggest the same thing. It is not a case of fighting back but one of non-engagement and detachment from the system. More importantly, Xiao Zheng’s daily walk makes a strong case for the practice of non- engagement, which finds resemblance in Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox’s Roads, in which they argue for the case of “the impossible public” (2015). Disengaging oneself from the system for a period of time over a section of space does not necessarily suggest a gesture of fighting back but the creation of a third space. Such third space is a space created for exceptions on Shennan Road. The relationship between the road and Xiao Zheng is not an intended relationship invested with a purpose that would be deemed social. However, non-engagement is a form of engagement that creates the space-time for Xiao Zheng when and where he ceases to be the person he has to be. Providing such a personal space for people such as Xiao Zheng is an unintended and somewhat non-specified role that Shennan Road plays.
163 Conclusion In this chapter, I have attended to the space-time of traffic that challenges the road as a moral space conceived by the State and prompts the reassessment of the effect of the motto “time is money; efficiency is life” that fires up the speed of growth in Shenzhen. However, through the discussions I have carried in this chapter, I have learnt many of the efforts put into maintaining the delivery of speed, progress and time-saving become in some way, counterproductive. The road as a moral space has in fact counteracted the intended infrastructural role in delivering speed, because the surveillance technologies have become a deterrent to progress. The presence of surveillance technologies and the numerous traffic lights also become a factor preventing many road users from choosing other expressways over Shennan Road. Therefore, the role assigned to the road as a moral space contradicts the role in delivering speed and progress. The space-time of traffic also brings out other unexpected roles of the road in providing individuals different experience of time. The process of waiting in traffic provides a situation reconfigures time as an experience rather than a resource. The irony of infrastructure is that its promise for speed and progress is compromised. It is not a broken promise because progress continues to be made by the continuous investment in the built environments and infrastructural projects such as the subterranean developments. There is also a lack of uniformity of progress. Surface disruptions caused by another infrastructural project suggest that progress is made by compromising other progress. I suggest that this is a condition that people in Shenzhen are forced to endure together in the common experience of progress and impediments to progress, as a result of the ongoing developmental projects taking place in the city. For a city thoroughfare such as Shennan Road in particular, surface disruptions on the road as a result of another infrastructural project epitomise the pace of change brought by the urgency of infrastructural upgrades. As a whole, in this chapter, through the ethnography of traffic, I have attempted to demonstrate that people experience the road differently due to differences in their means of transport. Mundane interactions with the road (Angelo & Hentschel, 2015) such as daily commutes on the road are experienced not only in smoothness but also often in disruptions and stuckness. These moments reflect not only social inequalities
164 but also the commonality of our experience of (im)mobility. The ethnographic space and time of traffic provides an important window through which differences encounter and even collide. The multiplicity and diversity of bodies carrying different habits(es) challenges the apparent oneness of the moral space of the road. With the exception of Xiao Zheng, who is neither subjected to the moral space nor the space-time of traffic, I have also demonstrated the road as a space of possibilities that provide the condition for the creation of personal space-time, where and when Xiao Zheng claims his own being. Again, he also demonstrates a conception of time that is beyond being a resource as perceived by the narrative of progress. Time is therefore experienced rather than spent, and that the road can also play an unintended role in providing a space of non-engagement.
165 Conclusion
“Shenzhen 2030” and future(s) imagined Over the last three decades, reforms have brought not only exponential economic growth but also represent a revolution against the socialist revolution pursued by Mao and his loyalists (Harrell 2001). However, a partial transition from command to market economy means that the role of the State in directing developmental trajectories and making economic decisions remains dominant. Apart from the 2010–2020 Comprehensive Plan (UPLRCSM 2010a), which aims to direct Shenzhen’s further transition into a more competitive city, the municipal government has also devised an urban development strategy that looks forward to what the government calls “Shenzhen 2030” with a vision that expands beyond the boundaries of the city (UPLRCSM 2010b). The strategy aims at elevating the status of Shenzhen to that of a global city, as well as broadening the scope of development to intra-city connectivity of infrastructural urbanism (Coward 2015). This inter-city networks are being formed with mega structures such as bridges and underwater tunnels that are being constructed in the Pearl River Delta, connecting major cities such as Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhongshan, Zhuhai etc. Developmental plans make promises that are predominantly oriented towards economic predictions and carefully calculated urban designs and planning. Who will benefit from the plans and developmental strategies produced by the municipal government remains questionable. Little is articulated about the ‘harmonious’ society conceived by the State. There are two aspects of uncertainty that I need to explore in order to attend to the temporal connections and disconnections between the future(s) and the present. In criticising the assumption that economic decisions are made based on rational calculations, sociologist Jens Beckert puts forward the term “fictional expectations”, which imagine futures that are anchored in the as if reality (2013; 2014). Instead of emphasising the predictability of future events or whether promises will be delivered in the near or distant future, the focus is placed upon the effects of these “fictional expectations”. One of these effects leads to innovations or ‘creative destruction’ in the capitalist system (2014). That is the willingness to take risks with a leap of faith.
166 Adam and Groves argue that “the more innovative the practice, the less secure is the basis from which to make accurate projections” and that “the more socially interconnected the activity, the more chance there is for interference and derailment of the plans” (2007: 30). The future is highly uncertain, especially for a fast-growing and changing city such as Shenzhen. In overcoming uncertainties, it becomes increasingly important for the State to act in relation to the future (Alvial-Palavicino, 2015) with plans and strategies that produce “fictional expectations”. Beckert’s “fictional expectations” are based upon the condition of uncertainty. By taking into consideration the risks and opportunities inherent in the capitalist system, Beckert argues that “fictional expectations” propel progress and growth. As a depiction of causal relations of linear temporal progression, Shennan Road becomes a time machine that takes us on a journey from the past, through the present, into the future. Yet, multiple temporalities crisscross each other on Shennan Road. As successful businessmen and businesswomen sit in their offices in a skyscraper high above, overlooking the road, some young person may, at the same time, be looking up at it imagining that one day he or she will be there. It seems valid enough to assert that someone’s present may be the future to which another person aspires. However, there is a third scenario. That is, the future may also be disconnected from the present. About a month after I arrived in Shenzhen, I went to see an art installation entitled “suàn shù” (accounting). The idea behind the installation was to explore the practicality of balancing personal financial accounts against competing desires for commodities. The underlying message centres on the widening gap between earnings and the realisation of personal desires for particular items. The kind of future being depicted is based on calculations. By Adam and Groves’ definitions, this is a future present connoting a future that can be predicted and anticipated based on the knowledge of the present (2007). It demonstrates a relatively linear process. While young migrants engage in daily practices of calculating how long it takes to acquire moderately luxurious items such as an iPhone, someone else might have turned to a street fortune teller in the hope of finding a more definite answer to what his or her future may be. Yet life is much more than rational calculations and identification of predispositions. It is more than a process of making predictions based on observable scientific or astrological patterns. As the focus scales down to the individual level,
167 complexities and thus uncertainties become more unsettling. It further begs the question about what kind of future people can (afford to) imagine. Both sides of Shennan Road especially in Futian and Nanshan are increasingly occupied not only by new private developments, but also billboards advertising new city apartments and villas in up and coming affluent neighbourhoods that are said to be the next big thing. An American friend who works in Shenzhen once said to me: “[developers] are selling our American suburban lifestyle in the city centre of Shenzhen!” Indeed, the bubble of property market has grown and expanded exponentially over the last decade as a result of rising investments in the built environments. During the period of fieldwork, I often heard stories about how young bachelors are under immense pressures to climb up the property ladder so that they would become more competitive in the marriage market. This phenomenon is not specific to Shenzhen but to most cities in China. Despite that the road puts on display the attractions of new city centre apartments and villages, the dreams of owning a property cannot be further away for many people who are struggling to make ends meet. Although the narrative of growth and progress continues to dominate the political and economic landscape in Shenzhen, the road is full of ironies that challenge such narrative.
Stories so far … At the beginning of the dissertation, I set out a central question asking: what other (kinds) of role does Shennan Road play, for whom and when? I have learnt that the road is defined by the roles it plays in serving different purposes. As the scope broadens, I intend the main question to engage with a wider theme of promises and uncertainties through studying the road.
Gaps begin to appear through the road For the State, history a product of political project of building social and political solidarity and the road as well as other infrastructure projects are part of this social and political engineering. The symbolic significance of the road is sustained by its role in maintaining the revolutionary image of the city. Yet gaps begin to appear between the State and people when the road becomes a subject of political engagement for the multiple but fragemented publics that exist in domains such as the Internet. Neither the State nor the publics have complete control
168 over the Internet. The public image of the road is destabilised by public opinions that put state practices in matters such as road maintenance under scrutiny. Developmental plans defines the road as a traffic corridor and describe a visual narrative of smoothness and uninterrupted flow of movements of people and goods. Neither plans for the future nor history of the past are neutral. Plans describe a visual narrative of what is connected to the road, by making invisible of what is intended to be disconnected from the road. To some extent, how the State intends the city to be is certain, but it simultaneously becomes increasingly uncertain for those who are gradually ‘planned out’ and ‘priced out’ of the city and its future. What these gaps underline is the relationship between power and the production of history as well as future(s). There is a widening gap between the future envisaged by the State and the future present to which ordinary people relate. Inequalities in urban developments and regenerations have increasingly challenged the individual futures imagined by the people who have to work hard simply to make ends meet.
The road as a catalyst for adaptive methods Doing ethnographic research on the road have posted challenges to the conventions of carrying out participant observations. Despite that the road has also become an important catalyst for devising methods that adapt to the movements as well as non- movements on the road. The ethnographic and audio-visual methods used to carry out research on the road are also the means by which I adapted to the road’s state of being between different people who use the road to serve different purposes, which in turn manifest in various relationalities. Studying the road on foot thus allows the ethnographer to adapt to the differential speeds of movements on the road as well as the time and space for detours. This is another way of demonstrating the possibilities presented by the road presented to people, including urban researchers. One of the unexpected results from doing research on the road is the production of a community of researchers. Such a community thus extends the capacity of the road to the generation of research experiences and ethnographic knowledge. In this case, the road is a research gateway for the ethnographer to explore urban issues. The multiplicity of the roles the
169 road can play is also reflected by the different ways of sensing and grasping the road and therefore the city.
A closer look: uncertainties, inequalities, and negotiations One thing that became increasingly obvious to me as I began organising the ethnographic materials was the level of association between people and the road. I began to notice a general pattern where people who occupy lower social strata are the ones who have established a higher level of physical associations with the road. The relationship people and the road is manifested by ways in which people negotiate their presence on the road. As a regulated space, the road is intended to be socially selective. But through the spatial stories of negotiations, the road becomes a temporary refuge space for some. As a State-conceived moral space that defines the expected and unacceptable behaviours on the road, the space-time of traffic then challenges the moral space by bringing together a multiplicity and diversity of bodies that produce a different set of unwritten rules on the road. It is also through the process of waiting in traffic that I learnt that time is experienced rather than spent as a resource. Because it is a State-space, it is destabilising for those who are deemed undesirable by the State. It thus puts into question the State conception of public space and the actual access to public space. While it is a research-space for the ethnographer who experiences a degree of uncertainty in the scope of knowing and subsequent soundness of knowledge, it is also a relational space with unintended contingencies, which are not always appreciated by the management authorities. The road continues to be “the materialization of ongoing communication” (Smith 2016) in multidimensional relationality. Such communication includes the communication of promises. What the dissertation has demonstrated is that as promises for a better future filter down to the ground level where low-income members of the population are working hard to make ends meet, they end up being fictional and even irrelevant. This leads me to rethink Beckert’s “fictional expectations”. The communication of promises, for example, via the inspiring façade of the road, is not a linear or equal process of filtering down from one level to another. When the Zhangs and the Fans face the daily uncertainties of being evicted, they only wish to be granted the right to public space – a space of stability. Lao Zhang, the taxi driver, would rather choose to dislike
170 Shenzhen because he cannot afford to buy a property. Buying a property is also out of the reach of the young graduate Xiao Yan and Xiao Zheng, and instead of putting themselves under the pressure of working towards a future, they can only focus their attention on the present with an attitude of come-what-may by putting headphones on and listening to the music they like or walking to work in solitude. Grand promises do not always find their way into everyone’s idea of the future. On the ground level, promises of more sustainable growth and a more competitive city are not always relevant to everyone whose expectations for life are more concerned with daily negotiations with challenges. With the example of London, Massey argues that a city is produced by conflict which becomes increasingly implicit (2005). She suggests that such conflict is what she calls a collision of trajectories and “a confrontation between the imaginations of the city” (2005: 157). In the context of Shenzhen, such confrontation still holds and manifests itself also in the imaginations of the future.
Final remarks: reassessing ‘the social’ Finally, I also put forward that this study of Shennan Road also implies the need to reassess ‘the social’. One important take-home message I have learnt from the study of the various roles that the road plays is that the quality of ‘the social’ cannot be taken for granted. Latour states in the opening chapter of Reassembling the Social that ‘the social’ should designate “what is already assembled, without making any superfluous assumption about the nature of what is assembled”, but he points out that “the social seems to be diluted everywhere and yet nowhere in particular” (2005: 1-2). ‘The social’ is not a given quality that is associated with all things and that the associations with people who use the road differently does not automatically render all human- associations ‘social’. The road is embedded within a network of social and non-social associations that are born out of the different ways in which people use the road. ‘The social’, according to Latour, is “what is glued together by many other types of connectors” (2005: 5). Secondly, the relationship established between the road and people are not always sustained and durable. The different roles that define the road do not always remain the same. Rather the roles played by the road can be undone as easily as they are produced and the same goes for relationships between the road and people
171 produced by these roles. The road is therefore not an inherently social subject to which people relate, but it is deeply involved with urban lives in the city in which the road is situated.
172 Bibliography Adam, B., & Groves, C. 2007. Future Matters: Action, Knowledge and Ethics. London and Boston: Brill.
Adey, P. 2010. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Malden, Oxford and Chichester: Blackwell Publishing.
Al, S., Shan, P. C., Giarlis, A., Juhre, C., & Wang, C. 2012. Factory Towns of South China: An Illustrated Guidebook. S. Al, P. C. Shan, A. Giarlis, C. Juhre, & C. Wang, eds., Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Alvial-Palavicino, C. 2015. The Future as Practice: A Framework to Understand Anticipation in Science and Technology. Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 6(2): 135-172.
Amin, A. 2014. Lively Infrastructure. Theory, Culture & Society , 31(7/8): 137-161.
Andrews, H. 2012. “Mapping My Way: Map-making and Analysis in Participant Observation”. In Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice and Performance. L. Roberts ed., London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 216-236.
Angelo, H., & Hentschel, C. 2015. Interactions with infrastructure as windows into social worlds: A method for critical urban studies. Introduction. City, 19(2/3): 306-312.
Anonymous. 2007. 深圳，你还能奢侈到什么时候？ (in Chinese) Retrieved August 24, 2016, from Sina Blog: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4c6bd4e1010008bi.html.
Asiedu, A. B., & Agyei-Mensah, S. 2008. Traders on the run: Activities of street vendors in the Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography, 62(3): 191-202.
Augé, M. 1995 [1992]. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York: Verso.
Auyero, J. 2011. Patients of the State: An Ethnographic Account of Poor People's Waiting. Latin American Research Review, 46(1): 5-29.
Bach, J. 2010. “They come in peasants and leave citizens”: Urban villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China. Cultural Anthropology, 25(3): 421-458.
Beckert, J. 2013. Imagined futures: fictional expectations in the economy. Theory and Society, 42: 219-240.
------. 2014. Capitalist Dynamics: Fictional Expectations and the Openness of the Future. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Discussion Paper, 14(7)
Benjamin, W. 1999 [1982]. The Arcade Project. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
173 Berman, M. 1988. All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. New York, London, Victoria, Ontario and Auckland: Penguin Books.
Bissell, D. 2007. Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities. Mobilities, 2(2): 277-298.
Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Dehli, Mexico City: Cambridge University Press.
------. 1999 [1993]. “Site Effects”. In The Weight of the World: Social Suffeirng in Contemporary Society. P. Bourdieu, A. Accardo, G. Balaz, S. Beaud, F. Bonvin, E. Bourdieu, et al.,. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. pp. 123-129.
------. 2003. Participant Objectivation. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 9(2): 281-294.
Bruton, M. J., Burton, S. G., & Li, Y. 2005. Shenzhen: coping with uncertainties in planning. Habitat International, 29: 227-243.
Buck-Morss, S. 1992. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October, 62: 3-41.
------. 1995. The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe. October, 73: 3-26.
Campbell, J. M. 2012. Between the Material and the Figural Road: The Incompleteness of Colonial Geographies in Amazonia. Mobilities, 7 (4): 481-500.
Cannon, T., & Jenkins, A. 1990. The geography of contemporary China: The impact of Deng Xiaoping’s decade. T. Cannon, & A. Jenkins, eds., London and New York: Routledge.
Casey, E. 1999. “The time of the glance: Toward becoming otherwise”. In E. A. Grosz ed., Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. pp. 79-97.
Chan, C. K.-C. 2012. Community-based organizations for migrant workers’ rights: the emergence of labour NGOs in China. Community Development Journal: 1-17.
Chan, C. K.-C., & Hui, E. S.-L. 2014. The Development of Collective Bargaining in China: From “Collective Bargaining by Riot” to “Party State-led Wage Bargaining. The China Quarterly, 217: 221-242.
Chan, K. W. 1994. Cities with invisible wall. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.
Cohn, B. S. 1980. History and Anthropology: The State of Play. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22(2): 198-221.
Coward, M. 2015. Hot Spots/ Cold Spots: Infrastructural Politics of the Urban Age. International Political Sociology , doi: 10.111 (ips. 12081): 96-99.
174 Dalakoglou, D. 2010. The road: an ethnography of the Albanian-Greek cross-border motorway. American Ethnologist, 37(1): 132-149.
------. 2012. ‘The Road from Capitalism to Capitalism’: Infrastructure of (post)Socialism in Albania. Mobilities, 7(4): 571-586. de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Debord, G. 2009 [1956]. “Theory of the Dérive”. In The Situationists and the City. T. McDonough ed., London and New York: Verso, pp. 77-85
Deleuz, G. 1986. Cinema 1 The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
------. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 52: 3-7.
Donham, D. L. 2002. On Being Modern in a Capitalist World: Some Conceptual and Comparative Issues. In Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies. B. M. Knauft, ed., Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 241- 257
Donovan, M. G. 2008. Informal Cities and the Contestation of Public Space: The Case of Bogota’s Street Vendors, 1988-2003. Urban Studies, 45(1): 29-51.
Douglas, M. 1968. Pollution. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 12: 336- 341.
------. 2001 [1966]. Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London and New York: Routledge.
Dourish, P., & Bell, G. 2007. The infrastructure of experience and the experience of infrastructure: meaning and structure in everyday encounters with space. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34: 414-430.
Edwards, P. N. 2003. Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems. In Modernity and Technology, T. J. Misa, P. Brey, & A. Feenberg eds., Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press, pp. 185-226.
Edwards, P. N., Bowker, G. C., Jackson, S. J., & Williams, R. 2009. Introduction: An Agenda for Infrastructural Studies. Journal of the Association for Information Systems , 10(5): 364-374.
Esarey, A., & Xiao, Q. 2011. Digital Communication and Political Change in China. International Journal of Communication, 5: 298-319.
Fabian, J. 2002 [1983]. Time and the Other: how anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.
175 Feuchtwang, S. 2002. “Remnants of revolution in China”. In Postsocialism: Ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia. C. M. Hann ed., London and New York: Routledge, pp. 196-213.
Fewsmith, J. 2008. China Since Tiananmen: From Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore and São Paulo: Cambridge University Press.
Fioramonti, L. 2014a. How Numbers Rule the World: the Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics. London and New York: Zed Books.
------. 2014b. The world’s most powerful number: An assessment of 80 years of GDP ideology. Anthropology Today, 30(2): 12-15.
Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
------. 1997 [1977]. Panopticism (extract). In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. N. Leach ed., London and New York: Routledge, pp. 356-366.
Gell, A. 1985. How to Read a Map: Remarks on the Practical Logic of Navigation. Man, 20(2): 271-286.
------. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Berg.
Goldman, M. 2002. “A New Relationship between the Intellectuals and the State in the Post-Mao Period”. In An Intellectual History of Modern China. M. Goldman, & L. O.- F. Lee eds., Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh, Madrid and Cape Town: Cambridge University Press, pp. 499-538.
Gottschalk, S., & Salvaggio, M. 2015. Stuck inside of Mobile: Ethnography of Non-Places. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 44(1): 3-33.
Graham, S., & Hewitt, L. 2012. Getting off the ground: On the politics of urban verticality. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (1): 72-92.
Gregory, R. L. 1977. Art and Reality. In Eye and Brain: The psychology of seeing. R. L. Gregory. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 163-188.
Gupta, A., & Ferguson, J. 1997. “Discipline and Practice: “The Field” as Site, Method and Location in Anthropology”. In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, A. Gupta, & J. Ferguson eds., Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 1-46.
Habermas, J. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. T. Burger, & F. Lawrence, trans., Great Britain: Polity Press.
176 Harrell, S. 2001. The Anthropology of Reform and the Reform of Anthropology: Anthropological Narratives of Recovery and Progress in China. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30: 139-161.
Harvey, D. 1985. Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
------. 1991. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harvey, P. 1996. Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the nation state and the universal exhibition. London and New York: Routledge.
------. 2010. Cementing Relations: The Materiality of Roads and Public Spaces in Provincial Peru. Social Analysis, 54 (2): 28-46.
------. 2012. The Topological Quality of Infrastructural Relation: An Ethnographic Approach. Theory, Culture and Society, 29 (4/5): 76-92.
Harvey, P., & Knox, H. 2012. The Enchantment of Infrastructure. Mobilities, 7(4): 521- 536.
------. 2015. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. W. Lovitt, trans., New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc.
Hetherington, K. 2014. Waiting for Surveyor: Development Promises and the Temporality of Infrastructure. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 19 (2): 195-211.
Hong, C. 2008. 深南大道”名称的最早来历. Shenzhen Dang An (Shenzhen Archive) (4): 47-48.
Hou, J. W. 2011. Economic reform in China: Cause and Effects. The Social Science Journal, 48: 419-434.
Huang, G., Xue, D., & Li, Z. 2014. From Revanchism to Ambivalence: The Changing Politics of Street Vending in Guangzhou. Antipode, 46 (1): 170-189.
Humphrey, C. 2005. Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination. Royal Anthropological Institute, 11: 39-58. iFeng.com. 2015a. 深南大道从无到有，渐成深圳的名片与坐标轴 (in Chinese). Retrieved August 24, 2016, from Phoenix News: http://v.ifeng.com/history/shishijianzheng/201505/01249274-c6a8-4080- 86f8-f1f4c86e726e.shtml.
Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London and New York: Routledge.
177 ------. 2007. Lines: a brief history. London and New York: Routledge.
------. 2010a. Footprints through the weather-world: walking, breathing and knowing. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute: S121-S139.
------. 2010b. Ways of mind-walking: reading, writing and painting. Visual Studies, 25(1): 15-23.
Irving, A. 2008. Journey to the End of the Night: Disillusion and Derangement among the Senses. Journeys, 9(2): 138-160.
------. 2010. Dangerous substances and visible evidence: tears, blood, alcohol, pills. Visual Studies, 25(1):24-35.
------. 2013. Bridges: a new sense of scale. The Senses & Society, 8 (3): 290-313.
Jensen, C. B., & Morita, A. 2016. Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments. Ethnos: 1- 12.
Katz, J. 2000. How Emotions Work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Keane, M., & Zhao, E. J. 2012. Renegades on the Frontier of Innovation: The Shanzhai Grassroots Communities of Shenzhen in China’s Creative Economy. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 53 (2): 216-230.
Kivisto, P. 2010. “Modernity: From the Promise of Modern Society to Postmodern Suspicions”. In Key Ideas in Sociology (3rd Edition). Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC: SAGE, Pine Forge, pp. 131-167.
Klaeger, G. 2012. Rush and Relax: The Rhythms and Speeds of Touting Perishable Products on a Ghanian Roadside. Mobilities, 7(4): 537-554.
Koolhaas, R. 1995. The Generic City. New York: The Monacelli Press.
Kusenbach, M. 2003. Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool. Ethnography, 4 (3): 455-485.
Larkin, B. 2013. The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42: 327-343.
Latour, B. 1993. We have never been modern. C. Porter, trans., Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
------. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. D. Nicholson-Smith, trans., Oxford, England: Blackwell.
------. 2003 [1970]. The Urban Revolution. R. Bononno, trans., Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
178 ------. 2004 [1992]. Rhythmanalsysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. S. Elden, & G. Moore, trans., London and New York: Continuum.
Li, Y. 2009. Da Dao 30 (Shennan Road at 30). Shenzhen: Shenzhen Press Group Publication.
Lindtner, S., Greenspan, A., & Li, D. 2015. Designed in Shenzhen: Shanzhai manufacturing and maker entrepreneurs. AA 2015 Proceedings of the Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference on Critical Alternatives. Aarhus University Press, pp. 85-96.
Lü, X. 2010. 深南路上尘封的记忆 (in Chinese). Shenzhen Dang An (Shenzhen Archive) (1): 45-46.
Luedke, T. 2010. Driving Lives: an Ethnography of Chicago Taxi Drivers. Retrieved March 30, 2016, from Industry Studies Association Working Paper Series 2010-03, http://isapapers.pitt.edu/179/
Luohu District Government. 2015. Luohu Overview. Retrieved March 03, 2016, from Shenzhen Luohu Government Online, http://www.szlh.gov.cn/en/a/2013/h19/a241924_870520.shtml
Lynch, K. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The Technology Press and Harvard University Press.
MacDougall, D. 2006. The corporeal image: film, ethnography and the senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Marcus, G. 1998. Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McDonough, T. 2009. Introdcution. In The Situationists and the City, T. McDonough ed., London and New York: Verso, pp. 1-31.
McKinnon, I. 2011. Expanding Cartographic Practices in the Social Sciences. In The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods E. Margolis, & L. Pauwels eds., Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC: SAGE Publications, pp. 452- 473.
Melly, C. 2013. Ethnography on the road: infrastructural vision and the unruly present in contemporary Dakar. Africa, 83 (3): 385-402.
Migdal, J. S. 1994. The state in society: an approach to struggles for domination. In State power and social forces: domination and transformation in the third world J. S. Migdal, A. Kohli & V. Shue, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 7-34.
Molotch, H. 1976. The City as a Growth Machine. American Journal of Sociology, 82 (2): 309-332.
Murchison, J. M. 2010. Ethnography Essentials: Designing, Conducting and Presenting Your Research. San Franscisco: Jossey-Bass
179 Nandu News. 2013. 深南路现 3 米深坑. Retrieved August 23, 2016, from Nandu News: http://epaper.oeeee.com/epaper/H/html/2013-03/31/content_2344937.htm
Newell, G., Chau, K. W., & Wong, S. K. 2009. The significance and performance of infrastructure in China. Journal of Property Investment & Finance, 27 (2): 180- 202.
Newton, J. H. 1998. Beyond Representation: Toward A Typology of Visual Behavior. Visual Anthropology Review, 14 (1): 58-72.
Ng, M. K. 2003. City Profile: Shenzhen. Cities, 20 (6): 429-441.
Ng, M. K., & Tang, W.-S. 2004. The Role of Planning in the Development of Shenzhen, China: Rhetoric and Realities. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 45 (3): 190- 211.
Nielsen, M. 2012. Roadside Inventions: Making Time and Money Work at a Road Construction Site in Mozambique. Mobilities, 7 (4): 467-480.
Notar, B. 2012. ‘Coming out’ to ‘Hit the road’: Temporal, Spatial and Affective Mobilities of Taxi Drivers and Day Trippers in Kunming, China. City & Society, 24 (3): 281- 301.
O’Donnell, M. A. 2001. Becoming Hong Kong, Razing Baoan, Preserving Xin’an: an ethnographic account of urbanization in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. Cultural Studies, 15 (3/4): 419-443.
------. 2008. Vexed Foundations: an Ethnographic Interpretation of the Shenzhen Built Environment. exed Urbanism: A Symposium on Design and the Social. New York: The New School.
------. 2017. Heros of the Special Zone: Modeling Reform and Its Limits. In Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City. M. A. O’Donnell, W. Wong and J. Bach, eds., Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 39-64
Pantsov, A. V., & Levine, S. I. 2015. Deng Xiaoping: a revolutionary life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pieke, J. 2004. Contours of an anthropology of the Chinese state: political structure, agency, and economic development in Rural China. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 10, 517-538
Pink, S. 2008. An urban tour: The sensory sociality of ethnographic place-making. Ethnography, 9 (2): 175-196.
Pool, R. 1991. Postmodern Ethnography? Critique of Anthropology, 11 (4): 309-331.
Pütz, O. 2011. From Non-Places to Non-Events: The Airport Security Checkpoint. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 41 (2): 154-188.
180 Rauchfleisch, A., & Schäfer, M. S. 2015. Multiple public spheres of Weibo: a typology of forms and potentials of online public spheres in China. Information, Communication and Society, 18 (2): 139-155.
Reeves, M. 2016. Infrastructural Hope: Anticipating ‘Independent Roads’ and Territorial Integrity in Southern Kyrgyzstan. Ethnos: 1-27.
Rodgers, D. 2012. Haussmannization in the tropics: Abject urbanism and infrastructural violence in Nicaragua. Ethnography, 13 (4): 413-438.
Rowe, W. T. 1990. The Public Sphere in Modern China. Modern China, 16 (2): 309-329.
Sassen, S. 2005. The Global City: Introducing a Concept. The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 11 (2): 27-43.
------. 2012. When the centre no longer holds: Cities as frontier zones. Cities, 34: 67-70.
Schmid, H., Sahr, W.-D., & Urry, J. 2011. “Cities and Fascination: Beyond the Surplus of Meaning”. In Cities and Fascination: Beyond the Surplus of Meaning, H. Schmid, W.-D. Sahr, & J. Urry eds., Farnham, England and Burlington, USA: Ashgate, pp. 1- 13.
Sennett, R. 1992. The uses of disorder: Personal identity and city life. New York: W. W. Norton.
------. 1994. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton
Shenzhen Archive. 2004. Shenzhen’s Big Events. Retrieved July 16, 2016, from Shenzhen Archive, http://www.szdaj.gov.cn/dawh/szds/2004/201301/t20130115_2101037.htm
Shenzhen Design Centre. 2013. 酷茶会 59 期：深南大道与深圳. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from Shenzhen Design Centre Website, http://www.szdesigncenter.org/?p=27438
Shenzhen Design Centre. 2014 趣城-深圳建筑地图 (in Chinese). Shenzhen: Haitian Publication.
Shenzhen Government. 2010. 深圳经济特区市容和环境卫生管理条例（1) (in Chinese). Retrieved March 25, 2016, from Shenzhen Government Online, http://www.sz.gov.cn/szzt2010/cgbmfw/ljgl/zcfg/201312/t20131226_229617 7.htm
Shenzhen Municipal Government. 2008. General Information. Retrieved August 23, 2016, from Shenzhen Government Online, http://english.sz.gov.cn/gi/
Shenzhen News. 2013. 深圳“地陷”一再上演，“脚下之危”谁来化解？(in Chinese). Retrieved from Shenzhen News Online, http://www.sznews.com/zhuanti/node_151926.htm
181 Shenzhen News. 2014. 深圳早餐摊点乱象多：卫生不过关， 存有安全隐患 (in Chinese). Retrieved March 26, 2016, from Shenzhen News Online, http://www.sznews.com/news/content/2014-09/23/content_10186029_3.htm
Shenzhen News. 2015. 深圳经济特区道路交通安全管理条例（全文）(in Chinese). Retrieved March 29, 2016, from Shenzhen News Online, http://www.sznews.com/news/content/2015-04/30/content_11532199_4.htm
Shin, H. B. 2011. “Vertical accumulation and accelerated urbanism: the East Asian experience”. In Urban Constellations, M. Gandy ed., Berlin: Jovis Publishers, pp. 48-53.
Simmel, G. 1950. “The Metropolitan and Mental Life”. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, pp. 409-426.
------. 1950. “The Stranger”. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, pp. 402-208.
------. 1997 [1994]. Bridge and Door. In Rethinking Architecture: A reader in cultural theory. N. Leach ed., London and New York: Routledge, pp. 66-68.
Simone, A. 2012. Infrastructure: Introductory Commentary by AbdouMaliq Simone. Retrieved June 28, 2016, from Cultural Anthropology website: https://culanth.org/curated_collections/11-infrastructure/discussions/12- infrastructure-introductory-commentary-by-abdoumaliq-simone
------. 2014. People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture, 6 (3): 407-429.
------. 2015. Afterword: Come on out, you’re surrounded: the betweens of infrastructure. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 19 (2/3): 375-383.
------. 2005. The Right to the City. Interventions, 7 (3):321-325.
Sina News. 2007. 从深圳深南大道改造等工程看中国式规划 (in Chinese) Retrieved August 24, 2016, from Sina News Online: http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2007-11- 09/093914270392.shtml
Smith, M. L. 2016. Urban Infrastructure as materialized consensus. World Archaeology 48(1): 164-178
Soukup, C. 2013. The Postmodern Ethnographic Flaneur and the Study of Hyper- mediated Everyday. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 42 (2): 226-254.
Star, S. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43: 377- 391.
Star, S. L., & Strauss, A. 1999. Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8: 9-30.
182 Starr, C., & Berg, D. 2007. “The quest for gentility in China: An introduction”. In The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond gender and class D. Berg, & C. Starr eds., London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1-18.
Stewart, K. 2011. Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29: 445-453.
Su, W. 2015. A virtual public sphere and its limitation – microblog, online civic engagement in China and its interplay with the state. The Journal of International Communication: 1-21.
Takungpao News. 2013. 深圳地陷成‘无底洞’30 吨水泥半月未填满 (in Chinese) Retrieved August 23, 2016, from Takungpao News: http://news.takungpao.com/paper/q/2013/0413/1545135.html
Tang, M., & Huhe, N. 2014. Alternative framing: The effect of the Internet on political support in authoritarian China. International Political Science Review, 35 (5): 559-576.
Taylor, N. 1973. The village in the city. London: Temple Smith.
Thrift, N. 2004. Driving in the City. Theory, Culture & Society, 21 (4/5):41-59.
Tong, Y., & Lei, S. 2013. War of Position and Microblogging in China. Journal of Contemporary China , 22 (80): 292-311.
Urban Planning, Land and Resources Commission of Shenzhen Municipality. 2008. Comprehensive Plan for Shenzhen 1996-2010 (in Chinese). Retrieved July 14, 2016, from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/main/csgh/ztgh/ztgh/jianj.htm
------. 2009. Shenzhen 2030 Development Strategy: Towards a Pioneering Global City with Sustainable Development (in Chinese). Retrieved July 14, 2016, from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/main/sz3/index.html
------.. 2010a. Comprehensive Plan for Shenzhen 2010-2020 (in Chinese) Retrieved July 14, 2016, from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/xxgk/csgh/csztgh/201009/t20100929_60694.htm
------.. 2010b. 30 Years: Three rounds of comprehensive plans leading Shenzhen’s developments (in Chinese) Retrieved July 14, 2016, from http://www.szpl.gov.cn/xxgk/gzdt/zwdt/201009/t20100909_59048.html
Urry, J. 2004. The ‘System’ of Automobility. Theory, Culture & Society, 21 (4/5): 41-59.
Vergunst, J. 2010. Rhythms of Walking: History and Presence in a City Street. Space and Culture 13 (4): 376-388
Virilio, P. 2006 [1977]. Speed and Politics. M. Polizzotti, trans., Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
183 Vogel, E. F. 2011. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Cambridge Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Wang, H. 1998. Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity. Social Text, 55 (Intellectual Politics in Post-Tiananmen China): 9-44.
Wang, J. J., & Xu, J. 2002. An unplanned commercial district in a fast growing city: a case study of Shenzhen, China. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Review, 9: 317-326.
Wang, Y.-P., Wang, Y.-L., & Wu, J.-S. 2009. Urbanization and Informal Development in China: Urban Villages in Shenzhen. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33 (4): 957-973.
Watson, C. W. 1999. Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology. C. W. Watson, ed., London: Pluto.
Weizman, E. 2002. Introduction to the Politics of Verticality. Retrieved July 22, 2016, Open Democracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology- politicsverticality/article_801.jsp
Whyte, W. H. 1980. The social life of small urban spaces. New York: Project for Public Space.
Wood, D. 2012. “The Anthropology of Cartography”. In Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance. L. Roberts, ed., London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 280- 303.
Wright, C. 1998. The third subject: perspectives on visual anthropology. Anthropology Today, 14 (4):16-22.
Wu, F. 1998. From Central Planning to Transitional Economy. Progress in Planning , 51: 165-252.
Yazici, B. 2013. Towards an Anthropology of Traffic: A Ride through Class Hierarchies on Istanbul’s Roadways. Ethnos , 78 (4): 515-542.
Zacharias, J., & Tang, Y. 2010. Restructuring and repositioning Shenzhen, China’s new mega city. Progress in Planning, 73: 209-249.
Zhang, L. 2001. Strangers in the city: Reconfigurations of space, power, and social networks within China’s floating population. California: Stanford University Press.
Zhang, L. 2006. Contesting Spatial Modernity in Late-Socialist China. Current Anthropology, 47 (3): 461-484.
184