Enclave Urbanism
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Urban Village ENCLAVE URBANISM Urban villages, or villages-amid-the city, have emerged as unique forms of urban spaces in Chinese cities. The mechanisms of their transformation, rooted in their origins as rural villages, posit an interesting dynamic between top-down policy and its informal interpretation and enactment via individual actors, families, or village organizations. Their naming embodies a dialectical tension between the rural and the urban that is played out in the transformation of urban form and its functioning and differentiation from other parts of the city. They exist as island enclaves, distinct through their physical form, the programs and activities that take place there, the concentration of migrants who live there, and the regulatory frameworks that they operate under. They go against the grain of formal city-building and planning in China, engendering and fostering a type of urbanity that contains a diversity of spatial conditions, entrepreneurial actions, and multiple stakeholders. As anomalies, they are threatened and many have been eradicated in favor of more sanitized and homogeneous urban forms that create a seamless cityscape without any awkward aberrations. Many city governments use the rhetoric of progress to argue that urban villages are unhygienic, unsafe, and are in desperate need of modernization, which echo many of the historical post-war slum clearance programs in the United Kingdom and the United States. However, if they are erased what would be lost in this process? How would their elimination affect the surrounding urban districts? Are there specific urban forms; building typologies, public spaces, or constellations of programs that are present in urban villages which could be harnessed in the future development of these locations? Do they contain urban design ideas that could be extracted and deployed to offer alternative solutions to the normative models of urban planning so prevalent in the construction The indented text is of Chinese cities today? * written by Mary Ann O’Donnell, a social Literally these neighborhoods are called cheng zhong cun, or city-inside-villages. anthropologist based This ordering is important because Chinese naming practices go from largest in Shenzhen who first Copyright © 2013. Birkhäuser. All rights reserved. Birkhäuser. All Copyright © 2013. introduced me to to smallest territory. In other words, the Chinese emphasizes the fact that these Tangtou in November neighborhoods are “out of place,” while the English reminds us that the cheng zhong 2012. cun have a particular kind of independent agency and identity.* Bolchover, Joshua, and John Lin. Rural Urban Framework : Transforming the Chinese Countryside, Birkhäuser, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Urban Village 21 Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/otis-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1433390. Created from otis-ebooks on 2018-01-17 14:40:40. By framing the question in terms of cheng zhong cun ( ), influencing the city (rather than the city shaping the neighborhood), this article goes against the grain of Chinese territorial norms, even as it affirms critical practices in Western scholarship. The distinction between Chinese territorial practices and Western intellectual practices matters because it illustrates the extent to which Western descriptions of cheng zhong cun are not and cannot be value-neutral. The larger question for progressive scholarship thus becomes one of self-reflexivity: “To what ends have we activated this rupture?” In order to answer these questions the essay will focus on Baishizhou, an urban village settlement in Shenzhen, Southern China. As Shenzhen became the first city in China to eliminate the legal status of all of its villages in2004, it is at the forefront of testing whether this policy will facilitate the smooth incorporation of these villages back into the legal and physical construct of the city. However, this process is fraught with complexity that belies the implicit resistance of these villages-amid-the-city. Residual Histories ↖ Urban village cluster, Emerging from the Baishizhou subway stop one first encounters the six-lane Shenzhen highway of Shennan Road, Shenzhen’s main East-West corridor. Across → Plan of Baishizhou the street, tourist buses congregate and the tops of replicas of the Eiffel tower urban village cluster and a sandy pyramid can be seen behind the gates of Windows of the World, within Shenzhen’s Copyright © 2013. Birkhäuser. All rights reserved. Birkhäuser. All Copyright © 2013. urban context. one of China’s earliest theme-parks, which opened in 1994. Down the street The Mao era, Tangtou a recently constructed mall, Yitian Holiday Plaza—“The Most Wonderful dormitories are highlighted in pink. Bolchover,22 Joshua, Baishizhou and John Lin. Rural Village Urban Framework : Transforming the Chinese Countryside, Birkhäuser, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/otis-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1433390. Created from otis-ebooks on 2018-01-17 14:40:40. Copyright © 2013. Birkhäuser. All rights reserved. Birkhäuser. All Copyright © 2013. Bolchover, Joshua, and John Lin. Rural Urban Framework : Transforming the Chinese Countryside, Birkhäuser, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/otis-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1433390. Created from otis-ebooks on 2018-01-17 14:40:40. Experiential Shopping Mall in China”—contains all the prerequisites of contemporary urban living for China’s new middle class: Starbucks, H&M, Cartier, an ice skating rink, a cinema, and an up-market Westin Hotel. Taking a Google Earth view of this piece of the city a very different urban morphology becomes visible. An amorphous spill of densely packed houses, irregularly organized, extends north-south on both sides of the highway hidden behind Shennan Road’s middle class veneer. This cluster is Baishizhou, one of Shenzhen’s last remaining centrally located urban villages and home to approximately 140,000 people—approximately the population of Oxford, England—living in an area of just 7.4 km2. Baishizhou is in fact a conjugation of five villages. Three of these, ↖ A typical street (Baishizhou, Shangbaishi, Xianbaishi) are “natural,” originally rural villages in Baishizhou and two are “administrative” villages (Xintang and Tangtou) that were set up by the state during Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–62). Today the boundaries of these villages are blurred and usually only visibly demarcated by a road or through different street address plaques. Spatial differences occur but are subtle with one exception—Tangtou. Tangtou is distinct as it contains a residual fragment of its rural past in the form of five rows of one-stroy workers’ dormitories that accommodate eighty-six households. These buildings were constructed in 1959 when the government decided that the original Tangtou village in Shiyan, about 15 km northwest of Baishizhou, was to be flooded to form a new reservoir. The residents were relocated to a newly set up agricultural work unit—the Shahe State Farm. Through this process the original Tangtou residents, who were rural villagers, became part of the state apparatus. This initial move was the origin for the latent ambiguity in status and ownership rights that underlaid all further evolution of the village. This is a good example of how societal units are very clearly organized and defined in Chinese terms. In Chinese, the difference betweencheng a“ zhong village”and a “village” marks an important social boundary between historic identities and the Copyright © 2013. Birkhäuser. All rights reserved. Birkhäuser. All Copyright © 2013. unintended effects of urbanization in Shenzhen. In Mandarin usage “village”orcun “ ” usually refers to one self-identified group, while cheng zhong cun would refer to all of Baishizhou. Bolchover,24 Joshua, Baishizhou and John Lin. Rural Village Urban Framework : Transforming the Chinese Countryside, Birkhäuser, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/otis-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1433390. Created from otis-ebooks on 2018-01-17 14:40:40. 1 Dikötter, Frank. 2010. During the periods of extreme volatility and hardship in the Mao era,1 Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution), many villagers within the county Most Devastating of Bao’an where Tangtou is located abandoned their homes and attempted Catastrophe, 1958—62. Bloomsbury Publishing, to flee across the border to adjacent, British-ruled Hong Kong. To maintain London, New York, agricultural production within Bao’an, the government installed work units, Berlin and Sydney such as the Shahe State Farm, and used these to accommodate overseas Chinese who were being repatriated from countries undergoing political turmoil across Asia: for example, the violent communist suppression and killing of Chinese citizens in Suharto’s Indonesia during 1965–66. Bao’an remained an agricultural county composed of natural villages and state farms producing lychees, bananas, rice, and oysters up until Deng Xiaoping’s radical economic reforms of 1979. Deng selected Bao’an as a laboratory for economic growth because of its adjacent border with Hong Kong and elevated it to the status of Shenzhen Municipality. The mechanism for growth was the apparatus of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) that encouraged the influx of foreign investment through opportune regulatory conditions to stimulate industrial production. Initially incorporating the entire county of 1953 km2, by 1981 it became apparent this was simply too large