Mary Ann O’Donnell, Editor, Architectural Worlds, School of Architecture, Shenzhen University Email:
[email protected] Presented at Vexed Urbanism: A Symposium on Design and the Social, The New School, New York, Feb 13-15, 2008. Vexed Foundations: An Ethnographic Interpretation of the Shenzhen Built Environment FORM OF THE QUESTION—INNER CITY VILLAGES (市中村) In this paper, I address an issue long dear to anthropological hearts—possible forms of cultural continuity despite and within rapidly changing societies. In doing so, I end up discussing the administrative structure of the Chinese state and the enabling conditions of imagining new forms of the Chinese nation. My study departs from the observation that despite the Chinese central government’s ideological, organizational, and architectural transformation of agrarian Baoan County into urban Shenzhen Municipality, villages have not only remained a viable feature of the urban landscape, but have also flourished in new ways, providing housing, employment, education, and medical care for their respective villagers. Indeed, the remarkable transformation of Shenzhen village lifeways has not diminished village-based cultural identities, but rather strengthened them. Such is the paradox of cultural continuity in Shenzhen. Even though materially little remains of agrarian Baoan, nevertheless, villages claim cultural histories of over four hundred years. Moreover, non-villagers explain village behavior in terms of this history. In other words, villagers not only claim unique, non-Shenzhen identities, but other Shenzhen inhabitants recognize the validity of this claim. In fact, the persistence of village identity constitutes a serious political challenge for Shenzhen officials, who view the villages as impediments to “normal (正常)” modernization.