A tale of 'chengzhongcun' in the Pearl River Delta

MINOR IN AREA AND CULTURAL STUDIES Part IV: Research Project A TALE OF ‘CHENGZHONGCUN’ IN THE PEARL RIVER DELTA Marie Sagnières (ENAC-SAR) Lausanne, academic year 2014-2015 1 INTRODUCTION Where do China’s urban poor live? This is a question I asked a Chinese friend of mine in a restaurant of Shanghai. In the framework of her Master thesis in architecture she studied informal housing in diferent parts of the world. She could talk about India’s shantytowns, Brasil’s favelas and South Africa’s townships. Weirdly, she could not say what was the Chinese version of those settlements. The common denominators of ‘slums’ around the world are a booming urbanization leading to massive rural to urban migration in search of a better standard of life topped with a general lack of infrastructure, policies and afordable housing. China, together with India and Nigeria are expected to account for 37% of the projected growth of the world’s urban population between 2014 and 2050. The world population living in urban areas is likely to reach 66% by then. (UN Prospects 2014) Today, city residents account for more than 51% of the whole Chinese population. Furthermore, one ifth of rural workers migrates and one third of urban workers are migrants. (World Bank 2008) Observing such igures, it seems impossible that Chinese cities do not have their own kind of migrants hub even though international organization such as the United Nations state that “China has managed so far to urbanize rapidly without the creation of large slum areas or informal settlements”. (UN-Habitat 2003) When my research started I was looking at container villages. A phenomenon that developed within the last ten years in the outskirts of Shanghai. Landowners would gather old containers and rent them out for an affordable price (500 yuan/month) to newly arrived workers. Even though the walls have no isolation, all containers have basic amenities such as electricity and water. A resident interviewed by Steve Robson, journalist for the tabloid Dailymail explains: “Many people ask me how I feel living in a container. I say it’s quite ine as I’ve never lived in an apartment in the city. The iron containers are quite solid and I don’t have to worry about leakages during rain or the roof collapsing.” Some inhabitants tried to launch a cooperation program but it was rejected by city oicials. Despite the important role of these settlements, the government considers them as dangerous and is in the process of removing all of them. Where will those people go then when their homes are gone? The container villages situation is only one of the many ways new migrants ind their way into the city. In many cities, employers provide poor quality housing to their migrant workers because no other option is available to them. (Li et al. 2010) To observe other migrant hubs situations, South China ofers larger scale examples. In the Pearl River Delta, a phenomenon happened over the past 40 years that served greatly the newcomers in the city: the ‘Chengzhongcun’ or ‘Village in the City’. 2 The aim of this research consists of understanding what kinds of redevelopment of ‘chengzhongcun’ are the most appropriate in the Pearl River Delta context. To do so, a irst part will try to give a complete deinition of what constitutes a ‘village in the city’. Spatial, social, and economic characteristics will be addressed. In the second part, the strategies adopted for three villages will be analysed. The accent will be put on the level of implication of each of the redevelopment actors in order to deine who are the greatest beneiciaries of each strategy. A last part will try to summarize what were the strong and low points of each example in order to deine an ‘ideal strategy’ that could be applied for future redevelopments. ‘VILLAGES-IN-THE-CITY’ 1. A brief History of China’s Urbanization “In the sprawling cities of the Third World, then, ‘periphery’ is highly relative, time-speciic term: today’s urban edge, abutting ields, forest, or desert, may tomorrow become part of a dense metropolitan core.” (Davis 2004) Before 1949, landlords and wealthy farmers employ peasants to work on their lands. When Mao takes over the power from Chiang Kaishek and founds the People’s Republic of China, his irst main reform consists in redistributing the land to all the peasants: the Agrarian Reform Law. He then introduces the Household registration system or ‘hukou’ dividing citizens into two categories, rural and urban. His idea is to prevent large-scale population movements and ensure social stability. In 1958, all land is collectivized and peasants are organised into teams, brigades and People’s Communes. What used to be a ‘city of consumption’ is turned into cells of work unit called ‘danwei’. “Danwei gave people a strong work-place identity, but the patterns and rhythms of life were controlled by the party, and they were nothing like the civic places of earlier times.” (Friedmann 2007) After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping introduces ‘the Four Modernisations’ reforms. It is the irst step towards a market economy. At that stage, 18% of China’s population is urban. Guangzhou is already a prosperous city due to its long history of trade. On the other hand, Shenzhen remained mostly rural until the 1970’s. The economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 transform China’s economy from state-controlled to market-driven. With all the successive reforms from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, villages can use their collective land the way they want as long as they do not dispose of it. The 3 rural household gives access to a land for residential use (‘zhaijidi’) although the government can requisition any kind of collective land for new developement against compensation (Lin et al. 2012). From the decollectivization of agriculture to the opening of the country to foreign investment, China’s cities undergo an ever-increasing urbanization that is still in process today. In 1979, the “Household Responsibility System” is introduced, shifting the responsibility of gains and losses in agriculture from the State’s to the producer’s. The villages in Shenzhen municipality are gradually reached by the urbanization of the area. In 1980, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, Xiamen and Hainan become Special Economic Zones (SEZ). Over the next three years, gradual reforms give farmers the right to sell crops directly to markets outside their hometowns and set up their own businesses in cities. This greatly encouraged rural to urban migrations. Shenzhen’s villages disappear one after the other inside the urban fabric and all farmland is swallowed by the city. (Hao et al. 2011) Peasants lose their traditional livelihoods. Over the 1980’s the cities of the Pearl River Delta keep growing, the original farmers who kept their houses but lost their lands have to ind a new way to made a living. The solution is quite simple. All the newcomers are in search of afordable housing as central as possible. The villagers start building extensions to their houses with the money received by the government for their lands. All the extra space is then rented out to migrants, which ends up being a perfect win-win situation. Thanks to an open policy concerning construction in the villages, they rapidly become very dense ‘urban villages’, every square meter of one’s land being built to become an extra source of income. (Liu et al. 2010) In 1990, the urban population reaches 26% of the total population of the country. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping goes on his famous South China tour with his son and daughter to boast the accomplishment of the Economic Reform Program. (Zhao et al. 1993) Eight years later, the 10th Five-Year Plan considers urbanization as a tool to reinforce the economic structure in order to achieve a more durable development, socially and economically. At the same time, governments and developers see the land under the ‘chengzhongcuns’ as a potential for very proitable development. They start relocating the original villagers and demolishing some of the more central villages. The migrants do not get to be relocated and are obliged to ind a new home in another village which leads to even denser ‘chengzhongcuns’. Serious conlicts emerge between the two parties. From 1995 to 2000, most migrants are moving from central and western China to Beijing, Tianjin and the Pearl River Delta (Fan 2005). In 2005, 10% of the population do not live where they are registered. 80% of them come from the countryside. At that stage, the government starts negotiating 4 more diplomatically with the villages in order to counter attack a growing social pressure. The 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15) plans on developing 36 million units of afordable housing for the growing urban population. That same year 2011, China’s urban population outnumbers the rural population for the irst time. 2. A matter of deinition It is irst important to deine the ‘chengzhongcun’. The chinese term is the combinaison of ‘city wall’,’in between’ and ‘agricultural village’ and therefore literally means ‘village in between the city walls’. To make it short many English speaking scholars refer to it as ‘village in the city’. The same concept is also often referred to as ‘urban village’. An ‘urban village’ can deine to two diferent concepts in the Western world. The irst one is the migrant hub in a city, phenomenon that happened mostly during the 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and the United States. It consists of little pockets established by migrants like ‘Little Italy’ or the ‘West village’ in big cities like New York. In the same trend, are the more recent versions of these: Chinatowns and other Koreatowns. They are called villages because the sociocultural dynamics found in those areas are very diferent from outside their boundaries and therefore gives them a certain level of isolation and independence. The other meaning of ‘urban village’ deines a diferent concept, the village-style neighborhood in a western city. The term was irst coined in that sense by Taylor in 1973. The idea was to counter the ‘soulless’ new developments on the mid-20th century by proposing a new urban typology: an urban settlement which is small and of neighborhood size, combines residential with work, retail and leisure units, aims to be self-sustainable, mixes diferent social and economic groups, has eicient transport, and is well designed and managed (Aldous 1992). Him Chung (2010) explains in his article the fundamental diference between ‘urban village’ and ‘village in the City’ by stressing on the ‘cun’ part of ‘chengzhongcun’. As explained earlier, ‘cun’ means agricultural village. In ‘urban village’, village refers either to sociocultural links between its inhabitants or to a special urban pattern. The particularity of the ‘chengzhongcun’ being the agricultural roots of its inhabitants, the translation ‘village in the city’ is prefered. Zheng Jing, one of the irst to write about the development of ‘chengzhongcun’ used the term ‘gudao’, literally ‘isolated islands’.1 Therefore, to avoid any confusion, the terms ‘village in the city’ or ‘chengzhongcun’ will be used here. 1 Interview conducted by Him Chung at Guangzhou Urban Planning, Design and Survey Research Institute on 28 August 2003 and reported in Chung, Him. Building an image of Villages-in-the-City: a clariication of China’s Distinct Urban Space. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. June 2010. 5 3. ‘Chengzhongcun’ in Shenzhen and Guangzhou The irst image one has of South Chinese cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen is very well described by John Joseph Burns in his essay The Chengzhongcun: Urban traces of the Village : “The vast majority of the urban development we see being developed can be described as the ‘Great Street’ and ‘Vertical Block’ which can be argued is in its pace of development creating generic and often soulless urban environments lacking in a sense of place or urban community.” Indeed, in Guangzhou 80% of the built environment has been erected less that 30 years ago. Today, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are supposedly home to 139 and 241 ‘chengzhongcun’ respectively according to many articles (Changqin, Kreibich, Baumhart, (2007), Lin, de Meulder, Wang (2012), Jian (2008), Zacharias, Hu, Huang (2013)). First, it is strange to ind the same numbers throughout the years. Then, these numbers rise the question of the phenomenon’s spatial deinition. Li Lixuan, a professor of Geography at Zhongshan University, considers that those igures are wide generalizations. Him Chung (2010), referring to an interview he conducted with Li Lixuan, explains his spatial classiication of ‘villages in the city’. According to him, there are three kinds of settlements included in the above numbers. The irst ones are the villages situated in the city centers and that do not have any agricultural lands left. The second ones still have some lands left but are already in suburban areas. The third ones are in the city outskirts and still have a large amount of lands. Generally, when referring to ‘villages in the city’, scholars take the examples of villages situated, if not in, very close to city centers. These villages as explained before were rural communities involved in agriculture. Therefore, only the villages in the irst group should be taken into account. Li Lixuan counted 45 such villages respecting those two characteristics in Guangzhou in 2001. Fourteen years later, many of the second group villages have shifted to the irst, and many third group villages have shifted to the second, which probably made the number of villages in each group rise. Today, half of Shenzhen lives in ‘chengzhongcun’ and Guangzhou’s population doubled between 1980’s and 2010. A law of communicating vessels is taking place in cities with ever-increasing overseas investment and accumulated capital leading inexorably to ever-increasing lows of migrants looking for work in labour intensive industries and service sector. (Lin et al. 2012) 6 4. Spatial characteristics of ‘chengzhongcun’ “They went from growing crops to growing homes.” (Song et al. 2003) Chengzhongcun exist because of the loophole found in the Chinese Land Administration Law (CLAL). Art. 8 which states that: “Land in the urban areas of city shall be owned by the State.” (So called property ownership in a Chinese city essentially entails long-term leases of up to 70 years.) and that “Land in rural and suburban areas shall be owned by peasants’ collectives, except for those portions which belong to the State as provided for by law; house sites and private crops of cropland and hilly land shall also be owned by peasants’ collectives.” In Guangzhou, during the urbanisation process, the ‘reserved land policy’ allowed villages to retain some land next to their residential land that represented about 10% of the requisitioned agricultural land. It was meant to become industrial and commercial development to help create new jobs and therefore replace the lack of income coming from agriculture. Villagers also received considerable compensations. Those two advantages greatly helped the development of ‘chengzhongcun’ (Lin, 2012). The typical process of densiication irst took place with low rise constructions on farm lands. When there was a shortage of land, former farmers started building inside the village, between houses. And when no more space was available on the ground, surelevations were added. (Hao et al. 2011) Villagers ‘illegally’ constructed in villages to respond to a demand from migrants for low-cost housing. Continuous migration brought pressure on the village to densify to its maximal capacity. Originally, houses in agricultural villages would be of 1 to 3 storeys but today, after densiication, they often reach 5 to 7 storeys. (Lin, 2012) It is really unlikely to see buildings higher than 8 storeys in ‘chengzhongcun’ as they rarely have elevators. To maximise loor area, the above levels are often cantilevered which results in buildings almost touching each other and covering the pathways that once were the village’s streets. These constructions so close to each other are referred to as ‘handshake buildings’(woshoulou) or ‘kissing buildings’(louwenlou). Chengzhongcun are often compared to slums as they share common characteristics. Throughout all deinitions, slums are described by: lack of basic services, substandard housing or illegal and inadequate building structures, overcrowding and high density, unhealthy living conditions and hazardous locations, insecure tenure-irregular or informal settlements, poverty and social exclusion and minimum settlement size. (United Nations 2003) All these points can be used to describe ‘chengzhongcun’ to an extent. Indeed, buildings often lack suicient sunlight and ventilation. They are gene- 7 rally unsafe because poorly built and crowded. Although electricity is available everywhere, cables are usually connected on buildings instead of passing in underground cable pipes. (Li, Wu 2013) Almost no public space is provided and roads waterlog due to excessive rainwater and sewage. Also, very few villages beneit from sewers, trash bins and collection system. Moreover, the risk of widespread ire is always high given the narrowness of streets.(Lin et al. 2012) The density of constructions and the the size of streets forces street lights of be kept on for 24 hours. Therefore we can observe that most of these points associate ‘chengzhongcun’ with slums. The major common denominator is the fact that they fall outside the limits of building regulation, zoning laws and land tenure. However, the biggest diference lies in the nature of the land tenure that we described earlier. (Lin et al. 2012) ‘Chengzhongcun’ are often considered as a threat to a more sterile vision of modernity embodied by the ‘state of the art’ chinese skyscraper. To qualify them, pejorative terms are often used in the same way that slums tend to be described. Pathological words such as ‘eye-sore’, ‘scar’, ‘tumor’ or ‘cancer’ can be found throughout governmental documents. (Li, Fu 2013) Scholars such as Gilbert (2007), point out the potential negative efect of such negativism on the future of these settlements. Indeed, the use of a pejorative vocabulary to talk about informal construction throughout the world tend to normalize this view and encourage demolitions by governments. “Villages remain diferent even while becoming more urban, as their transformations rejuvenate a multifaceted tradition.” (Frassoldati 2014) This dramatic vision of slums and ‘chengzhongcun’ annihilates the various spatial qualities that these developments still hold. These pockets hidden behind rows of skyscrapers are invisible to anyone who is not actively looking for them. They are also invisible because they are not considered as an added value for the city. They would therefore not be shown or talk about as an asset. Nevertheless, ‘chengzhongcun’ could well be one of the invisible cities discovered by Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s book Le città invisibili in the sense that they can also be considered as ‘hidden gems’ to those who keep their eyes open. These villages in the city are highly vibrant places due to their mixeduse organisation. Indeed, ground loors are often used at commercial ends, services are provided, goods and food are sold. This generates very lively streets all day long. Jane Jacobs explains that the best way to keep a city safe is to have ‘eyes on the street’, this quality is being lost in cities where every commute is done by car and where commercial streets are replaced by malls. The ‘chengzhongcun’ typology could therefore be an alternative to the new asceptized urban spaces. 8 Moreover, the urban organisation of these neighborhoods contrasts strongly with the surrounding fabric. While the scale of Guangzhou and Shenzhen has become extremely big, these enclaves have conserved a human-scale. Most urbanists will argue that it is speciically these heterogenous urbanscapes that make cities interesting. Furthermore, a lot of streets cannot be accessed by cars, which results in a pedestrian-friendly environment. The absence of regulation also allows a certain amount of spontaneity that cannot be found anymore in the planned modern city. Residents of ‘chengzhongcun’ in Guangzhou all have water connections and electricity. the existence of such a grid makes upgrading much easier than in slums that are not equipped with utilities. Lin and Wang (2014) address the question of whether the ‘chengzhongcun’ can be seen as an organic neighborhood instead of an informal settlement. They explain that as the Chinese social housing scheme failed to meet needs the ‘chengzhongcun’ have given an opportunity to all these migrants who would otherwise be homeless. It is therefore thanks to their ‘infomality’ that the people can have a decent life. 5. Social characteristics of ‘chengzhongcun’ “(...)as the anthropologist Cliford Geertz has written, ‘no one lives in the world in general’ but in localities where human ties and familiar landscapes give rise to sentiments of place, providing shelter against the vicissitudes of life.” (Friedmann 2007) ‘Chenzhongcun’ are home to a very varied crowd. Original villagers, migrants with various backgrounds, urban residents relocated and visitors share spaces and services available in villages. 5.1 Villagers The common denominator of both villagers and migrants in ‘chengzhongcun’ is their relatively recent shift of condition from rural to urban. Villagers have become landlords. They culminate at the top of the social pyramid of villages in the city. They often managed to get a lot of money from the state when dispossessed from their lands and therefore live comfortably with the monthly rents that they levy. They also have a share in the collective village assets. A lot of them do not work and therefore live as rentiers. (Li and Wu 2013) Villagers and shareholders are responsible for providing infrastructure in the villages. They are often reluctant to invest as there is always a risk of destruction of the village. This results in a lack of infrastructures and facilities which contributes greatly to the insalubrity of the place. (Li and Wu 2013) Studies on residential satisfaction show that villagers are rather unhappy with their conditions as they are higher up the social ladder and therefore have higher ambitions. 9 Lin, De Meulder and Wang explain that ‘villagership’ is the main condition that allows villagers to access resources through redistribution, market exchange and reciprocity. (Lin et al. 2012) Therefore, villagers function in a closed environment excluding outsiders, whether they are inhabitants of other parts of town or migrants. Moreover, villagers in Shenzhen and Guangzhou have diferent legal status. Since 2004, Shenzhen has granted an urban hukou to all villagers whereas in Guangzhou, there are still dependant of rural rules until villages are redevelopped. This greatly contributes to making villagers involved in the city functioning. 5.2 Migrants “Unless they can obtain an urban hukou for an exorbitant fee, they will continue to live as ‘loaters’ who may be tolerated but not loved.” (Friedmann 2007) We have seen that villagers function in a closed circle and that the circle excludes every outsiders including migrants. Lin and de Meulder explain the way the latters have to deal with this exclusion: “excluded from state redistribution and the beneits accruing to villagership, migrants are pushed into developing survival strategies and into self-organizing employment, housing and education based on reciprocity and market exchange. It seems that further access to resources in the redistribution sphere for migrants is essential to reduce social and spatial exclusion in ViCs and the city.” (Lin et al. 2012) In many villages, migrants outnumber original villagers. In Shipai village in Guangzhou for example, there are 10’000 original inhabitants and 75’000 migrants. (Li and Wu 2013) Even when migrants do obtain a hukou, their roots always betray them. They are stigmatized as ilthy, burglars, drug users or even murderers by people living outside the village boundaries. It would seem natural that, given the precarious status of migrants, their satisfaction would be lower than the villager’s one. Against all odds, the research on residential satisfaction conducted by Li and Wu has shown that throughout urban villages in Guangzhou, migrants were more satisied with their condition than villagers. A lot of literature considers residential satisfaction as dependent on the context - conditions, history and geography. This would mean that the habitat conditions of migrant in ‘chengzhongcun’ are not as precarious as they seem even though the result can also be explained by the relatively low expectation of these populations. The study also 10 brought to light the fact that access to facilities such as shower, kitchen and air conditioner are a factor of satisfaction. Nonetheless, the most important point made is that all these facilities do not compensate for lack of community and belonging feelings. Indeed, it was revealed that what migrants are mostly unsatisied with is the lack of inclusiveness. Therefore, the most important move to be made would be to consider migrants as valuable members of the village community. (Li and Wu 2013) Cecilie Andersson explains what a migrant woman in Xian village told her about her relation to her new environment: “She is surrounded by family and her local language is spoken by one third of the population in the urban village; still the overall impression does not allow her to rely on a more stable inclusion within this urban environment.” (Andersson 2014) 6. Economic characteristics of ‘chengzhongcun’ “Villages without farmland have demonstrated capacity to self-adapt and reinvent their role in the urbanizing society.” (Frassoldati 2014) The general particularity of the ‘chengzhongcun’ economy is its informality. Whether we are talking about the rental market, the various services or enterprises, it all works in a closed circle limited by the village boundaries. This informal economy has been a survival strategy for both villagers and migrants. Renting apartments has provided landless farmers with new means of livelihood. This is even more true for villagers who have developed factories and commercial buildings on their lands. (Wu et al. 2012) Small enterprises and workshops have generated jobs for both villagers and migrants. A lot of ‘chengzhoncun’ have developed speciic manufacturing skills, transforming them into indispensible micro urban economies rather than simple dormitories as we will observe in Dafen village for example. In parallel of the rather strong villagers economy, another network of services has emerged from and for migrants within ‘chengzhongcun’. These services provide newcomers with the practical help that they could not get anywhere else given their informal status. It ranges from “rental assistance, help for moving, repairs and maintenance of household goods, purchase and sales of second-hand goods, and job information.” (Zhang 2011) These services also help migrants to expand their social networks and develop community-based contacts. 11 7. The various stakeholders “(...)the ‘zeitgeist’ is against us: in a globalizing world, mega-projects trump the small, humanized spaces of the city most of the time.” (Friedmann 2007) Actions Challenges - Integrate urban villages rehabilitation into planning. - - - - Organize repartition of profits. - Ensure rights. - Contribute to compensations. - Guarantee rehabilitation quality. - Guarantee relocation quality. - Collaborate in rehabilitation process. - Improve quality of low-cost housing. Actively partake in rehabilitation. - Shift from secondary role to active role. - Partake actively in community life. - Actors Make best profit from land charges. Optimize land value. Valorize the city’s image and promote urban quality. Acquire funds and land reserve for new urban developments. Make profits from rehabilitation. - Develop a branding. - Raise real estate value. - Get compensations for lands and housing. - Get social security. - Improve quality of life. - - Municipal Government Developers Develop good relations with local development. Get recognition as actors. Village Community Migrants Get residency rights. This chart 2 shows the various typologies of challenges and actions according to the interests at stake. Even though there are no democratic election of leaders of Chinese cities, some traditional political village structure has been preserved in ‘chengzhongcun’ with a ‘village head’ or a ‘village collective leadership’. (Xiaohong, Schoon 2014) The biggest challenge of all emerging from this chart is the recognition of migrants as actors in the negotiations. The are still the main losers while villagers are gaining more and more recognition and rights. In the following case studies we will observe in what way the various stakeholders Translated from: http://www.sinapolis.net/index.php?option=com_lexicontent&view=items&cid=37&id=516&Itemid=32&lang=fr 2 12 have partaken in the redevelopment process and to what extent migrants have been taken into account. REDEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES Guangzhou has been trying to promote reconstruction as the ideal solution for rehabilitating villages for the ifteen past years. The process of reconstruction of ‘chengzhongcun’ in Guangzhou takes place in two phases. The irst phase consists in executing four major shifts: Administrational transformation of villagers into citizens; formal transformation of the villagers’ committee into a residents committee; transformation of collective-owned land into into state-owned land, with villagers’ property ownership into state-owned properties; transformation of the collective economic danwei under the management of the villagers’ committee into a shareholding joint-stock company. In Guangzhou, until 2007, developers were prohibited from taking part into the reconstruction process of ‘chengzhongcun’, which resulted in no reconstruction taking place at all. In 2007, they reinvited developers in the process as their inancial capacities and know-out were found to be indispensable. (Xiaohong, Schoon 2014) Nevertheless, villages negotiate with the government under a ‘one village, one policy rule’, which gives villagers a lot of weight in the negotiations. (Wu, Zhang, Webster 2012) Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was made up of villages. It is estimated that there were over 1300 villages on where the city stands today. The population grew from 300’000 to 12 million (plus or minus the very instable migrant population) within that time span. ‘Chengzhongcun’ in Shenzhen are often the addition of several natural villages together. ‘Taogang’ is a phenomenon intrinsically linked to the history of villages-in-the-city in Shenzhen. It literally means ‘leeing to Hong Kong’. The proximity between the two cities, made it possible to leave mainland China for villagers who could not stand their new position of urban villagers and wanted to earn high wages. To do so, they had to cross by foot the mangrove or even to swim across the Shenzhen bay. That phenomenon took place from the early 1960’s to the beginning of the 1980’s with the economic take-of of Shenzhen. Shenzhen was founded in 1979. A lot of villages reported losing half of their able-bodied male population. A lot of village lands were leased to Hong Kong and Taiwanese investors to set up small factories. Later, villagers themselves started to set up factories. Each village would have its specialization. Shared proit and mutual 13 interest made villages more incline to set up partnership with private investors and developers than with the government. The improvement of housing also started to attract a diferent crowd. White collars and Hong Kong residents sometimes lived in ‘chengzhongcun’. In 1992, Shenzhen let its villages set up their own village joint-stock companies. In 1994, villages were moved from a rural land to an urban land and therefore became administered by the government. From the formation of the companies on, villages all carried out tremendous transformations but they have not all achieved the same results. 3. Liede - Destruction and Redevelopement Liede is situated in the Zhujiang New Town District considered as a the new Central Business District on the last Guangzhou masterplan. Therefore, redeveloping the village in this area seemed very proitable to developers. Moreover, some infrastructure projects were planned such as a metro stop, the Liede bridge and the redevelopment of the Liedeyong river. Liede had a 800 years old history and was the densest ‘chengzhongcun’ of China with some buildings as high as 15 storeys. It is the irst village in Guangzhou to have undergone this process of destruction and reconstruction. The transformation of Liede was to follow the “four wins” promised by the government: “beneiting the villagers, strengthening the village collective economy, improving urban environment, enhancing appearance and preserving and carrying on the traditional culture.”3 Liede village was separated into three zones: the east area, the west area and the area south-west of Liede bridge. The eastern zones was chosen to be the resettlement plot for the villagers. The construction went from 2007 to 2011. The western plot was sold through auction and the beneice was invested into the reconstruction. Villagers were guaranteed a 1 to 1 compensation of their original home footprint after reconstruction. To make this possible the government had to relax rules on density which has been seen by some as an informalization of the reconstruction process. It resulted in an extremely verticalized redeveloped village, today nicknamed the ‘Vertical city’. (Wu, Zhang, Webster 2012) In 2007, before reconstruction took place, there were 7000 villagers and over 8000 migrants. The reconstruction process has been lead by the villager’s population. The mode of governance chosen was experimental: the State as leader for planning and implementation and the village as main 3 Guangzhou Association of Foreign Afairs on http://english.gz.gov.cn/ 14 executive actor dealing with market proits. The promising proits were the main motivation for villagers to partake into the redevelopment process. Throughout literature, the accent is put on the implication of the various stakeholders, namely the villagers, the government and the developers but no mention is ever made of the migrants who seem to be an invisible collateral damage in the whole process. Xiaohong and Schoon followed the whole reconstruction process by conducting intensive ield observations and interviews and by analysing the community online forum and oicial documents. When reconstruction was approved, the main concerns of the villagers were about the level of income they would get when relocated (compensations and monthly rent perception), whether they would really be relocated in-situ and the quality of the new housing. Xiaohong and Schoon found interesting to notice that while the villagers interest lied in the fulillment of their inancial and housing needs, scholars were mostly showing concerns about the loss of a cultural heritage. There were reasons to be concerned as the project was described by the municipality in the following way: “The Liede resettlement zone, which will be built to high standards, will be as beautiful as those neighboring, more exclusive housing zones.”4 This sounds like a nice way to imply a clean sweep of the past with total transformation. The east parcel was redeveloped into 37 high-rise residential buildings, a primary school and a kindergarten. However, signiicant temples and the dragon boat lake were rebuilt on the east parcel after demolition to preserve their traditions. Although villagers now have their landmarks back, it nonetheless raises the question of whether destroying and rebuilding a landmark to the identical is a proof of respect or the complete opposite. According to the government it is by large the irst option: “The transformation of Liede Village takes into full account the respect for traditional culture and folklore and, to a great extent, will generate room for their preservation. The Longmu Temple will lie in the center of a protected area and temples and representative residences will be to other sites and restored thus ensuring that they make the right impression.”5 4. Dafen - Employement for a new start Dafen is situated at the edge of the city of Shenzhen. It is probably the most famous ‘chengzhongcun’ in China. Its renown is due to its largescale production of fake masterpieces. This industry started in 1989 when a 4 5 idem idem 15 merchant from Hong Kong came to Dafen to launch a small oil painting company. He proited from the low rents of the area. Soon, his success attracted migrants from all around the country to learn painting. (Urbanus 2014) Today there are around 800 galleries and more than 6000 artists, (Al 2014) most of them being migrants. Painters work in their apartments and use the streets or shops on the ground loor to sell their art. Although Dafen was an agricultural village 30 years back, some argue that it does not it into the ‘chengzhongcun’ category. Joshua Bolchover, an architect and urbanist from the Hong Kong based irm ‘Rural Urban Framework’ working extensively on villages and ‘chengzhongcun’ explains that Dafen does not house the same kind of migrants than the more traditional ‘chengzhongcun’, that rents are much higher and that it is already largely gentriied. According to him Dafen belongs to a diferent category altogether.6 However, many books and articles on ‘chengzhongcun’ cite Dafen as an example of successful development. Indeed, Dafen has recently been recognized as a model by city oicials. It was featured in the Shenzhen Pavilion designed by the irm Urbanus at Expo 2010 in Shanghai which gave the village international recognition. The authorities are starting to take into consideration the various advantages of ‘chengzhongcun’ for the city and therefore to imagine them as a touristic asset. This has been proposed for the city of Kunming in Yunnan . The idea is to convert ethnic ‘chengzhongcun’ into scenic areas to give a glimpse of these places to the growing amount of tourists interested in these informal and organic developments. This interest has raised since scholars, artists, architects and businessmen have started to work on and with ‘chengzhongcun’. The Second Guangzhou Triennal of 2005, under the theme of ‘Alternative: Space of Special Modern Experiments’, was the irst art exhibition ever to dedicate a special session to the ‘chengzhongcun’. (Frenzel et al. 2012)7 In Dafen, Urbanus, a Shenzhen-based architecture irm who has worked several times on ‘chengzhongcun’ rehabilitation projects was to propose a museum for the village. They came up with a building inspired by the shape of the housing in the village. The project has been described as a strategy for constructing an anti-museum because it celebrates the concept of art as a production process instead of a still object for display. The museum indeed brought some change to the village but not to the beneits of the inhabitants as it was irst intended according to this artist resident of Dafen: “The inexpensive property rent, stable order and the emergent pain6 meeting with Joshua Bolchover, EPFL, 15.12.2014 Frenzel, Fabian, Ko Koens, Malte Steinbrink. 2012. “Slum tourism: poverty, power and ethics”. Routledge. New York. 7 16 ting production system in this village provide the migrants a quiet place to live and work. However, today’s rent in the village is as high as 4000 to 10’000 yuan. The expensive rent and management fee makes it so the painters can no longer breath. Consequently, the number of spaces rented directly to individual migrants is decreasing. This phenomenon demonstrates the gradually changing power system in the village. The painters’ union in the village cannot make an eicient use of the museum facility. Hence, the museum remains always unused. The museum management also does not want to provide a platform for local painters. I think this is diferent from the original intention of the design of the museum by the architects.”8 In front of Dafen is an industrial area underexploited three times bigger than Dafen. It is planned to transform it into a ‘culture park’ which will further enhance Dafen as an important part of Shenzhen’s identity. However, it will surely not lower the rents and it would not be surprising to see a phenomenon of further gentriication take place as noted by Joshua Bolchover. 5. Huanggang - Regeneration from bottom-up Huanggang has a history of over 700 years and is one of the irst village of Shenzhen to have undergone an urbanization process. The village is situated in the middle of the city and has taken full advantage of this strategic spot. In 1992, two years before Shenzhen government started administering all ‘chengzhongcun’, Huanggang became oicially part of the city. Therefore, the whole political structure of the village disappeared and was replaced by by an urban administrative structure. (Wang 2014) A lot of villagers from Huanggang led to Hong Kong in the 1960’s-70’s to earn higher wages and came back ten years later to their village in order to receive compensation for their left-behind lots as villagers. Therefore, a lot of villagers in Huanggang got richer thanks to the addition of their high wages and the compensations. This helped them greatly to undergo strong developments. For instance, in the 1980’s Huanggang set up a sand transport business entirely run by the village collectivity. They would dug up sand and bring it to various construction sites. Later, a rubbish collection and recycling business by importing waste from Hong Kong. The Huanggang joint-stock company when set up has a fund of 200 million yuan. Today, it is worth over six billion yuan. (Wang 2013) The village company owns two large hotels, a department store, oice buildings, restaurants, rental properties. In 2009, the company erected its irst skyscraper the ‘Huanggang Business Centre’: a sixty-two loor oice buildings in the center of Shenzhen. 8 Interview conducted by Urbanus 2012, published in Meulder and Shannon 2014 17 The village is now considered as even more urbanized than the city itself. Nick Smith proposes to consider Huanggang no more as a ‘chengzhongcun’ (village in the city) but as a ‘cunzhongcheng’ (city in the village). This term tries to counter the common perception that the city has the responsibility to redevelop the village, whereas Smith argues that it is from the village itself that change can come and that if the village undergoes a bottom-up transformation the efect will not only be perceptible in the village but in the whole city as well. 9 The six main reasons for Huanggang’s success are deined by Wang as such: the stability and discipline of the leadership structure, a strong sense of collectivism, an ability to strategically plan the future, a strong incentive to promote responsibility among younger generation, an intra-population harmony and a good self-promotion. These elements cannot be found in every ‘chengzhongcun’. However, an example such as Huanggang shows that redevelopment from bottom-up can efectively happen when various factors meet. Lessons from Huanggang are universal write Wei, Da and Wang and can therefore be applied fully or partially to other villages in China. However the new development of Huanggang is not satisfying every inhabitant. Indeed, some regret the time of the agricultural village: “There is a certain level of pride associated with that kind of hard-labour career that material comfort could not replace. Although it was hard, it was the good old days. People sweat and labour to make a living. In a particular way, one feels more pride living that kind of life instead of the current materialistic lifestyle in the city. As a farmer, there is a deep connection with the land, the weather, the food, and the local culture. This is something that money from rent and real-estate projects could not buy. The children have all lost that connection with the land. They are born into a concrete jungle of apartments and countless shops. They do not know how to farm – how to distinguish the crops and growing seasons? In the long term, their connection with the village is also weakened.” 10 6. Learning from precedents By looking at these three development of ‘chengzhongcun’, we have observed diferent trends between Guangzhou and Shenzhen. These are mostly diferent due to the political and legal status of the villages. Guangzhou is strongly pushing for a total top-down redevelopment, merging the village with the city to give a homogenous look to the urbanscape. 9 http://www.urbanismith.com/blog/2014/8/1/on-the-term-village-in-the-city 10 Interview with ZSF, on 31/12/2008 conducted by Wei David Wang for his contribution to the book “Urban China in the New Era”. 18 This approach seem to have pleased the villages who managed to get a lot of compensations. They get new apartments to rent out at a higher price and will probably reach the level of satisfaction they were lacking when still living in ‘chengzhongcun’. However, the main losers are the migrants. They are totally forgotten in the redevelopment process and end up having to move to another village which will eventually also disappear under bulldozers a few years later. The politics of Shenzhen in terms of ‘chengzhongcun’ gave tools to villagers to organize themselves in order to undergo the upgrade from inside. The use of collective funds raised from the community empowers all villagers and make them actors of their project. Furthermore, leaving the development in the hands of villagers is also a way for the government to make a lot of economies. This is very diferent from Guangzhou where villagers have to compromise with the government to reach an agreement pleasing all parties. In Shenzhen, villagers can therefore conduct bottom-up incremental developments. This does not give more power to migrants but involves them in the process. This method of redevelopment also gives more opportunities to migrants to adapt to change. Furthermore, there is a better chance that heritage elements of the village remain when decisions are taken from inside. These two approaches therefore do not take into account the lot of migrants even though one approach is less harmful that the other. There are still in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and many other Chinese cities a lot of ‘chengzhongcun’. With the increasing urbanization, places that are still agricultural villages today might soon become part of the urban fabric too. It is therefore very important to learn from what has been done so far in order to develop strategies for the future redevelopment of these villages. The three examples shown here are not representative of ‘chengzhongcun’ but all have been considered as successful by either the villagers, private developers or the government. We can therefore draw lessons from them. The main aspects that need to be considered when looking at the redevelopment of ‘chengzhongcun’ are the implication of stakeholders, the type the redevelopment, the strategy for the urban space and the city-scale integration of the village. First, it has been seen all around the world that redevelopement projects for informal settlements were most successful when conducted by three categories of stakeholders - the state, the market and civil society. (UN-Habitat 2003) In ‘chengzhongcun’, migrants need to have a bigger role that it has had in most rehabilitation projects so far. Those who have been living in ‘chengzhongcun’ for several years should be allowed to take part in planning processes. 19 Second, an incremental approach is needed. Collective properties and industrial lands inside and outside ‘chengzhongcun’ reserved for development have to be turned into social housing in order to reduce the housing demand inside villages. The density inside should deminish step by step. This should gradually leave space for experimentation and implementation of new spaces and typologies. In the redevelopment projects themselves social housing has to be planned as the number of migrants is constantly increasing. A lot of projects have shown that infrastructure and provision of facilities and services need to be improved rather than demolished and reconstructed when possible. This is the most low-cost option and has been proved the most successful at every level throughout the world. (Lin and Wang 2004) Then, in order to make ‘chengzhongcun’ sustainable elements of the urban realm, the quality of their urban space needs to be greatly upgraded. The footprint of buildings has to slowly decrease to bring back green and open space in for all users of the village. This would also improve security against hazards and crime. Of course, decreasing footprint will subsequently lead to a rise of density by building higher. To do so, reinforcement of structure or reconstruction of fragile buildings would need to take place. Comfort and security will also be improved by the widening of streets and upgrading of infrastructures such as drainage, embedded electricity and street lighting. Being mostly pedestrian is a great quality that the rest of the city lack. ‘Chengzhongcun’ should therefore remain that way as much as possible. Furthermore, the typology of ‘chengzhongcun’ would be very suitable for roof terraces in order to generate more public space. Given the agricultural past of these villages, agriculture could also be reintegrated in ‘chengzhongcun’ in the form of community gardens or vertical agriculture. Roofs can also be used to that end. To conclude, ‘chengzhongcun’ need to be considered as an integral part of the city, with their own spatial and cultural characteristics and history. Instead of drawing boundaries between villages and the rest of the city, further connections should be developed. 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