Reimagining Shenzhen Urbanism: Villages-in-the-City, Architecture Biennales, and Modern City-Building

Abstract

This dissertation tells an alternative story of Shenzhen’s emergence of one of the world’s great manufacturing cities by focusing on the transformation of over one thousand former farming and fishing villages within the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone into Villages-in-the-City [ViC] that today house about 10 million out of Shenzhen SEZ’s 14 million people. Instead of showing these villages as places of scarcity, precarity, and conflict, I approach them as critical sites of production and supply, providing sites for small-scale manufacturing, local retail, and above all affordable housing for newly arrived migrants. Yet, these ViCs are not only visually concealed between hypermodern urban structures but also omitted in the dominant narrative of Shenzhen’s model-city building process. With historical materials and ethnographic observations, I identify three prominent sets of actors: (1) urban planners (concretizing central plans and visions); (2) architects (representing the global imagination); and (3) local villagers (as bottom-up forces), in shaping the ViCs’ spatial evolution and their relationship to the larger urban transformation. As I show, this complex top-down/bottom-up formation of the ViC’s is very different from the more familiar model of informal settlements in the global South. My analysis of a maps, planning atlases, government reports, and photographs reveals that the spatial transformation of ViCs was not outside of planning. Instead, from the 1950’s socialist ideal of perpetuating villages as cooperative production sites through the 1980’s and 1990’s development strategy of supporting village manufacturing industries and affordable rental housing for migrant workers, planning played a guiding role in the process. My participation in an urban renewal project/event (architecture biennale) targeting ViCs further unveils the expanding agency of the architectural imagination during China’s on-going modernization process. Global architects operating mostly through the Shenzhen Biennales turned creative power into political and market power through their partnerships with local architects and with the local government. In addition, through extensive interviewing and other fieldwork in a selected ViC, I reveal a growing gap between the original local villagers and their descendants who collectively own the ViC land and the migrant workers who constitute the majority of ViC occupants. Local villagers’ collective land ownership allows them to partner with the local government in attracting foreign investment for rapid growth and increased rents. While the original villagers have profited greatly from Shenzhen’s rise, the migrant workers who provided the labor-power to build the new city have nevertheless become a vulnerable group subject to displacement in Shenzhen’s on-going effort to build a modern, progressive, and innovative global image. This study of Shenzhen’s ViCs sheds light on the evolving process of city-building in China, which adds local complexities to current debates in globalization and urbanization studies.