ruralizing urbanization - hanxi.wang

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Ruralizing Urbanisation:
Homesteads, Subjectivities, and Subversions within China's Growing Cities

UKRI ESRC Funded PhD Research at University College London
Master's Dissertation at School of Geography and the Environment

Presented at the 2022 Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference

Exhibited at Cornell University Department of Architecture, Art, and Planning

Within China’s rapid urbanisation, chengshi kaihuang (translated as “urban homesteading”), an informal practice of vegetable gardening emerging from China’s urban wastelands, has been quietly ruralising the newly constructed urban landscape. As such, urban homesteading challenges both the prevailing conceptual separation between the rural and the urban, and the assumption of the passive and powerless Chinese citizen within understandings of contemporary China. Through a mixed method study combining digital discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews, this project contributes original research on the complex subjectivity of the urban homesteader within Chinese society and the ambiguous and entangled relationship between citizen agency and the authoritarian control within China’s urban environment. Within emerging discourse on urban futures steeped in crisis and dominated by top-down actions, this study contributes an understanding alternative to Eurocentric conceptions of the “right to the city” where resistance exists, not through radical opposition to, but ambiguous entanglements with structures of power.

Cities Gone Wild

Sites of Identified Urban Homesteading

Urban Homesteaders
on Social Media

Urban Homesteaders
on Social Media

Urban Homesteaders
on Social Media

EMERGENT SITE TYPE 1
infrastructure

Motorways and railways are the first signs of urbanization. The tendrils of concrete and steel cut ruthlessly through existing rural land to lay the foundations for manpower and reallocation of resources necessary for further demolition and construction to take place. Ironically, the strips of land along/under major transportation infrastructures are also one of the most appropriated spaces for urban homesteaders. As rural farmlands disappear into high-rise towers, pockets of homestead emerge, again and again, in the shadows of the infrastructures that caused this change, protected by their inhabitability - noise, speed, neglect.

EMERGENT SITE TYPE 2:
vacant development

As the process of urbanization began en masse, many developers believed that land prices could only go up and bought up rural land at the fringes of urban areas even without the funds necessary for development. The speculation of land and the recent scandals in the real estate sector has left many vacant sites and abandoned building sites around the city. It is typical for a residential development to have successfully completed Phase 1 or 2 but found itself out of money to build the subsequent phases planned for lots next door - leaving the newly settled urban residents with abundant wastelands to reclaim and cultivate for their family.

EMERGENT SITE TYPE 3:
water edges

Water is essential for vegetable growing. Rivers and lakes are therefore favourable sites for urban homesteaders to establish their vegetables. Apart from those that are beautified for development, the grassy banks of rivers and lake are often peripheral sites that are less accessible and surveilled. For the watersdie plots that are developed, large-scaled constructions are often set back from the water out of considerations for flooding and soil stability. This provides a large communities of residents, particularly child-caring grandparents who are notoriously industrious homesteaders, interested in the organic vegetables, exercise, and rural nostalgia that urban homesteading offers with easy access to the vacant riverbanks.