Cities Gone Wild:
Understanding Urban Homesteads Through Remote Sensing

Exhibition held at the Bibliowicz Family Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Based on funded research conducted as part of the Cornell AAP Design Teaching Fellowship.
Presented at the 2023 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium

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.