Urban Village Redevelopment in Beijing, China

The book provides a multi-stage assessment of the changing housing opportunities of migrant workers in the three stages of Beijings urban village development (emergence, erasure and preservation). The volume re-theorizes Henry Lefebvres notion of the right to the city as a largely property-based concept that falls within the citys hybrid tenure matrix of varying degrees of tenure security and formality that is undergoing entrepreneurialization or gentrification. This is another highly valuable contribution to China studies from the geographical perspective of the territorial politics at play in the process of urban village redevelopment, which has fostered a new propertied landowning class as winners, while moving low-wage migrants. The book takes the reader on a fascinating journey from peri-urban villages to IT worker villages to artists villages, revealing a restless landscape of urbanism and state-centered governance, as well as bottom-up counterplots. The fieldwork explores the contradictions of urban village redevelopment in Beijing. On the one hand, it is state-dominated and yet creates new housing opportunities for migrants; on the other, it disrupts old orders but also encourages new forms of grassroots alliances. The empirical studies of Beijings urban villages enrich Henry Lefebvres discourse on planetary urbanisation, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris notion of the rhizome, and Elinor Ostroms ideas on the wise management of the commons.