ABSTRACT
Inside the urban villages, wagon bikes are often the only option, as cars are too big to enter the narrow lanes, but they are also essential in the connections between the villages and in exchanges between the agencies of the village and the city. In the Chinese city, the migrants operate within flux landscapes, evolved through rapid urban transformation. With a migrant perspective on marginalized habitation in the city, urban villages and construction sites are the most visible form of migrant housing within the city. While urban villages take up approximately 20 per cent of the land of the urban area in Guangzhou, they accommodate about 70 per cent of the migrant population, which again constitutes about 40 per cent of the entire population in the city. Traditionally, Chinese market cities like Guangzhou have been ‘dynamic, cultural, economic and political spaces linking country to city’, in the words of Siu.
