ABSTRACT
Introduction: changes in urban Chinese neighbourhoods The everyday reminders of the seemingly incessant processes of demolition and renovation occurring in cities across mainland China include the sight of the character chai (拆, meaning to pull down, dismantle or demolish) painted onto the faces of structures; bright blue iron partitions; and rural labourers lined up along pavements at lunchtimes eating food from polystyrene boxes; and the relentless sounds of jackhammers, drills, sledgehammers and other heavy machinery. The pace at which such change is being applied is nothing short of breathtaking and this, to some extent, explains why in recent years a heady, febrile, seemingly intoxicated language of superlatives has become the standard lexicon with which to describe Chinese urban areas. Shanghai, for example, has been described as having ‘embarked upon one of the most adventurous and frenetic building programmes the world has ever known’ (Gamble 2003: x), whilst Beijing has been depicted as ‘a forest of giant construction cranes at work twenty-four hours a day in an endless cycle of creative destruction and reconstruction’ (Broudehoux 2004: 2). Such profound changes in the physical environment have made Chinese cities barely recognizable with those of the late-Mao era. Before the 1980s, residential neighbourhoods were predominantly composed of walled danwei (单位, work units) that completely regulated the lives of all who lived within them, giving city residents little privacy from neighbours and employers.1 The danwei retained significant control over employees’ official records, thereby creating a system inherently averse to the idea of any kind of mobility. In the decades since, as Logan and Fainstain note, Chinese cities have been transformed from relatively compact, low-rise centres to sprawling metropolises with high-rise cores surrounded by suburban subdivisions and mega-malls (2008: 17). Emerging from the rubble of demolition are new commercially built housing complexes and ‘new neighbourhoods’ (Read 2003: 39-40), often in the form of high-rise gated complexes with security personnel and surveillance cameras. Such xiaoqu (小区, translated as ‘small district’ and meaning neighbourhood) often exist side by side with more traditional urban features, such as pre-1949 houses, low-rise apartments built in the 1980s, streets, hutong (胡同, ‘narrow
lane’, peculiar to Beijing), nongtang (弄堂, ‘lane’, peculiar to Shanghai) and danwei (work units). In fact, the location of wealthy communities next to rundown migrant areas (Ma and Wu 2005), or shabbily constructed urban villages existing in the shadow of high-end housing complexes can be visually arresting indications of the increasing housing inequality and residential segregation in Chinese cities. The Western media have become preoccupied with stories of forced eviction and so on, propagating a typical narrative of simple, ordinary yet courageous residents, representing victims, being forced from their homes as their hutongs (alleyways), representing tradition, are ‘destroyed’. According to the media, the residents are bullied by the faceless, relentless and uncompromising hand of the state into making way for the almost inhuman ‘Brave New World’ to take their place (Gallagher 2006; Spencer 2006). This way of thinking about urban renewal reduces complex realities into simplistic media sound bites, and fails to capture not only the rather more complex ways in which demolition is experienced but also the more ambivalent feelings associated with living in older – or for that matter newer – parts of urban areas. Whilst it is undoubtedly the case that many inhabitants are being reluctantly displaced, it is not reasonable to say that this has in all cases led to anger. Rather, for a good number of urban inhabitants, a move away from a location which through a camera lens appears idyllic, provides an opportunity to live in an environment with better infrastructure, for example with housing stock with an inside bathroom which makes it unnecessary to brave cold mornings and evenings to wash and go to the toilet. Such ambivalence has been communicated much better outside the confines of newspapers. Hewitt (2007: 14), for example, shows that from the perspectives of those actually caught up in the processes of demolition and relocation it is not simply a question of feeling positive about the past and negative about the present or vice versa, but rather that a much more complicated set of emotions are encapsulated in residents’ feelings about older and newer forms of neighbourhood life. S.V. Liu, meanwhile, shows that the dismantling of danwei space and the new urban environment that has emerged in its place, as apartments in buildings once owned by the city or the danwei are sold to their occupants, has various contradictory repercussions. Examining the effects brought about by the demise of the danwei on a local neighbourhood in Beijing, Liu shows that this has not only resulted in job loss, mental illness, marital ‘disharmony and suicide but has also provided residents with the ability to either sublet or rent out apartments entirely as well as to establish small unlicensed businesses at home (2006). It is in the context of such physical alterations and the discussions accompanying these changes that this chapter endeavours to consider the experiences of informants within residential neighbourhoods. This chapter considers neighbourhoods not simply as tightly defined physically quantifiable spaces, but as encompassing both a set of locations in which and the people with whom individuals feel emotionally ‘at home’. Such a way of thinking about neighbourhoods takes into account the fact that although there is no Chinese word for neighbourhood,
with linju (邻居, neighbour) and jie (街, street) often being offered by way of translation, the notion of a neighbourhood seems to connote relationships with specific individuals who occupy that space rather than with a physical space (Jankowiak 2009: 71). Locality is then conceptualized as being ‘primarily relational and contextual rather than scalar or spatial’ while neighbourhoods are taken to refer to ‘the actually existing social forms in which locality, as a dimension or value, is variably realized’ (Appadurai 1995: 204). More specifically, this chapter examines the nature of informants’ identifications with the immediate social worlds of the neighbourhoods which lie outside their homes and family lives, by focusing on their contact and connection with, and feelings of belonging to, both the physical surroundings and the individuals and families living there. Through analysis of informants’ experiences in the areas surrounding their homes, I hope to provide an insight into the nature of informants’ constructions as local subjects, showing how differing experiences of locality within neighbourhoods impact upon the subjectivities which emerge there. I first present two portraits of neighbourhood life: one based on a low-rise neighbourhood in Shanghai, and the other a composite image derived from the commentary of a number of informants from different urban areas in China who live in newer high-rise forms of housing Then, I distinguish between their experiences of living in old and new neighbourhoods by focusing on aspects such as the relative amounts of private and public space as well as their relationships with neighbours. In so doing I perpetuate a distinction between low-and high-rise neighbourhoods as representing either intimate or more emotionally distant ways of living, respectively. Later, however, I interrogate these sets of binary oppositions and show that being nostalgic about and idealizing older forms of urban neighbourhood is inadequate as a language through which neighbourhood experiences can be described, and instead show how different types of residential arrangement engender feelings of ambivalence.
