Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper we engage with a theoretical reflection on the concept of the right to the city amidst China's emerging urbanism. In particular, we conceptualize the right to the city as embedded within the complex geometries of power relations throughout the production process of China's urban modernity; and in this sense assert the right to urban life is inevitably entangled with a social project of altering dominant power structures. We suggest that the rights of three social groups—namely socialist workers in work units, rural migrants, and urban redevelopment displacees—to the modern Chinese city is situated within the uneven distribution of social power and corresponding infrastructures of social control, which contribute to these social groups' structural marginality in the process of urban social formation. In some cases, these social groups may be endowed with substantial rights to social welfare but the dominant power structure is left unquestioned and unchallenged, resulting in latent forms of social vulnerability. Therefore, the concept of the right to the city needs to be captured as a combination of the distribution of things (social welfare) and the mobilization of process (structural change). In this sense, a Hegelian teleology of linear social development to comprehend the rights issue amid China's emerging urbanism must be called into question.

Since the late 1980s two waves of gentrification have occurred in Guangzhou, China and brought about dramatic transformations of cityscape and sociospatial configuration in the central city. Accordingly, the emphasis of urban policy has shifted from fighting the ‘blight’ to eliminating the ‘obsolescence’, which signifies the rise of neoliberal urban policies. The first wave of gentrification started in the late 1980s and paused in 1999 and was mainly in the form of sporadic housing redevelopment justified by city betterment and infrastructure improvement. The second wave surged around 2005, featuring an ambitious urban upgrading scheme with the aim of building a world-class city. While the first wave of gentrification was a modest experiment of marketised operation, the second wave of gentrification is at the core of the local government's growth-seeking and city reimaging neoliberal urban strategy. Defending the right to appropriation has been a major struggle for residents affected in both waves of gentrification, although in the first wave there was very little room left for rights claiming. In the second wave, rights conflicts have gone deeper and been more fierce, and struggles for a right to participation started to rise. Buttressed by local media, academics, activists, and volunteers, local residents have made modest progress in defending their rights. Yet, it is still far from seriously challenging the power structure in urban decision-making and the trajectory of (re)urbanisation dominated by the elite class and vested interest groups.

China's unprecedented urbanization since the 1978 economic reform has left many rural villages engulfed by expanding urban jurisdictions. Because of the collective ownership of land, these villages have not vanished over night. On the contrary, they have maneuvered to bypass planning and construction codes and rebuilt themselves into high-density neighborhoods, housing millions of migrants in the cities. This paper analyzes the continued survival of the collective economy of these villages-in-the-city (chengzhongcun) from the perspective of public finance. Urbanized villages remain financially responsible for public services within their jurisdictions, including infrastructure, sanitation, policing, social welfare, and even education. Neither the problem of urban—rural disparities, nor the consequent lack of adequate public services has been resolved by the integration of these villages into urban areas. These villages have had to find new ways to cope with rapid population growth, finance an urbanized community, and at the same time, bear the burden of their stigmatization as a cancerous growth within otherwise ‘modern’ cities. Using the rapidly urbanized Pearl River Delta region as an empirical case, this paper explores how the urban villages are asymmetrically integrated within the cities: they contribute to the city's growth, but receive little or no public support. In contrast with the common sense that incorporation into an urban jurisdiction will bring about rising fiscal investment, in China, it is the rural villages that are financing the growth of cities.

Escalating housing prices in China's major metropolises have brought widespread discontents. There is a general impression that housing inequality is rising, and that housing has become increasingly out of reach of ordinary households. Yet, much of the literature on urban housing in China is based on data generated in the early reform period. Very little has been written about what has happened since the 1998 housing reform when both the production and the consumption of housing became primarily market based. The present paper aims to address this deficiency with reference to surveys conducted in Guangzhou in 1996, 2001, and 2005. Quality-adjusted inequality indices including the Gini coefficient and the Theil index are computed to compare housing inequality before and after the ending of welfare allocation of housing at the turn of the century. Quite unexpectedly, the results show only a modest increase in inequality in housing consumption.

Institutional bias is an important topic in social justice and the presence of institutional bias is widely recognized in China's urban housing sector. This paper proposes a new framework for measuring and assessing institutional bias in China's urban housing system based on structural equation modeling and the Pratt index of relative importance for linear regression. The proposed framework analyzes the structural pathways through which nonmarket institutional forces affect housing, and provides quantitative measures to evaluate both the direct and the indirect effects of biased institutions on housing outcomes. A case study of Guangzhou is presented to demonstrate the proposed ideas and methods using first-hand household survey data collected in 2009. The results of the case study show the dominance of institutional effects over market effects on housing outcomes through direct and indirect pathways. The results also show that, although institutional forces affect most subjective and objective measures of housing outcomes, they induce the largest effects on homeownership attainment and physical housing conditions. This suggests that, at this stage, property ownership and material housing well-being are two potential central areas of China's housing justice.

The hukou system is one of the most enduring legacies of the 20th-century Chinese socialist control instruments. The hukou in the Chinese context is an official identity of residency rights in a given geographic unit. Cities use the hukou policy to impede the urban hukou of migrants who are deemed unworthy in terms of socioeconomic attributes. Based on policy documents and data collected from forty-five sample cities, this paper offers statistical measures and explanations for barriers to urban hukou nationwide. The paper introduces the city's entry barrier (CEB) index to rank the degree of difficulty of acquiring urban hukou and performs factor analysis to identify the key determinants that significantly explain the various levels of the CEB index across cities. Our empirical findings suggest that a more developed city tends to develop a higher entry barrier to its hukou. The intention of city governments to impose barriers to urban hukou is enshrined largely in their progrowth mentality and their metaphors on the political economy of urbanization.

Previously I have used qualitative data to develop a four-domain (physical, social, temporal, and psychological) model of attachment to place for older people in rural areas. Drawing on data for 920 older people (60+ years) living in rural areas of South West England and Wales, and utilising items developed from the initial qualitative analysis to represent each domain empirically, this paper uses exploratory factor analysis to identify the underlying factor structure of place attachment for older people in these rural areas. It examines the match between the resulting factor structure and an a priori conceptualisation of place attachment. I develop subscales and an overall scale of place attachment and tests for reliability and rating scaling assumptions (content validity). Using principal axis factoring three factors are identified: social attachment, aesthetic attachment, and appropriateness of resources and the environment. The three factors account for 23.5%, 11.6%, and 6.4% of the variance and good internal reliability is demonstrated (Cronbach's α 0.71, 0.72, and 0.72). The analysis suggests that this is a psychometrically reliable and valid instrument fit for the purpose of measuring attachment to place for older people in rural areas. However, further psychometric evaluations with other samples are required to confirm the model structure, and to develop a fourth domain representing an historical attachment to place.

Discussing an urban walking event, “Moss-eye view”, held in the City of London, this paper considers the ways in which cities may be understood from the view of more-than-human processes and incorporations. The walk explores how distinct insights emerge into ways of ‘becoming urban’ by attending to organisms, environments, and forms of sitework that are not typically foregrounded in the usual economies of the City of London. Moss incorporates the material effects of urban ecologies across time and space, and thus forms a process of bio-indication in the city, capturing pollutants and making resources available for other organisms. Mosses in the city might be studied as sentient, more-than-human exchangers of and participants in urban energies, and as in-between and peripheral organisms that connect up sites by working across material, affective, political, socionatural, and imaginative registers. It is argued that the “Moss-eye view” walking event is a form of research that opens up infra-urban practices for understanding cities through alternative associations and incorporations of urban life.

The paper analyses trends in the location of commercial, industrial, and different residential land uses in the four largest metropolitan cities of South Africa over the past decade. Recent development patterns show strong decentralisation trends of away from core cities to the metropolitan fringes despite proactive containment policies. Elements of the differential urbanisation model are used to explain heterogeneous migration patterns within a rapidly urbanising South African population. Indications are that strong centrifugal patterns in the cities are linked to both local decentralisation and deflected urbanisation at the regional level. This results in continuing social stratification in all four agglomerations and the continuation of the ‘post-apartheid city.’ The persistent movement of populations and commercial and industrial land uses to the urban fringe has resulted in the strengthening of the multicentric urban framework of the four metropolitan cities.

This paper explores the public self-representations of Muslim American leaders from major Muslim organizations in the United States as articulated in a local community engagement. I argue that the prevalent self-representations of the ‘mainstream Muslim’ and ‘American Islam’ have become politicized terms in an effort to construct a political and religious constituency in resistance to rampant Islamophobic expressions. By stressing compatibility and reconciliation with American political and social life, a counternarrative of citizenship and belonging emerges. Hence, the self-representations also shed important light on how Muslims as a minority group negotiate and perform politics of belonging and inclusion in the United States through the appropriation of powerful notions of what represents ‘the mainstream’. As any religious definition, ‘American Islam’ has to be understood as a particular discursive product specific to time and place. While highlighting hybridity and fluidity, as well as the flexibility of the religious faith with respect to interpretation, ‘American Islam’—a definition used by activists as well as scholars—also has essentializing tendencies overlooking particular voices and geographies within the Muslim community in the USA.

This paper examines the experience of volunteering in relation to the latent functions of paid work identified by social psychologists. In-depth interviews with fourteen volunteers illustrate the considerable rewards of volunteering, especially in terms of personal status and identity. The common rewards of volunteering and employment challenge the traditional dichotomy between paid and unpaid work. However, the experience of volunteering is context specific, and for some the lack of material benefits will limit its ability to substitute for employment. The promotion of volunteering within the UK Big Society policy could acknowledge its personal benefits, while being mindful that their ability to contribute to a satisfying life is moderated by the individual's circumstances and attitude towards the opportunities volunteering offers.

This paper shifts discussion on social diversity from ethnic diversity to broader social diversity. We explore spatial social diversity and assess opportunities to encounter diversity in an urban context. In doing so, we prepared a description of diversity in the residential communities of two cities, Leeds and Warsaw, using census data for small areas (UK 2001, Poland 2002). Selected variables were used to represent the key social dimensions of difference: demographic, socioeconomic, ethnic, and disability. A cluster analysis using a k-means algorithm was implemented for each city separately and for the two cities combined using harmonized indicators. We selected eight cluster solutions for each city which had different profiles and spatial distributions. A combined cluster analysis showed that there was little overlap in community types across the two cities. The paper illustrates that Leeds and Warsaw residents experience very different opportunities to encounter difference which need to be taken into account when local diversity policies are implemented.

Vacant land is a serious problem in many cities, and cities have recently begun to explore greening as a management strategy to reduce the negative influence of vacancy. The city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania pioneered the use of a simple greening treatment—removal of debris coupled with planting grass and trees—as a means of improving blighted communities. Though they are becoming more popular, the actual economic impact of these programs is not well understood. This paper details the use of a spatial difference-in-differences approach for measuring the impact of Philadelphia's innovative vacant land greening program on nearby residential property values. This approach compares observed changes in property values surrounding treated vacant lots with observed changes around control lots—lots which might have been treated but were not. While property values throughout the city increased during the study period, properties surrounding greened vacant lots had a greater increase in value than properties surrounding nongreened vacant lots. By developing both global and local versions of the model, we also explore spatial variation in the impacts of the program—offering insight into which kinds of neighborhoods might derive the greatest economic benefit from vacant land greening programs.