Urban Villages

Just as all Gaul is divided into three parts, so is land in China. In 1949, when the Communists established their government, part of the socialist revolution entailed seizing all major assets as property of the state. This included all the land in China. That's right...all the land (pardon my Family Guy reference). Most land use planning and economic development planning in China are accomplished by manipulating the supply of land. Since the state has total control, this makes planning astonishingly easy and potentially very effective. To begin with, all land in China is classified as urban, rural agricultural, or rural residential. The urban land is controlled directly by the state through municipal governments. The rural land is controlled by collectives.

The collectives are essentially communities of rural residents (over 80% of the people in China) who live together and farm their land, which is owned by the group. Various land reforms in China since the revolution have adjusted the way the collectives work, but their basic right of group ownership has remained secure. Thus, when a municipality wants to expand, the state must negotiate to acquire land from the collectives. By the Chinese constitution, no land can be developed until it is transferred from rural agriculture to urban, with cash compensation to the farmers in the collective. Land reforms in the 1980's made it legal for municipalities to transfer land use, as opposed to land ownership, rights to private entities. As you can imagine, rapidly expanding cities like Shenzhen want to acquire land because the municipalities make lots of money off of leasing the land use rights for 50 or 70 years to private developers for substantial up-front one-time fees (on a separate note, no one knows what the Chinese government is going to do when these leases, the earliest of which will expire around 2030, run out). However, the farmers aren’t too excited about such land transfers, because they don't see the vast majority of these profits.

The farmers cannot develop the rural agricultural land on their own. Therefore, this land is generally sold off to the municipalities in exchange for cash. However, the collectives have by and large retained their rural residential land (i.e. land that they are allowed to develop for any use on their own). Though transferring their residential land to the municipalities would yield some benefits, such as the cash compensation and access to the much better urban pension and education systems, etc, many collectives have opted for the much greater potential profit of developing their rural residential land themselves. This produces the phenomenon of “urban villages,” where all the agricultural land surrounding a village is converted to the urban classification and developed according to the municipality's comprehensive plan, but the core residential village remains, an island of rural life in the middle of an urban ocean.

In Shenzhen, a shocking 62% of the land area within the boundaries of the city lies in these urban villages, and is thus controlled by various collectives instead of the municipalities. Most of these villages have been redeveloped, meaning that the original rural housing has been torn down and replaced by tightly packed high-rises. The former farmers of one collective we visited, between 1,000 – 2,000 people, are now making fortunes as the landlords of about 60,000 people, mostly migrant workers who have come to Shenzhen to work in the many factories there. These redevelopments do not have to comply with any urban building code, producing “kissing buildings,” so called because they are so close together that people in different buildings can lean out and, you know, kiss (above, left). You can spot the urban villages as you drive around Shenzhen by the extreme proximity of the towers.

The planning authorities in Shenzhen would like to see all of the urban villages redeveloped into, essentially, fancier housing that complies with the Shenzhen building code and comprehensive plan for Hong Kong commuters and the like. In general, the major public service these communities perform in housing the millions of migrant workers in Shenzhen who want to keep their housing costs rock-bottom low is not acknowledged, and major incentives are dangled in the face of the collectives to upscale. I can't help but think this is too bad. In the urban village we visited, the former villagers had redeveloped their area into an incredibly vibrant community, full of housing, retail, and public spaces. They have essentially transformed their business from farming into neighborhood planning. The soccer field was filled with children playing (at right, some of my students playing as well). The plazas were crowded with groups doing tai chi, playing hacky-sack and badminton, ballroom dancers, and the like. Though crime is generally higher in the urban villages than other parts of Shenzhen, the life on the streets there was more abundant than Hong Kong, New York, and Chapel Hill combined. This is caused by the fact that the average migrant workers housing unit is very small, so no one wants to spend much time in one's home. Also, the workers don't want to spend money on entertainment. So they gather in the plazas and bring a dazzling community to life.