The baggage of representation: man with a red carrier bag searching for a signal

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Acknowledgment

I am grateful to John van Aitken for his insights and encouragement in 2015 and more recently in support of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term urban village describes an historic village which has been encompassed into an urban centre but is still administered under rural law by a village collective. This unique Chinese form arises due to rapid urban growth and the separation between urban and rural legislations.

2 In the 1980s as Guangzhou expanded around it, the village farmland was requisitioned for development by the municipal authority, consequently the villagers lost their agricultural livelihood. Villagers used compensation funds to build these low-rise rental properties and so they could make their living by supplying cheap accommodation to rural migrants and the urban poor.

3 Handshake buildings are blocks of flats built so close together, that it is said a person could shake hands through the window with their neighbours in an adjacent block. This form of density is common in urban villages like Xian.

4 Dating from the 1950s, the Danwei or work unit administered housing, health, education and other benefits to workers based around the factory or other urban workplace. The dormitory or Su She of the Danwei provided workers with a secure, affordable home and in this sense has a parallel with council housing.

5 Tagg, J. 1993. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

6 See for example Sky Net, and the cover of Visual Studies, 36.4-5 (2001) by Gilles Sabrie.

7 Lees, L., Slater, T., and Wyly, E., eds. (2023). The Planetary Gentrification Reader. Oxon: Routledge.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Brake

Jane Brake is an artist, writer and independent scholar. Formerly Senior Lecturer, School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, she retired in 2021.

John van Aitken is Principal Lecturer, University of Central Lancashire, and PhD student, CREAM, Westminster University. Brake and Aitken have collaborated as Institute of Urban Dreaming since 2004 (https://iudblog.org).