Informalising formality: the construction of penghuqu in an urban redevelopment project in China

Abstract

When applying informality in China, researchers always focus on urbanised villages with informal property ownership. Albeit important, property ownership is merely one parameter of informality. Inspired by the postcolonial urban theory, recent debates conceptualise informality in a relational way. This article adopts this dynamic informal-formal framework to explore the redevelopment of penghuqu in China. Penghuqu can be conceived as informality due to its physical conditions, but it is also an ambiguous category that leaves the local state with the space of discretion. By looking at the largest penghuqu redevelopment project in Sichuan, this article demonstrates that under the shield of penghuqu, the local government can deconstruct formal neighbourhood and informalise it as penghuqu, to meet with different political demands. By doing so, this article attempts to empirically add more variants to informal settlements, and theoretically further extend the ongoing debate that conceptualises informality in a relational way.

Keywords:

• Informality
• penghuqu
• housing policy
• urban redevelopment
• China

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The author appreciates the three anonymous reviewers’ helpful feedbacks. The author would like to thank Prof. Hyun Bang Shin, Dr. Yimin Zhao and Dr. Mara Nogueira for their help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The new affordable housing system in China contains cheap rent housing (lianzufang; since 2007, for urban poor with local urban household registration), public rental housing (gongzufang; since 2010, for lower-income urban residents, including migrants), economic comfortable housing (jingjishiyongfang; no land transaction fees, limit the size and unit price), the redevelopment of penghuqu, etc. (see Huang, 2012; Shi, et al., 2016).

2 Due to China’s institutional arrangement of land ownership, that is, the state ownership of urban land as opposed to the village collective ownership of rural land (Ho and Lin, 2003; Tian, 2008), villagers who built residential buildings in urbanised villages had a legal land entitlement, rather than illegally occupying the land as squatters (Webster et al., 2016).

3 In the document issued by the State Council in 2013, the regions where the factories built as part of the Third Front Construction concentrated were designated as key sites of penghuqu redevelopment. The priority granted to the Third Front is a gesture to recognise the sacrifice made by migrant workers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yi Jin

Yi Jin obtained the PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies by the London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom. He is now a postdoctoral fellow working in the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. His research interests include urban redevelopment, urban governance, housing policy, and industrial heritage, mainly in the East Asian context.