Urban village on a global scale: Diverse interpretations of one label

ABSTRACT

In recent years, “urban village” has become a heated topic in urban research on informal settlements in the Global South, particularly in the Chinese context. However, this critical review uncovers that at least three different interpretations of urban village exist in the literature: ethnic enclaves in American metropolises, new models of community development in the Anglosphere, and informal settlements within the rapidly expanding metropolises in the Global South. In tackling the complexity of the urban village discourse, this study employs fundamental linguistic knowledge to probe the urban village in cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic contexts. The resulting argument is that urban village is a label that denotes diverse ideas. This work expands the discussion on the flexibility and mutability of popular keywords in the contemporary discourse on urban research.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban village
• global scale
• linguistic studies
• discourse analysis
• conceptual multiplicity

Acknowledgement

I am most grateful to Suzanne Ewing and Ruxandra-Iulia Stoica for their encouraging and inspiring guidance on this research. Thanks to Him Chung and three anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1. E-Mail correspondences between the author and Léon Krier in the summer of 2016 (an urban theorist in the early UVG activities) confirmed the role of the Prince of Wales in the UVG.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council [201306210041] and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions [1101007005].