Contesting speculative urbanisation and strategising discontents

Abstract

This paper explains what the production of speculative urbanisation in mainland China means for strategising emergent discontents therein. It is argued that China's urbanisation is a political and ideological project by the Party State, producing urban-oriented accumulation through the commingling of the labour-intensive industrial production with heavy investment in the built environment. Therefore, for any progressive movements to be formed, it becomes imperative to imagine and establish cross-class alliances to claim the right to the city (or the right to the urban, given the limitations of the city as an analytical unit). Because of the nature of urbanisation, the alliances would need to involve not only industrial workers and urban inhabitants but also village farmers whose lands are expropriated to accommodate investments to produce the urban as well as ethnic minorities in autonomous regions whose cities are appropriated and restructured to produce Han-dominated cities. Education emerges as an important strategy for the discontented who need to understand how the fate of urban inhabitants is knitted tightly with the fate of workers, villagers and others who are subject to the exploitation of the urban-oriented accumulation.

Key words:

• speculative urbanisation
• discontents
• accumulation
• the right to the urban
• China

Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the STICERD/LSE Annual Fund New Researcher Award (2009–2011). The author thanks the organisers (in particular, Antonis Vradis, Dimitris Dalakoglou and Klara Jaya Brekke among others) of the Crisis-scape: Athens and Beyond conference (9–10 May 2014) in Athens, Greece where this work was first presented.

Additional information

Hyun Bang Shin is Associate Professor of Geography and Urban Studies in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.