Creating and defending concepts of home in suburban Guangzhou

Abstract

This paper uses the concept of "home" to analyze recent urbanization processes in suburban China from a cultural geography perspective. Urban growth, land development, and human mobility have had great impacts not only on land use and the built environment, but also on people's concepts of identity and belonging. As the current Chinese leaders have turned to explicitly viewing urbanization also as a social project, we need to understand better how it works as a social and cultural process. While Chinese societies have always conceived of "home" as something very stable, we now see this concept challenged in two ways: by human mobility and by the transformation of the places themselves. Suburban Guangzhou is a case in point. There are three population groups -the residents of gated communities, villagers, and rural migrants -that are all displaced in different ways. They settle side by side at the fringes of a city which most of them do not fully consider as their home yet. Interesting in this situation are their competing and interrelated claims of home. Being local or migrant, rich or poor, and urban or rural people, each of these groups has different resources and different strategies to construct, reconstruct, and defend their sense of home in this transient and contested space. Based on many years of research in Guangzhou, the authors try to disentangle these strategies and resource configurations. One aspect receiving particular attention is the role of spatial boundaries and of processes of exclusion and inclusion in this context.

What makes you feel at home? Constructing senses of home in two border cities

“…The consumption of housing has become a major basis of homemaking in China. Developers market their estates as “five‐star homes” to the uprooted intracity and intercity mobile (Feng, Breitung, & Zhu, : 388). Stimulated by state policies (Wu, ), owning has become the preferred tenure mode (Li & Huang, ), and China has attained among the highest home ownership rates worldwide (Li, ).…”

“…Urbanisation, urban transformation, and urban renewal are often experienced as challenges to the feeling of home (Clifford, ). In fast changing societies such as China, farmers see their villages swallowed by big cities (Bercht & Wehrhahn, ; Feng et al, ) and old neighbourhoods replaced by high‐rises or divided by expressways (Fleischer, ). The (re)shaping of the urban socio‐spatial landscape (Y. Huang & Deng, ) had a deep influence on traditional notions of home.…”

Spatial patterns of the variability of native residentsin a transitional society: The case of the Czech Republic

“…In the most intensive way, the process has occurred in the metropolitan area of Prague and in the suburbanised hinterlands of regional centres. Based on these observations, it is possible to conclude that local belongings and the narratives of local and other spatial identities based on having roots in an area, as well as people's concepts of "home" (Feng, Breitung and Zhu, 2014), have been challenged by ever-increasing spatial mobility. Inhabitants have more heterogeneous spatial backgrounds and the personal histories and processes of identification have become diversified (Paasi, 2002).…”

Living in the “Ghost City”: Media Discourses and the Negotiation of Home in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China

“…When people continually attribute meaning to a particular place, it will transform from a simple container to a home-place associated with belonging and identity [45]. Home is not just a place for settlement but also carries positive emotions [46]. Through the family practice of translocal mobility, a clear division has emerged between the functions and meanings of two homes.…”