Economic transition and speculative urbanisation in China: Gentrification versus dispossession

Abstract

Gentrification requires properties to be available for investment through market transactions. In mainland China which has gone through transition from a planned to a market economy, it is necessary to unleash decommodified real estate properties and make them amenable to investment. This entails inhabitants' dispossession to dissociate them from claiming their rights to the properties and to their neighbourhoods. This paper argues that while China's urban accumulation may have produced new-build gentrification, redevelopment projects have been targeting dilapidated urban spaces that are yet to be fully converted into commodities. This means that dispossession is a precursor to gentrification. Dispossession occurs through both coercion and co-optation, and reflects the pathdependency of China's socialist legacy. The findings contribute to the debates on contextualising the workings of gentrification in the global South, and highlight the importance of identifying multiple urban processes at work to produce gentrification and speculative urban accumulation.

Shifting land-based coalitions in Shanghai's second hub

“…It should be added here --although this is beyond the scope of the present paper --that the losers from the project are the 3,874 households and 1,381 businesses and shops who are displaced, in effect making their own contribution in providing land for the Hongqiao project. The displacement and relocation of these residents and workers forms an important chapter in the story of the new Hongqiao, one that the authors will present elsewhere (for a discussion of some of the issues involved in a variety of contexts, see Shao, 2013;Shih, 2010;and Shin, 2016).…”

It's the State, Stupid: 21st Gentrification and State-Led Evictions

“…These accumulation processes involve dispossessing people of land deemed to be of value and are often a 'precursor' to gentrification (Shin, 2016), or at least an underlying aspect of it (Hodkinson and Essen, 2015). However the relationship between displacement and capital accumulation in gentrification research has been underdeveloped.…”

Introduction: Locating gentrification in the Global East

“…As testified by contributors to this special issue, such commodification may hap-pen in peri-urban areas in a fast-growing metropolitan region such as Bandung City, Indonesia (Hudalah et al, 2014), in historic city centres with the presence of rich heritage sites (Chang, 2014;Jou et al, 2014), or in former urbanised villages in new central business districts (Shin, 2015). Not only existing buildings with formal titles but also informal properties or properties constrained by, for example, the legacy of socialist ownership may be subject to commodification, often in a selective way to suit the purpose of accumulation and beautification (Choi, 2014;La Grange and Pretorius, 2014;Shin, 2015;Yip and Tran, 2015). The diversity of such processes requires us to acknowledge the complexities of land and housing tenure or property relations that can be found in each locality.…”

“…Here, power is attributed to the Singaporean state's control of state land assets in addition to its authoritarian political culture. Mainland China is not an exception in this regard, as Shin (2015) explains: state control of urban land assets and the reform of land administration has turned entrepreneurial urban governments into de facto landlords (see also Shin, 2009b). Mainland Chinese cities are perhaps far more advanced in terms of wielding their power to remove socialist legacies in terms of creating vibrant property markets, but this process has come about due to the state exercising its power to bring properties into the market domain through the dispossession of people's rights.…”