Taking Part: The Social Experience of Informal Finance in Ordos, Inner Mongolia

Abstract

This article examines how a resource bonanza in Ordos Municipality, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in the 2000s translated into broad-based participation in informal lending networks and drove a remarkable, but short-lived, phase of urban expansion and private wealth accumulation. Local lending networks inflated enormous credit and property bubbles, which ultimately burst in 2011 with severe ramifications for Ordos's urban expansion and households' livelihoods. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ordos, the analysis advances the idea of “taking part” to explore the interconnected desires to participate in urban expansion and to seize for oneself a portion of the local bonanzas in natural resources, property, and finance. The socio-spatial impacts of the financialization of the everyday environment are discussed in relation to urban transformation, the production of a “ghost town,” and local authorities' opportunistic forms of deregulation. These were vital ingredients in Ordos's spectacular passage from boom to bust.

Housing as asset and payment: Construction, speculation, and financialization at the European periphery

“…For instance, the reconstruction of the Eurasian city of Baku was financed by a bonanza of oil and gas (Grant, 2014). A resource boom in coal financed the building of new futuristic cities such as Ordos in China (Woodworth and Ulfstjerne, 2016). The expansion and building booms in Baku, Nur-Sultan (Astana), and Ordos have been accompanied by a state rhetoric of modernity and futurity and a claim to becoming a global city.…”

Picturing Urban China in Ruin: “Ghost City” Photography and Speculative Urbanization

“…One recent study (Yin, Qian, and Zhu 2017) shows, in fact, a high degree of satisfaction among permanent residents of Ordos' new town, with residents citing its relative quiet and ordered environment-precisely the features portrayed so spectacularly in ghost city photography, as detailed below. Other research on property development in new towns shows that speculation in new-town housing has been a motor of wealth accumulation for local residents, albeit a highly volatile one (Woodworth and Ulfstjerne 2016). This more complex picture than the ghost city trope conveys reflects the adaptive form of aggressive urban territorial expansion undertaken by municipalities throughout China with broad public support and a continuation of spatial project-based metropolitan development strategies prevalent since the 1990s.…”

Financial geography II: Financial geographies of housing and real estate

“…Finally, others have studied housing microfinance (Ferguson and Smets, 2010; Grubbauer, 2018; Smets, 2006; Soederberg, 2017), the finance-led housing paradigm promoted by the World Bank (Van Waeyenberge, 2018; see also Rolnik, 2013), urbanization through informal finance (Kim, 2018; Woodworth and Ulfstjerne, 2016); the financialization of informal housing (Desai and Loftus, 2013; Rolnik, 2013), of care homes (Horton, 2017; Kilian, 2018), and of domestic space on television (Druick, 2017; Leyda, 2016; Ouellette, 2017). Interestingly, academic work on the financialization of housing has also influenced the reports of two consecutive UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing (2012, 2017; see also Rolnik, 2014) and several civil society and activists’ campaigns (e.g.…”