Who Cashed the Rent Gap? An Alternative Narration of a Shantytown Renovation Project in Nanjing, China

Abstract

Despite research on shantytown redevelopment highlighting socio‐spatial exclusion, the viewpoint frequently disseminated through social media depicts it as a massive wealth‐creation movement in China. This paper intends to provide evidence that evicted residents of a shantytown in Nanjing, China, share a common identity with the encroaching gentrifiers – the housing class. By shaping the housing class, an increasing number of urban residents become micro‐agents of housing financialization, allowing the rent gap to be frequently opened even without producing a ‘higher and better’ space. This enables capital to circulate and accumulate within a broader temporal and spatial scope. However, both the class imagination of the housing class and the financial speculation in the housing market are based on the expectation of continuous price growth. This is unsustainable and leaves the real housing needs out of the housing market, which is detrimental to housing equity.

Bridging the Rent Gap: New Theoretical and Empirical Narratives

“…The final paper on urban China, by Liu, Yuan and Qi (2023), looks more closely into the appropriation of rent gaps in recent times, as housing has become an increasingly crucial source of family wealth. Conventional urban China scholarship has highlighted local states and private developers as the primary beneficiaries of rent gap closures while affected residents tend to be marginalised and excluded.…”

Social housing as a multi-functional tool: understanding the social housing expansion in Nanjing, China

“…This dependence on land finance is also reshaping urban redevelopment. In both the urban central areas and the urban peripheries, numerous urban villages are being demolished (Jin, 2023;C. Liu et al, 2023).…”

“…The housing differentiation between high-end commercial properties and urban poor enclaves becomes increasingly pronounced (Fang & Iceland, 2018;Logan et al, 1999). Nonetheless, for a long time, government aid housing and housing subsidy in China only open for local residents holding household registration (hukou) 6 and migrants were excluded from the system (C. Liu et al, 2023).…”