Urban Village Redevelopment in Beijing, China (eBook)

The book provides a multi-stage assessment of the changing housing opportunities of migrant workers in the three stages of Beijing's urban village development (emergence, erasure and preservation). The volume re-theorizes Henry Lefebvre's notion of the 'right to the city' as a largely property-based concept that falls within the city's hybrid tenure matrix of varying degrees of tenure security and formality that is undergoing entrepreneurialization or gentrification. This is another highly valuable contribution to China studies from the geographical perspective of the 'territorial politics' at play in the process of urban village redevelopment, which has fostered a new propertied landowning class as winners, while moving low-wage migrants. The book takes the reader on a fascinating journey from peri-urban villages to IT worker villages to artists' villages, revealing a restless landscape of urbanism and state-centered governance, as well as bottom-up counterplots. The fieldwork explores the contradictions of urban village redevelopment in Beijing. On the one hand, it is state-dominated and yet creates new housing opportunities for migrants; on the other, it disrupts old orders but also encourages new forms of grassroots alliances. The empirical studies of Beijing's urban villages enrich Henry Lefebvre's discourse on 'planetary urbanisation,' Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the 'rhizome,' and Elinor Ostrom's ideas on the wise management of the 'commons.'

Ran Liu is Associate Professor at the College of Resource Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China. She holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She holds an M.A. degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Her research interests include the urban village (chengzhongcun), low-income housing policy, land reform, China's urbanization and migration issues.

Her research on urban village redevelopment won the 2018 'Case Study Award' from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC No. 42071201, 41701188), the Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education of China (No. 16YJCZH060), and the Beijing Philosophy and Social Science Planning Program and the Social Science Research Key Program of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education (No. SZ202010028016).

She has published in international peer-reviewed journals (including Environment and Planning A, Cities, Habitat International, Applied Geography, Urban Policy and Research, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, etc.). She has also published the monograph Spatial Mobility of Migrant Workers in Beijing, China (Springer, 2015) and chapters in the book The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, the City and Urban Society (Routledge, 2020) and Population Mobility, Urban Planning and Management in China (Springer, 2015).