By Darcy Bender, 2/8/2016. What is an urban village? The term seems to defy an exact definition as each urban village has a different story of its founding, development and current use. While in Shenzhen, I visited four different urban villages and each had a very different context and management system. But some features they all shared was existing outside the city’s official planning system. This is generally because of their founding as parcels of land given to rural villages that existed in the space before official planning of the city took place. The parcels were handed over as a way to compensate the villagers for land the government used to develop as Special Economic Zones or other special designations. Eventually, these cities grew to encompass the parcels given to the villagers, hence the term “urban villages.” The parcels are managed as a cooperative and some of the shareholders have become quite wealthy selling the parcels to developers. Urban villages are often inhabited by recent immigrants and have dormitory style living for much cheaper than the surrounding neighborhoods and many shareholders also can make a significant profit from renting out their buildings.
Urban villages are also not part of the official city system of trash collection and depending on the governance can have more litter and waste management problems than surrounding areas. The Shenzhen Center for Design has created a very informative study of one urban village’s waste system and was generous enough to share it with me. I was able to document some of the informal waste infrastructure that existed at each of the urban villages I visited which varied considerably depending on the location, property value and organization of the parcel shareholders.
