By BAILEY BAERWOLF, 7/14/2016. Shenzhen’s urban villages are the foremost example of its citizens claiming their rights to the city—and their rights to produce the city. These uniquely Chinese urban landscapes are essentially small cities within the greater Shenzhen area. Some will define these areas as villages within the city, but that’s not quite sufficient. At 150,000 people, the self-contained urban village of Baishizhou is hardly a village. In terms of population, it’s roughly the equivalent to Kansas City or Rockford, IL. However, when considering its context—within a city of 20 million people—Baishizhou is more than just a neighborhood, it’s basically a village. Again, for reference, it’s home to about as many people as Battery Park City, Greenwich Village, and SoHo combined.
Granted, not all of Shenzhen’s urban villages boast such a large population, but the point remains: because of the informal and largely unplanned nature of their buildings and infrastructure, their unprecedented rate of growth, impressive efficiency in housing lower-income communities, and independence from the municipal government, these areas remain to be called the villages in the city. Confusing— I know. For an expanded definition, see fellow ICI grant recipient Darcy Bender’s Urban Villages blog post or Mary Ann O’Donnell’s magnificent blog, Shenzhen Noted.
Our time in Shenzhen thus far has largely been spent wandering these areas with no true destination in mind. Sort of similar to how we found ourselves in Old Hubei Village by total accident, we have attempted to recreate the feeling of arriving at each new urban village by happenstance—meaning, we get off at the respective metro stop and then use our intuition to make our way to the bustling alleyways of places like Gangxia or Baishizhou instead of referencing a map.
In fact, because the urban villages are so complex and unplanned in structure, there aren’t many resources to help find these places. Maps of the city often represent them as a single gray shape, in the same way that a flat concrete plaza would be portrayed. How telling. On the other hand, if you see a map with a large area of random little rectangles scattered about, you’ve certainly found one!
More observations on individual urban villages to come.