Raymond Zhou

'Urban villages' reminders of uneven growth

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-01-14 05:32

The term "urban village" connotes very different things in English as it does in Chinese.

In English, it usually refers to a well-planned development at the edge of an urban area. In the US, a residential "village" is called a "subdivision," with swimming pools and tennis courts, and rows of well-landscaped single-family houses.

In China, a cheng zhong cun (literally "village within a city") may be far from the skyscraper-crowded downtown, or it may lie in the shadow of the high-rises.

"Village" in Chinese often alludes to a farming community, and those urban villages that used to be farmland a decade or two ago. Hence the name.

Now they are a major headache for urban planners across China, in big metropolises and small towns alike.

A typical urban village in today's China has absolutely no planning. The residents used to be farmers but now are mostly landlords and the majority of residents are migrant workers. The streets, if they can be called that, are narrow, dirty and lined with all kinds of small shops selling fake or shoddy merchandise. It's the birthplace of much of a city's sweatshops and crime cases.

Like bankrupt State-owned enterprises (SOEs), these villages are remnants of the old times, when urban planning was non-existent and suburban farmers scrapped a living from growing vegetables and peddling to city slickers. But unlike the SOEs, few solutions have worked.

If you demolish them without proper compensation, there will be unrest among the residents. If you pay market price, the cost will be prohibitive since urbanization has driven them into prime real estate. And since municipal governments can hardly afford the job, they'll hand it over to developers, who can be unscrupulous and ruthless in kicking out the original residents.

We have seen reports of these tragedies. But that's not the whole story. Sometimes it's the local government that is held hostage by greedy residents.

Some readers will ask at this point: "How can you take the side of the powerless and downtrodden in this kind of dispute? Where is your conscience as a journalist?"

If you dig deeper, you'll find that the victims of urban development are the urban poor, say, those with 20-square metres to a family. No matter how reasonably compensated they are, it's not likely they'll be able to live in their old neighbourhoods any more.

However, the original suburban farmers, as a whole, profit extremely well from urban sprawl. Even though all land belongs to the State in name, they divvy up the money when the land accurately speaking, the right to land use is sold, generating hundreds of millions of yuan for a single small village.

These residents, in anticipation of big-money buyout, scramble to build all kind of structures on their plots so that when the city administrators come to measure their properties, they'll get more richly recompensed. In cities like Shenzhen or Guangzhou, the housing complexes they built have such narrow passageways that only one bike can go through them. Stairways are dark all day long and corridors are cramped and piled with all sorts of junk. Fire hazards are everywhere and there's little chance a fire truck could get close.

Suddenly awash with easy money, some of these land owners and sellers have turned to business ventures, but stories of gambling and drug binges also abound. A distant relative of mine died of overdose while squandering his "land money" on drugs. Some of his old neighbours are still spending their entire days on mahjong games.

Desperate for a way out, some cities have turned to consultants from Western countries. Surprisingly, these experts say, "Don't change a thing. This is how people live and interact. It reflects a lifestyle that should be respected."

So, are "urban villages" a cultural heritage or an eyesore? They are not on anyone's tourist routes, and the renting public inside them don't live there because they like to, but because they cannot afford a better place.

Would a Western consultant say, "Don't clean up a slum because gentrification will change the way people interact?" Probably not. Allow me to be blunt: these "urban villages" are virtual slums.

The buck can indeed be passed to local governments, which did not have the foresight to properly zone suburban areas when they were still farmlands. Once migrants swarmed in, and stores and sweatshops sprouted up, it was too late.

Eventually the market may be able to take care of it when developers can offer a high enough price to buy up all the shanties and build something new and exorbitantly priced. Or they may road conditions permitting bypass these places and build out into the far suburbs, leaving pockets of unseemly blocks on the cityscape, a reminder of urban growth that is uneven and under-prepared.

E-mail: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/14/2006 page4)