Creating and defending concepts of home in suburban Guangzhou

Abstract

This paper uses the concept of “home” to analyze recent urbanization processes in suburban China from a cultural geography perspective. Urban growth, land development, and human mobility have had great impacts not only on land use and the built environment, but also on people’s concepts of identity and belonging. As the current Chinese leaders have turned to explicitly viewing urbanization also as a social project, we need to understand better how it works as a social and cultural process. While Chinese societies have always conceived of “home” as something very stable, we now see this concept challenged in two ways: by human mobility and by the transformation of the places themselves. Suburban Guangzhou is a case in point. There are three population groups – the residents of gated communities, villagers, and rural migrants – that are all displaced in different ways. They settle side by side at the fringes of a city which most of them do not fully consider as their home yet. Interesting in this situation are their competing and interrelated claims of home. Being local or migrant, rich or poor, and urban or rural people, each of these groups has different resources and different strategies to construct, reconstruct, and defend their sense of home in this transient and contested space. Based on many years of research in Guangzhou, the authors try to disentangle these strategies and resource configurations. One aspect receiving particular attention is the role of spatial boundaries and of processes of exclusion and inclusion in this context.