Gendering grassrootscapes: The sociospatial relations of lower working-class women dwelling in the socialist Workers’ New Villages in post-reform Shanghai

Abstract

ABSTRACT Women of the lower working-class in Shanghai are seemingly invisible in Chinese urban scholarship. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2021 in Shanghai, this article sheds light on the social lives of lower working-class women dwelling in the Workers’ New Villages in the wake of rapid urbanization. Mounting a threefold conceptual exploration of grassroots urbanism, genderscapes, and guanxi (social connectivity), the article develops and coins the term grassrootscapes to explicate grassroots women’s sociospatial relations with housing units, the community, and the city. Probing these multi-layered horizons to trace women’s life trajectories and gendered experiences, the article discerns how sociospatial dynamics of grassrootscapes are produced under a socialist system, in which women’s day-to-day suffering is a by-product of market reforms. Socialist workers’ housing is employed as a case study to show how the conceptualization of grassrootscapes can be a useful tool to examine the social transformation brought about by the drastic changes in urban policies in globalizing cities.