Informalising formality: the construction of penghuqu in an urban redevelopment project in China

Abstract

When applying informality in China, researchers always focus on urbanised villages with informal property ownership. Albeit important, property ownership is merely one parameter of informality. Inspired by the postcolonial urban theory, recent debates conceptualise informality in a relational way. This article adopts this dynamic informal-formal framework to explore the redevelopment of penghuqu in China. Penghuqu can be conceived as informality due to its physical conditions, but it is also an ambiguous category that leaves the local state with the space of discretion. By looking at the largest penghuqu redevelopment project in Sichuan, this article demonstrates that under the shield of penghuqu, the local government can deconstruct formal neighbourhood and informalise it as penghuqu, to meet with different political demands. By doing so, this article attempts to empirically add more variants to informal settlements, and theoretically further extend the ongoing debate that conceptualises informality in a relational way.