Peripherization of Indemnificatory Housing Community under Land-Centered Urban Transformation: The Case of Nanjing, China

Dan Ye,Guoliang Xu,Jingxiang Zhang

doi:10.3390/su9040656

Dan Ye, Guoliang Xu + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su9040656

Copy DOI

Abstract

Indemnificatory housing programs—a kind of state-backed urban low-end and nonmarket housing programs which used to be welfare—have now increasingly evolved to be the vehicle to promote capital accumulation. Most of these housing communities show peripherization with high rates of unemployment, low income, poverty, and social exclusion, which violates their sustainability. This paper examines the impacts of land-centered urban transformation on indemnificatory housing communities, and analyzes the causes of unsustainable outcomes in political economy discourse. To achieve this, the social and economic conditions of a longstanding suburban indemnificatory housing community in Nanjing were analyzed. Survey data collected from March to April 2016 was evaluated to determine the peripherization of the residents within it. We found that for many residents, high rates of unemployment, low income, and poverty were mainly caused by their individual demographic and socioeconomic disadvantages, with the peripheral physical and social location contributing by exacerbating their vulnerabilities. It is concluded that local governments’ land-centered urban transformation and the central government’s affordable housing policies aimed at social and economic crisis mitigation combine to produce suburban indemnificatory housing communities, driving low-income relocated residents into more disadvantaged situations. This finding creates important lessons for the sustainable development of Chinese indemnificatory housing communities.

Highlights

Affordable housing has become an increasingly important policy issue in China
The central government did not withdraw completely from the housing provision system: it provides various affordable housing programs, such as public rental housing (PRH), with open access for migrants; economically comfortable housing (ECH), houses sold at below-market prices to promote home ownership; shared ownership housing (SOH), under which property is owned between the house-owner and government; etc
This paper argues that land-centered urban transformation is an important factor in the formation of indemnificatory housing communities, and seeks to understand the seriousness of unemployment, low income, poverty, and exclusion problems in China’s cities

Summary

Introduction

Affordable housing has become an increasingly important policy issue in China. Since the mid-to-late 1990s, housing system reform has transferred the responsibility for housing provision from work units to the market, triggering the housing market boom and skyrocketing housing prices. Affordable housing programs were a kind of post-reform housing welfare for the urban low-income and middle-income households and migrants (especially highly-educated migrants). At present, it is developed for more complicated reasons. On the other hand, constrained by affordable housing construction policy issued by the central government to alleviate economic and social crisis to march towards a “harmonious society”, local governments are assigned quotas of affordable housing. Indemnificatory housing programs have become the vehicle to promote urban renewal, through which local governments expropriate valuable lands and relocate residents into suburban low-cost indemnificatory housing communities. The “indemnificatory housing” to some extent, can be understood as indemnity to those relocated residents

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion