Re-purposing the built environment of urban China: Residential eldercare and David Harvey's capital switching in a new era

Abstract

In urban China, institutional eldercare interacts with local land markets in ways that present special analytical problems in critical political economy. It is a new sector: home-based eldercare and childcare have formed complementary parts of intergenerational household strategies that are coming under system-wide pressure for the first time. Growth in Chinese institutional eldercare has increasingly contributed to the repurposing of a wide range of disused buildings, with noteworthy state encouragement. We read this post-reform feature of urban transformation to deploy David Harvey’s concept of ‘capital switching’ in new ways that are emerging in studies of China's urban geography. Harvey’s framework has already been used in analysing China’s multi-decade boom in the built environment. It exposed the stabilising effects of diverting capital from overaccumulation in single turnover and realisation cycles into deferred returns in the multi-cycle built environment albeit complicated by complex and distinctive interpenetrations of consumption fund and fixed capital, for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, state and non-state interests, and so on. This certainly speaks to the origins of contemporary Chinese urbanisation booms. But repurposing for institutional eldercare now appears to be playing a role in abating mounting overaccumulation and potential devalorisation in the built environment, pairing these unprofitable buildings with for-profit eldercare services operating and yielding profits in repeated single turnover cycles. We experiment with bundled commodity theory to understand repurposing buildings for residential eldercare in this new context.