The Rural–Urban Fringes in the Local Limelight: Urban Village Redevelopment in Yinchuan, Ningxia

Abstract

As urbanisation strategies have been adopted throughout China in recent years, it has become increasingly relevant to study their implementation processes in so-called lower-tier cities away from the well-known regions. Urbanisation has given rise to different types of settlements for landless peasants: planned resettlement neighbourhoods, as well as more or less accidentally grown urban villages. While resettlement is widely adopted and positively propagated, urban villages are usually only seen as soon-to-be demolished “non-places” and their residents are often stigmatised. This article focuses on a case in Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia Hui autonomous region. It analyses the demolition process of Yingnan village and its lead-up and finds that despite this general discursive framework, exposure on a local TV show and low scores on a national “civilised cities” ranking pressured the local government to not ignore Yingnan village as merely a “non-place” but to invest in better sanitary conditions and speed up redevelopment.