Resilience of Housing Supply in Urban Villages for Migrant Groups: A Demand Side Investigation

Is the urban village a passive choice for non-hukou migrants under the discriminatory hukou system? The answers are mixed. This chapter reviews Lefebvrian theories of “planetary urbanization” and a “tenure continuum” of varying degrees of legality/security/credibility in the Global South. In a new “points-based hukou system” (jifen luohu 积分落户) in large cities since the release of the National New-type Urbanization Plan (xinxing chengzhenhua 新型城镇化) in 2014, the housing tenure status of migrant workers is increasingly used to differentiate who is more qualified to enjoy the welfare of the host city and who is not. This chapter explores the rationale for the hybrid “tenure continuum” in Beijing and its stratification mechanism across the migrant population. It shows that the tenure hybridity/continuum structure, from insecure to de facto and then legal titles, is critical for increasing the resilience of housing supply for migrant groups. This tenure hybridity/continuum is indeed trans-local — operating in a trans-rural network that spans village homes and urban destinations. This chapter also explores the multi-site tenure strategies of migrant workers between their village homes and Beijing, the main destination of internal migration in China. As suggested by the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM), most cases of informality/semi-formality (e.g. urban village) are an indispensable part of rural-urban circular migration that can generate net urban-rural remittances and expand rural household incomes. The policy implication of this chapter is how best to empower migrant workers in the context of incomplete urbanization and circular migration.