Conclusion: Prospects for a Communal but Contested World—New Opportunities for the Urban Village

This chapter is the conclusion of the book. It summarizes the main research findings from the different chapters covering the three stages of urban village development (emergence, erasure and preservation). All three research questions raised in Chap. 1 are addressed in this chapter. This book pioneers the debates on “planetary urbanization” and “right to the city” that underpin the restructuring of urban spaces in Beijing, China. Particular attention is paid to grassroots self-autonomy (in the semicommons) and counterplots that form informal spaces. The book traces the spatial shifts of migrants in Beijing (2000–2010, 2010–2020), including four “dispersal routes” for (a) garbage villages, (b) garment manufacturing and wholesale villages, (c) art villages, and (d) IT worker villages. The empirical studies of the artist and IT worker villages as common pool resources (CPRs) have provided further evidence of the role of the urban village in knowledge production circuits in Beijing (e.g. digital work, media and arts).