Recomposing class and modernity between country and city - Chongqing's public rented housing

The emerging megacity of Chongqing in Southwest China was the site of an extraordinary experiment in housing and urbanization during the period 2009-2012. Under the auspices of the so-called "Chongqing Model" instigated by... [ view full abstract ]

The emerging megacity of Chongqing in Southwest China was the site of an extraordinary experiment in housing and urbanization during the period 2009-2012. Under the auspices of the so-called "Chongqing Model" instigated by governor Bo Xilai, the city planned a bold road to urban modernity which allegedly directly challenged the increasingly neoliberal patterns of urbanization which had marked the development of cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, and instead affirmed a Maoist vision of egalitarian urbanization for the public good. As part of this programme, it was promised that 40 million square metres of public rented housing would be constructed on the city's edge, far exceeding the public housing supply of other similar size Chinese cities. After the imprisonment of Bo Xilai for corruption in 2012, the future of the Chongqing Model, and whether its utopian promises ever meaningfully existed, is in doubt.

Based on long-term fieldwork amidst the public housing estates on the rural-urban fringe of Chongqing, this paper examines how social class is recomposed through the everyday life of residents drawn from a diverse range of backgrounds, many of whom were evicted from regenerating inner city neighbourhoods or arrived in the city as homeless migrant workers, and considers what a "right to the city" might mean in such a periurban context. The reconfiguration and spatialisation of social class takes place against a broader question of how urban modernity is conceived as a cultural and political project amongst the ordinary citizens of Chongqing, and is contextualised within a wider critique of Chongqing's public rented housing, which seeks to examine whether the building programme was ever intended to address the rapidly developing city's housing inequalities, or merely to supply cheap labour to fuel the region's industrial development.