Spatial Mobility of Migrant Workers in Beijing, China

✍ Scribed by Ran Liu (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer International Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 314
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The great migration of farmers leaving rural China to work and live in big cities as 'floaters' has been an on-going debate in China for the past three decades. This book probes into the spatial mobility of migrant workers in Beijing, and questions the city 'rights' issues beneath the city-making movement in contemporary China. In revealing and explaining the socio-spatial injustice, this volume re-theorizes the 'right to the city' in the Chinese context since Deng Xiaoping's reforms. The policy review, census analysis, and housing survey are conducted to examine the fate of migrant workers, who being the most marginalized group have to move persistently as the city expands and modernizes itself. The study also compares the migrant workers with local Pekinese dislocated by inner city renewals and city expansion activities. Rapid urban growth and land expropriation of peripheral farmlands have also created a by-product of urbanization, an informal property development by local farmers in response to rising low-cost rental housing demand. This is a highly comparable phenomenon with cities in other newly industrialized countries, such as São Paulo. Readers will be provided with a good basis in understanding the interplay as well as conflicts between migrant workers' housing rights and China's globalizing and branding pursuits of its capital city.

Audience:
This book will be of great interest to researchers and policy makers in housing planning, governance towards urban informalities, rights to the city, migrant control and management, and housing-related conflict resolutions in China today.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xix
China’s Globalizing Primary Cities as a Contested Space: An Introduction....Pages 1-40
Front Matter....Pages 41-41
The Intra-city Residential Mobility of Migrant Workers: A Literature Review....Pages 43-89
Conflict Between City Image Pursuits and Migrant Workers’ Rights....Pages 91-122
Front Matter....Pages 123-123
Demographic Profile, Spatial Mobility and Residence of Beijing’s In-Migrants: Data from the 2010 Census....Pages 125-165
Low-Wage Migrants in North-Western Beijing: The Precarious Tenancy and Floating Life....Pages 167-193
The Marginalized Status of Dislocated Migrant Groups in Beijing....Pages 195-236
Front Matter....Pages 237-237
Building the Globalizing City With or Without Slums?—Exploring the Contrast Between City Models in São Paulo and Beijing....Pages 239-267
Conclusion: Exigencies Produced by the Lefebvrian Notion of ‘Right to the City’....Pages 269-279
Back Matter....Pages 281-303

✦ Subjects

Landscape/Regional and Urban Planning; Urbanism; Migration; Environmental Management; Labour Law/Social Law