UC Berkeley

Among the numerous questions about China’s ongoing transformations, a crucial one is: how did ninety million peasants transform themselves into new social subjects in the reform era? This research responds to this general inquiry by identifying housing in “villages-by-the-city” (城边村) as a key spatial arena in making what I call “post-peasantry subjects”. In doing so, it criticizes two main bodies of literature in China Studies by filling in two of their lacuna. It foregrounds village housing as a key, yet largely overlooked analytical site for peasantry research; and it adds an under-investigated locale, “villages-by-the city” to housing studies.

This dissertation provides an architectural ethnography of the housing practices in Guangzhou villages-by-the-city. While focusing on Guangzhou, it notes broader social and housing trends in contemporary China. It draws on extensive documentations and ethnographic fieldwork. I examine the roles of housing design, construction, management, and consumption in re-configuring village domestic spaces, lifestyles, and village organizations from 1978 to 2017. Through their housing practices, they empowered and reinvented themselves as a broad spectrum of post-peasantry subjects, such as urban villager, peasant-worker master, village middle class, etc. In highlighting their housing creativity, I argue that the village inhabitants have produced a form of spatial agency—what I call “housing agency”—in reaction to the limits of their social and political conditions and to achieve self-reinvention, which is both productive yet contested.

This dissertation comprehensively documents, for the first time, the transformation and creativity of the Chinese rural population in their housing practices and building cultures. While pointing out limits and controversies, it also shows the abundant possibilities and opportunities in the village-by-the-city habitation. Thus, it is also an attempt to both question and offer alternatives to the large-scale developer-produced xiaoqu (gated community) housing that dominates contemporary China.