Dancing with bulldozers: Migrant life on Beijing's periphery

Caroline Knowles

City, 2014, vol. 18, issue 1, 52-68

Abstract: This paper details two research encounters with Beijing. It explores the connections migrants make with the city in navigating it, and offers this as a way of thinking about cities. The first encounter is with poor internal, sometimes called 'floating', migrants in Xiao Jiahe on the NW edge of the city. The second is with UK migrants in the gated community 'Capital Retreat' on the NE edge of the city near the airport. Both locations are city arrival-portals of different kinds. The (incommensurate) streams of migration through which these portals are coproduced are placed side by side, exposing migrants' routine and irregular mobility and the urban knowledge guiding their navigation of the city. In this juxtaposition it becomes clear that urban navigational skills are more appropriate to the analysis of migration than definitions based on formal educational and occupational skills commonly deployed by migration scholars. Comparison of navigational skills in these portals reveals the imagination, flexibility and resilience of internal migrants and the fears, difficulties and incapacities of UK migrants. Most importantly, migrants' navigational skills expose the city through the connections they make with it, providing new ways of thinking about cities through their constitution in migrant fabrics: migrants don't just live in cities, but make them. From these two close encounters, I suggest that intimacy and distance, protection and exposure, overlapping conditions of urban existence, provide a way of conceptualizing the city-as-migrant-fabric. The contrasting realities of these two city portals in the making, lived side by side, are not quite a matter of parallel lives. In making the city by living it, internal and foreign migrants each produce for the other the circumstances in which the city must be re-navigated, thus producing it as a living nexus of disparate, intersecting journeys, in which the logics of accumulation through land speculation provide significant forms of traction for both groups. This paper describes how global capitalism makes urban life in the capital city of (post) socialist China through the lens of migrant life, demonstrating the analytic advantages of spatially dynamic, biographical and comparative approaches to contemporary urbanism.

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2014.868167

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