Infrastructuring Mobility via State-Led School Franchising: Leveraging Public Educational Resources to Facilitate Middle-Class Residential (Im) Mobility

Qiong He and Shenjing He

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025, vol. 115, issue 4, 836-853

Abstract: Drawing on the literature of geographies of education, mobilities, and critical infrastructure studies, this study introduces a novel analytical lens of infrastructuring mobility to examine the prevalent phenomenon of school franchising in China. From the vantage point of mobility with an infrastructure focus, we examine how strategic school infrastructural substrates are selectively mobilized to facilitate desired (im)mobilities of the middle class for promoting urban (re)development. Drawing on rich empirical evidence, including policy documents and thirty-nine in-depth interviews with various stakeholders, we found that school franchising mainly revolves around exporting the subinfrastructure (i.e., the brand of key schools) from the city center to strategic locales in the suburbs, and to a lesser extent in the city center. Other infrastructural substrates essential for high-quality schooling experience like good teachers are lagging behind. These franchised schools are nonetheless highly sought after by middle-class parents anxious about social reproduction as infrastructures of promise, who subsequently enact residential mobilities to these urban (re)development areas to access these schools. These mobilities and their infrastructuring processes are underpinned by a nexus of the entrepreneurial local states, profiteering developers, and expansionist schools. Particularly, the state strategically orchestrates and meticulously calibrates school franchising and its geography to enable desired mobilities and facilitate urban (re)development. This study hence unpacks the multiple mobilities (of infrastructural substrates and middle-class households) and the infrastructuring process enabling it. It foregrounds the importance of education as an apparatus of urban governance and an integral part of reshaping the wider sociospatial restructuring processes.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2025.2463523 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:115:y:2025:i:4:p:836-853

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2025.2463523

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().