Living in the Future City: Migration, Class, and Placemaking in a Chinese “New Area”

PI: Xuyi Zhao, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Co-PI: Robert Weller, Professor, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts & Sciences

How is urban life made meaningful in a city recently planned and built up from scratch? Xuyi’s research investigates migration and homemaking in a “National New Area” in Southwest China, where millions of acres of rural land have been bulldozed to make space for brand new roads, airport, office buildings, and gated communities. In China, proliferating “new areas” are designed as special economic zones for transnational investment and the development of technology and financial industries. Through ethnographic fieldwork, Xuyi will demonstrate how the “future city” image is constructed through top-down urban planning and how the grand narratives about development and pursuits of “good life” are shaping what it means to be a middle-class, moral person. She hypothesizes that swift urbanization and infrastructural development channel people into a different mode of living that intimately connects upward social mobility with the “potential” of a rapidly urbanizing place. In this process, making home is less about “rootedness” as central to a traditional Chinese way of understanding belonging and identity, but involves a fluid state of becoming and aspiring. This project seeks to provide new possibilities for thinking about individual aspirations, urbanization, and the intricate relationships between the Chinese state and its middle-class subjects.

See more of our 2021 Early Stage Urban Research Award recipients