Agency & Social Construction Of Space Under Top-Down Planning: Resettled Rural Residents in China

Resettled rural communities are a product of China’s rapid urbanization and associated top-down planning. For local governments, relocating farmers from natural villages into new, concentrated residential neighborhoods serves the dual purpose of implementing national directives on farmland conservation and integrated urban-rural planning. For resettled residents, however, the transition process is fraught with livelihood, and social and cultural contest. This paper explores how such residents in a Chinese city, Zhenjiang, exercise agency to reconstruct community and public space in their new neighborhood. Keeping alive patterns and practices of thoughts acquired during their rural lives, habitus, resettled residents have deployed their new spatial situation in creative ways. The pre-existing social fabric and mutual benefit-sharing provide the foundation for spatial adaptation and transformation, allowing residents to achieve a sense of normalcy or even to recreate village life. Theoretically, our analysis highlights the importance of situating spatial agency within the context of the shifting regime of property rights and its effect on the maintenance of habitus.