Migration and the dynamics of informal housing in China

Since the Second World War, various policies have been promoted by international organizations and national governments to provide housing to the urban poor. During the 1950s and 1960s, in Western Europe subsidized public housing estates were built as part of rebuilding the war-torn economies and labor stabilization (Jenkins et al., 2007; Renaud, 1981 ; Wakely, 1988 ). In Latin America (Turner, 1968 ; Abu-Lughod and Hay, 1979 ) and also Southeast Asia (McGee, 1967 ), the post-war decades witnessed massive fl ows of urban-bound migrants from deprived rural areas in search of jobs and better life. Repeated subdivision of tenement houses into tiny cubicles and widespread construction of roof-top housing turned many inner-city neighborhoods into slums. Migrants who could not even afford such shelter scrambled for undevelopable marshlands and steep hillside slopes to construct squatter huts. To eradicate such urban “malaise”, municipal governments in the developing “South” followed their counterparts in the industrialized “North”, and undertook large-scale slum and squatter clearance; they too launched public housing projects in order to house the migrants and other urban poor.