Abstract

Spatial Entrepreneurship: Transforming Urban Space and Economic Inclusion in China

China’s economic transformation is a largely story of rural-to-urban migration. Since the end of the Maoist era, successive waves of rural migrants have abandoned the resource-drained countryside to seek better economic opportunities in cities. At the same time though, in a bid to maintain “societal stability,” the Chinese party-state has sought to control and limit this “floating population” through the creation of a web of financial, bureaucratic, and spatial barriers to mobility. In this context, a group of informal entrepreneurs emerged to profit from the circumvention of these barriers by transforming interstitial urban spaces (e.g. unoccupied apartments, urban villages, etc.) into flexible, short-term accommodations for migrant populations. These entrepreneurial practices not only disrupted state control over spatial order but also promoted inclusivity by providing marginalized citizens with access to cities. In this article, we draw upon Henri Lefebvre’s concept of spatial politics to develop the idea of “spatial entrepreneurship,” which we define as creative acts of re-imagining and re-structuring space in ways that purposefully reshape social, political, and economic orders. In detailed ethnographies of two informal spaces— a rooftop enclave atop an office building in Shanghai that accommodated hundreds of underemployed migrant youths and a junkyard shantytown in the outskirts of Xi’an that housed dozens of begging people— we retrace how informal spaces are created, contested, cleansed, and re-built in the urban landscape over time. Through this retracing we explicate how spatial entrepreneurship challenges the administrative ordering of everyday life by creating spaces of opportunity and redefining the “right to the city.” Furthermore, we seek to contribute to the scholarship of entrepreneurship by highlighting spatiality as a dynamic element (rather than a latent context that structures how entrepreneurship unfolds) that interacts with entrepreneurial processes in many different ways.