Rufina Wu
Graduate architecture student
Beijing / Vancouver

Personal Journal

Submission: “Underground Migrant Housing in Beijing”

In the minds of most Chinese citizens, there exists a wall separating what’s urban and rural. This “wall” – a political, social, and economical construct known as the hukou system – has served to control internal migration since its implementation in 1958. One’s identity as an urban or rural citizen, determined at birth based on parental status, had lifelong effects. Since for the majority of the population, this invisible wall was virtually impossible to breach.

But with the economic reforms of the late 1970s and onward, China’s burgeoning market economy began to draw millions of rural residents to the large cities, especially those in the more affluent coastal regions. The boundary that so clearly demarcated the two sides of China’s binary system was now blurred.



The huge influx of a “floating” population (“floating” denotes the person’s hukou status more so than the temporality of a person’s stay in the city) has brought about housing issues unprecedented in China’s history. The floating population is a large group of urban residents whose labour is accepted/required by the economy but whose rights as citizens are denied under the hukou system. Without proper urban status, one has little to no access to social benefits, including subsidized housing.

The floating population of Beijing is officially estimated at 4 million people, more than one-quarter of the city’s total population.1 The question becomes: Where do all these people live? This study looks at one mode of urban habitation among Beijing’s floating population: underground housing retrofitted from air defence basements.
Invisible from the urban proper, they are at once everywhere and nowhere.



Bio:

Rufina Wu is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. She is currently conducting field research in Beijing on the urban housing situation of that city’s floating population.


"The floating population of Beijing is officially estimated at 4 million people, more than one-quarter of the city’s total population"
http://www.cpirc.org.cn/news/rkxw_gn_detail.asp?id=5554