1 - Becoming Urban Boringly? Jiehebu Urbanism and the Aspirational Politics of “Homesteads” in Urbanising Beijing

Following the recent interrogation of the North-western definition of urbanism, this paper looks into the everyday life and politics of living on Beijing’s urban frontier. Topographically, one of the most significant changes in this urbanising landscape is the rise of numerous “Homesteads” (家园, jiayuan) that name and represent the resettlement communities for local villagers. In addition to the critical mapping of these communities, this paper draws on long-term fieldwork and in-depth interviews with government officials, urban planners, grassroots elites, villagers and other residents (with non-local hukou) to interrogate both cultural and material politics of representation that have been involved in the making and dwelling of such “Homesteads.” It is demonstrated that an aspirational process of incorporation is at work in forging the villagers’ vision of becoming urban, where various political strategies that regulate population and space differently are shaping, and reshaped by, the villagers’ appeal to both their senses of belonging and the collective concern of equality and community building. The technologies of subjection are further inflected by the political economic concerns of land and property development, and they together render the “Homesteads” homogeneous in cultural symbols and material settings. This is how, in the end, Jiehebu urbanism is erected as the only way of urban life on Beijing’s urban frontier, endorsed by and embodied in the seemingly boring spatio-temporality of those “Homesteads.”