Slow construction

Abstract

Whereas once the policy and practice of wholesale eviction and demolition (chaiqian) was ubiquitous across the urban landscape of Beijing, today, development discourse in the state capital has shifted to embrace the strategic terminology of tengtui, or ‘voluntary’ evacuation. Concomitant with this discursive shift has been a critical rearrangement of urban development politics on the ground. In lieu of forced eviction disputes, ‘site fights’ now routinely occur between local residents and building crews as construction breaks ground on new development projects. This paper tracks varied incidents of construction conflicts in the redevelopment of Beijing’s historic old city to examine how the shift from the eviction site to the construction site is accompanied by the articulation of alternative temporalities that belie the linear, progress-oriented time of construction, planning and development in contemporary China. If speed is vital to development, I argue that site fights illustrate how slowness and the protraction of time can be essential to politics. Offering new tactical ways of using and measuring time in urban space, construction obstructionists recall a ‘right to the city’ that pivots more on temporality than the fetishisation of land and space. Through their resolute emphasis on the durative present, I suggest that it is not the ruptured eventful time of eviction, but the liminal time of these construction disputes that may pose the greatest challenge to the architects of China’s utopian futures.

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