Urban "Home" for the Great Urban “Outcast”

Abstract

The "migrant worker" (MW) is a new social group and the irreplaceable force in economic development in contemporary Chinese cities. But they are “fake-urbanized”. Their urban residential problems directly reflected the situation: On the one hand, they are not acknowledged in urban population’s (UP) urban residential system; On the other hand, they still try to make use of the existing poor residential places in city. The national problem can be easily witnessed in the second-tier city Changsha. This graduation project tries to make a proposal on how to develop a “normalized urban residential system for MW”, in order to allow them to access to normalized urban life. For clarity, the research is divided into seven parts: (1) By comparing the top-down universalized solution and the bottom-up contextualized solution, the study concludes that the “transformation of MW - used existing residential places” is more feasible and possible; (2) Under existing dilemma, the “normal urban life” for MW means the livelihood and the way to live with UP. And the “public realm” is the interface between MW and UP. After the case study of (3) three “normalized residential systems for urban population in different context” and (4) three typical “MW - used residential places”, the public realm can be seen as a “Three Level Interfaces Structure” system to organize the livelihood and meeting of different social strata. (5) This system is developed as a strategy for the transformation of MW - used residential places into “urban residential system”, which allow them to access to the normal urban life. (6) It is successfully tested by planning and designing of the “Village within City” from previous case studies, (7) and the evaluation clearly shows its potentials and flexibility.