From Shanzhai City to Maker City

Abstract

Maker movement is emerging in Shenzhen which is seen as one of the catalysts in facilitating mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation. Because of its rich resource in Hardware, Shenzhen attracted lots of makers and startup teams to start their businesses. This is timing that Shenzhen heads to another phase of city development which is related to creative industry and innovation. However, used to be city of Shanzhai products, the city benefited a lot from Shanzhai ideology which is seen a successful migrant entrepreneurship model by some scholars. This significant social movement provided some strategies could be used as guidance for improving the maker movement later. Current maker movement in Shenzhen represents the national culture which mainly focus on manufacturing production instead of incubating innovation. Highly connected to production chain makes it lose the essence of doing for fun spirit. Under the pressure of employment base shift, migrants especially workers are gradually leaving the city center even the city. Thus inclusive urban innovation development will defiantly deserve discussion on how migrants could build up a new model of entrepreneurship based on maker movement to achieve self-empowerment. How could Urban village where 50% of migrants live spatially, economically and socially contribute to the incubate social economical innovation instead of only a collective property waiting to be redeveloped. This essay will discuss how a model learned from Shanzhai Movement is used a strategy to revise current maker movement towards inclusive urban redevelopment and empower migrant entrepreneurs.

During the last decade, Chinese Shan Zhai mobile phones have steadily and deliberately evolved from an informal economy to a formal one. We draw on institutional entrepreneurship to study this evolution, focusing in particular on how informal Chinese entrepreneurs pursued change and the transition to a formal economy. We emphasize three strategies—framing, aggregating, and bridging—Chinese entrepreneurs employed to mobilize support, garner resources, and increase their amount and level of legitimacy. We also discuss implications for research on informal economies and institutional entrepreneurship. This shanzhai model provided a basic for discussing about the possibility of implementing Maker Movement in Urban Village, which could be seen as an opportunity for new migrant economy.

A dramatic paradigm shift over the last few years from top=down planning, physical construction and industrial development towards a new wave of experimentalism that attempts to tackle contemporary urban complexities, develop holistic social growth and steer new social values not solely dependent on economic metrics. In urban village, the urgency of discussing informal development should go beyond the physical structure of the urban village and needs to include the understanding of an intangible network of communities across the entire city.