Anxious Homes - by Mengqi Wang (Paperback)

About the Book

"Studies how real estate drives China's urbanization through an ethnography tracing the growth of a housing market at the urban periphery of east Nanjing, southeast China, during the heyday of China's real estate boom from 2012 to 2015. It examines the homeownership ideologies emerged from China's urban development"--

Book Synopsis

Anxious Homes is a study of the power that shapes the forms of the homes Chinese citizens strive for and the possible paths they may take to realize their home ownership dreams. Mengqi Wang discusses how the Chinese real estate industry functions in the everyday, welding aspirational middle-class families, especially migrant families, to the property-owning class and the urban growth machine. Urban housing was a socialist benefit in China until the market reforms and privatization in the 1990s. Today, most Chinese citizens consider homeownership a necessity rather than an economic privilege. Wang analyzes the making of homeownership ideologies through "inflexible demand" (gangxu)--a concept that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China use to craft homeownership as indispensable for fulfilling dreams of urban citizenship. The ethnography shows that gangxu helps to articulate diverse attempts to accumulate value through housing at China's urbanizing city periphery, while giving shape to a housing-based, postsocialist right to the city. Anxious Homes argues that homeownership does not necessarily engender independence but suggests further inclusion of citizens within the dominant regime of accumulation.

Review Quotes

Anxious Homes argues that homeownership does not necessarily engender independence but suggests further inclusion of citizens within the dominant regime of accumulation.

-- "New Books Network"

About the Author

Mengqi Wang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests include economic anthropology, urban anthropology, political economy, gender studies, and science and technology studies.