VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

China’s migrant villages (城中村) house a vast share of the rural-to-urban workforce in settlements that are spatially urban but institutionally rural — absorbed into the expanding city yet excluded from its planning systems, infrastructure, and public services. These settlements provide affordable housing, employment proximity, and dense social networks that formal markets do not. They are also incrementally self-built environments whose construction logic is adaptive, modular, and reversible: residents extend, subdivide, and reconfigure structures as needs shift. Yet this adaptability operates without technical frameworks, and its material limits — fire risk, structural deterioration, inadequate services, poor-performing envelopes — accumulate over decades. The dominant policy response remains demolition, which resolves material deficiency by destroying the affordable housing, social fabric, and spatial intelligence residents have produced. This paper argues that Design for Disassembly (DfD) offers an upgrading framework that works with rather than against existing construction logic. Drawing on fieldwork (2021–2025) in Xiawang Village (霞王村), Wenzhou — including spatial syntax analysis, morphological surveys, material documentation, and semi-structured interviews — the paper shows that self-built construction already exhibits proto-DfD characteristics: reversible connections, interchangeable components, and structures designed for modification rather than permanence. What it lacks is the material specification, connection detailing, and documentation that would allow these practices to support safe, targeted interventions — reinforcement, envelope upgrades, service integration — without triggering wholesale demolition. The paper proposes DfD not as external imposition but as formalization of capacities already present, arguing that this formalization is itself a form of defense: settlements demonstrating a legible upgrading pathway are harder to justify demolishing