Space and Place after the Privatization of Urban Housing:reflections on the contributions of

段义孚

Deborah Davis

Yale University

December 15, 2007

Who is 段义孚 ?

• 1930 born in 天津• 1940 南开小学 in 重庆• 1951 BA Oxford • 1955 MA Oxford• 1957 Phd.University of California Berkeley• 1966-68 University of Toronto• 1968-82 University of Minnesota• 1982-98 University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial bibliography

• Topophilia (1974)• Space and Place (1977)• Landscapes of Fear (1979)• Segmented Worlds and Self (1982)• Dominance and Affection (1984)• Morality and Imagination (1989)• Passing Strange and Wonderful (1993)• Cosmos and Hearth (1996)• Escapism (1998)• Place, Art, and Self (2004)• Coming Home to China ( 2007)

• Place is (a ) pause between spaces.

• Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to one and long for the other. There is no place like home

• Space is experienced directly as having room in which to move. Moreover, by shifting from one place to another, a person acquires a sense of direction.

Tuan’s 段’ s challenge

• “a geographer speaks as though his knowledge of space and place were derived exclusively from books, maps, aerial photographs, and structured field surveys…A large body of experiential data is consigned to oblivion because we cannot fit the date to concepts that are taken over uncritically from the physical sciences…We rarely attend to what we know. We attend to what we know about; we are aware of a certain kind of reality because it is the kind that we can easily show and tell.”

• (Space and Place :200-201)

My several partial responses

• Open-ended Conversations about Housing Histories

• Sequenced Focus Groups

• Housing blogs

• Re-analysis of housing satisfaction survey

零点宜居指数研究

• April 2006

• N= 2,553 in 20 cities

• Age 18-60 years

General Satisfaction with Living Situation

Gender and ownership

• Deborah Davis and Chan Kinman(2003) "The Consequences of Home Ownership in Post-Handover Hong Kong," Indicators of Social Development: Hong Kong 2001 (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press):233-248.

• We found a significant gender difference in the impact of ownership on a respondent’s class-identity. Specifically for blue-collar men, but not women, home ownership significantly reduced the likelihood that the respondent saw themselves as lower class. In short property status trumped economic class for men but not for women. In

the reanalysis of the 零点 data, we therefore explicitly tested to see how interacting maleness and ownership would affect the level of satisfaction with one’s home.

零点宜居指数研究

Satisfaction with one’s home

• Overall (and not surprisingly) owners and wealthier respondents living in larger homes were more satisfied. Younger respondents more satisfied than older.

• But also as hypothesized when we interact gender and ownership as, we find that men and women differ.

• Controlling for all else, men who rent are 15% less satisfied than females who rent and ownership increased satisfaction of males by 31% while only increased satisfaction among females by 16%. The positive impact of income, space, and youth remain

Satisfaction with home

• Linear regression Number of obs = 2228• F( 10, 19) = 29.91• Prob > F = 0.0000• R-squared = 0.1162• Number of clusters (city) = 20 Root MSE = .92837• ------------------------------------------------------------------------------• | Robust• sat_house | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]• -------------+----------------------------------------------------------------• owner | .1593839 .0867133 1.84 0.082 -.0221091 .3408768• age | -.0046642 .0019668 -2.37 0.028 -.0087809 -.0005476• male | -.1527451 .0727898 -2.10 0.049 -.3050959 -.0003944 owner_male | .1579402 .1067197 1.48 0.155 -.0654267 .3813071• educ | -.0233491 .0290482 -0.80 0.431 -.0841478 .0374495 local_hukou | -.0559016 .0931308 -0.60 0.555 -.2508265 .1390233 month_fam $| .0603636 .0230957 2.61 0.017 .0120236 .1087035 high-med occ| .0254312 .0854265 0.30 0.769 -.1533685 .204231• space_pc | .0138956 .0026753 5.19 0.000 .0082961 .0194951• BJ_SH | -.4126287 .061099 -6.75 0.000 -.5405104 -.2847471• _cons | 2.850606 .1623831 17.55 0.000 2.510734 3.190477

Beijing –Shanghai effect

• Controlling for ownership and all else, residents in these two cities were 41% less satisfied with their homes.

• Given the numbers of cases and the need to cluster analysis by city we could not add additional city level variables to the model, however, the large, significant effect on reported satisfaction, underlines how essential it is that scholarship on urban China always explore and test for regional variation. and avoid generalizing to urban China as a whole.

Space per capi ta and Sati sfacti on

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Space per capi ta

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mal e; owner; l ocal hukou; hi ghi ncome and occup. status; not i nBJ SH

mal e; not owner; l ocal hukou; hi ghi ncome and occup. status; not i nBJ SH"

mal e; owner; l ocal hukou; hi ghi ncome and occup. status; i n BJ SH

mal e; not owner; l ocal hukou; l owi ncome and occup. status; i nBJ SH"

femal e; not owner; l ocalhukou; hi gh i ncome andoccup. status; not i n BJ SH

Satisfaction with one’s neighborhood

• As with satisfaction with ones home, men are more dissatisfied than women with their neighborhoods ( 21% of men and 17.6% of women were dissatisfied ),

• However this gender distinction did not persist in a multi-variate analysis. Nor did the positive impact of youth.

• Instead the three key factors explaining satisfaction with the neighborhood were ownership, income, and space. Moreover this pattern held across all cities, with no difference with those living in Beijing or Shanghai.

Satisfaction with neighborhood

• Linear regression Number of obs = 2237• F( 10, 19) = 7.80• Prob > F = 0.0001• R-squared = 0.0360• Number of clusters (city) = 20 Root MSE = .85584• ------------------------------------------------------------------------------• | Robust• sat_commun~y | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]• -------------+----------------------------------------------------------------• owner | .1400822 .0551598 2.54 0.020 .0246315 .2555329• age | -.0023935 .0019464 -1.23 0.234 -.0064674 .0016804• male | -.0396761 .064472 -0.62 0.546 -.1746174 .0952653 owner_male | -.0004865 .0831612 -0.01 0.995 -.1745449 .1735719• educ | -.0360187 .0252851 -1.42 0.171 -.0889409 .0169035 local_hukou | -.0066176 .0782543 -0.08 0.933 -.1704057 .1571706 month_fam$ | .0654599 .0228701 2.86 0.010 .0175923 .1133275 hi_med occ | -.0501032 .0818973 -0.61 0.548 -.2215162 .1213097• space_pc | .0055668 .001754 3.17 0.005 .0018956 .009238• BJ_SH | -.0918458 .0860826 -1.07 0.299 -.2720188 .0883272 _cons | 3.056768 .1542647 19.82 0.000 2.733889 3.37964

Satisfaction with one’s City:• In terms of general satisfaction with the city in which they currently

lived, men were slightly less satisfied than women ( 8% of men and 6.4% of women dissatisfied) but overall respondents held relatively positive attitudes toward the city where they currently were living. In the multi-variate analysis, gender had no impact. Rather ownership, wealth, and space that increased satisfaction.

• And as in the reports on neighborhood satisfaction, there were no differences among men and women by ownership status nor with respondents from BJ or Shanghai.

• However in contrast to the earlier questions about satisfaction with the home and immediate neighborhood, here for the first time hukou status becomes significant. In fact, it the single most important variable. In fact, it the single most important variable.

• Also of note, it is locals not migrants who are significantly less satisfied

• Even when they were owners and had spacious homes, locals were

16% less satisfied with the city than immigrants

Satisfaction with one’s city of residence• Linear regression Number of obs = 2231• F( 10, 19) = 24.33• Prob > F = 0.0000• R-squared = 0.0507• Number of clusters (city) = 20 Root MSE = .73157• ------------------------------------------------------------------------------• | Robust• sat_city | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]• -------------+----------------------------------------------------------------• owner | .0815817 .043731 1.87 0.078 -.0099482 .1731117• age | -.0024719 .0016981 -1.46 0.162 -.0060261 .0010823• male | .0419455 .0456384 0.92 0.370 -.0535768 .1374679 owner_male | -.0140224 .0641411 -0.22 0.829 -.1482713 .1202265• educ | -.0203643 .0241249 -0.84 0.409 -.0708583 .0301297 local_hukou | -.1615971 .0596409 -2.71 0.014 -.286427 -.0367672 month_fam$ | .0582717 .0169047 3.45 0.003 .0228898 .0936537 hi_med occ | -.0614868 .0630191 -0.98 0.341 -.1933873 .0704136• space_pc | .0035144 .0009895 3.55 0.002 .0014434 .0055855• BJ_SH | -.2772381 .2327327 -1.19 0.248 -.7643533 .2098771• cons | 3.52101 .116578 30.20 0.000 3.277009 3.7650

Openness to outsiders

Openness scores for those with local hukou(4-20 possible range)

Mean_Openness

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北京 上海 广州大连 杭州 西安 昆明天津 苏州 桂林青岛 宁波 武汉深圳 南京 重庆 珠海厦门 成都 三亚

Ci ty

Openness to outsiders• In multi-variate analysis gender continued to be significant, with men

averaging 37% higher scores (more openness) than women.

• However ownership by itself was not significant and there was no significant interaction with ownership and maleness as we found when we looked at satisfaction with one’s own home.

• Instead the key element was youth and an individual’s sense of security in terms of adequacy of social welfare provisions from one’s employer or the government.

• There also was a massive intra-city difference, that was unaffected by the percentage of immigrants in the population.

• Specifically we find that after controlling for all else, residents of Beijing and Shanghai are 370% less likely to be open to new arrivals and that the percentage of migrants have absolutely no effect.

Openness to 外地人• Linear regression Number of obs = 1594• F( 8, 19) = 42.35• Prob > F = 0.0000• R-squared = 0.1453• Number of clusters (city) = 20 Root MSE = 3.571• ------------------------------------------------------------------------------• | Robust• openness_t~i | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]• -------------+----------------------------------------------------------------• age | -.0219927 .008915 -2.47 0.023 -.040652 -.0033334• male | .3730808 .1399643 2.67 0.015 .0801322 .6660295• owner | .0842236 .3707166 0.23 0.823 -.6916951 .8601423• educ | .1050886 .1024124 1.03 0.318 -.1092631 .3194403 month_fam$| -.0233144 .0904119 -0.26 0.799 -.2125487 .1659199 sense_safe| .6609245 .2405938 2.75 0.013 .1573559 1.164493 migr_perct | .0000128 .0208701 0.00 1.000 -.0436688 .0436945• BJ_SH | -3.706234 .4145399 -8.94 0.000 -4.573876 -2.838592• cons | 12.16123 .8960926 13.57 0.000 10.28568 14.03677

Owners with local hukou

Openness to Waidi People

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mal e; hi gh sense of safety; noti n BJ or SHmal e; l ow sense of safety; noti n BJ or SHmal e; hi gh sense of safety; i nBJ or SHmal e; l ow sense of safety; i nBJ or SHfemal e; hi gh sense of safety;not i n BJ or SHfemal e; l ow sense of safety;not i n BJ or SHfemal e; hi gh sense of safety;i n BJ or SHfemal e; l ow sense of safety; i nBJ or SH

Focus group probes to identify possible gender specific attachments to home ownership

• 2004 "Talking about Property in the New Chinese Domestic Property Regime," in The New Economic Sociology edited by Frank Dobbin (Russell Sage Foundation):288-307.

• 2003 (with 卢汉龙 ) “ Property in Transition: Conflicts over Ownership in Post Socialist Shanghai” Arch.europ.sociol.XLIV /European Journal of Sociology (April): 77-99.

2000 original probe

• “我与母亲现在住的房子原来是我父亲单位的公房，是由我父亲承租的。实行房改政策后，我出资购买了这套房子； 1996年10 月，我父亲去世，我兄长不仅不安慰我母亲，还扬言他有权继承这套房子，并准备到法院去起诉我。请问：我父亲生前承租的公房由我出资购买以后，我兄长有没有权利继承？”

2002 altered probes

• 编辑 同 志 ： 我 和 母 亲 现 在 住 的 房 子 原 来 是 我 父 亲 的 私 房 。 我 父 亲 去 世 ，

• 我 兄 长 不仅 不 安 慰 我 母 亲 ， 还 扬 言 他 有 权 继 承 这 套 房 子 ， 并 准 备 到 法 院 去 起 诉 我 。 请 问 ： 我 兄 长 还 有 没 有 继 承 权 ？ ”

Experience of Physical Space, Social Place, and Time