Building Biographies through Heritage Repurposing

Abstract

Chinese urban village has attracted much discussion as an urban phenomenon by sociologists and architects. It was transformed from a traditional village gathered by clans with blood ties to an urban enclave focusing on a land-profit economy. At the same time, with the migration of locals and outsiders, the collective memory has changed from a mono-cultural memory to a multicultural memory. And problems such as poor infrastructure, unspoken rules of space usage and social segregation in the urban village have become increasingly severe during urbanization. However, there is not enough research on the urban village to explore the causes of such social conflicts based on the spatial conflicts.

This article focuses on the Shipai village in Guangzhou and examed Lefebvre's theory of spatial production to explore the relationships between the changes in collective memory and spatial conflicts in Shipaii village. Based on the perspective of urban ethnography, the repurposing of heritage, such as the transformation of ancestral halls and streets, will be used as spatial outcomes to observe how people fix into the urbanization through morphological dynamics and the impact of collective memory on this transformation.

The critical questions are: What is the conflict in SV? What is the relationship between collective memory and spatial contradictions in Shipai Village? What are the processes and outcomes of spatial contradictions? I argued that the contradiction in SV is a group clash, where cultural diversity has resulted in an unshared collective memory.