This research essay pays attention to a grey modality of urban cultivation that differs from the practice of home gardening driven by civic participation purposes, environmental concerns, or marketization strategies. Instead, it is a type of small-scale urban agriculture practiced by Chinese domestic migrant workers (nong min gong) in an informal way. Drawing on empirical studies on a piece of temporary farmland in a peripheral area of Shanghai, I propose that the informal cultivation activity in emerging urban areas should be read as gestures of re-occupation and reproduction of the spaces that mark out migrant workers’ dispossession and displacement experience. To illustrate the missing link between the land and the landless cultivator, this essay offers an “off the map” reading (Robinson 2002) to unfold the voids, the ordinariness, and the splintering city-making process. It explores the “prehistory” of marginal urban lands and marginalized urban dwellers on this temporary site.

Wastelands and informal reclamations in new urban spaces 

Cultivating plants and vegetables in a backyard, a flat rooftop, or community green spaces is a popular practice in today’s cities. The fashion of food forest and home gardening has been promoted by campaigners and civic groups as a way to enhance urban greenness, shorten the food miles, and strengthen food security amid the alarming global climate crisis (Obeng-Odoom 2013; Zhu et al. 2020; Zheng and Chou 2023).

In recent years, a growing number of literature has drawn attention to the emergence of informal cultivation activities on new urban lands in China. These studies delve into both theoretical and empirical interpretations of such activities, positively seeing them as a creation of a new public realm through civic engagement with “edible landscapes” and “community gardening,” (He and Zhu 2018; Zhu et al. 2020) a form of “informal commoning,” (Roast 2022) and a bottom-up “ruralization” practice during rapid urbanization (Wang 2024). The sites of informal cultivation can occur on the rooftops of dense residential buildings, urban green spaces, the relocation community of peasants in new city blocks, vacant or neglected construction sites, and numerous irregular edge lands left behind by the expansion of urban infrastructures.

In an ethnographical writing on the informal peri-urban agriculture in Chongqing in southwest China, Roast (2022) proposes a conceptualization of “kongdi” (空地). “Kongdi” is a Chinese word that normally refers to idle land, open spaces, or wasteland. Given the threat of rapid enclosure within the urban regimes of rural land accumulation, Roast reframes the concept as “a temporal (and temporary) position awaiting an imagined future of urban development” to capture the phenomenon where displaced “urbanized” peasants and migrant workers informally utilized the large areas of undeveloped land awaiting construction for cultivating vegetables.

The informal reclamation and cultivation of kongdi are believed to exist prevailingly in many Chinese cities. A dataset provided by Wang (2024) that collects gray literature of local news reports and social media content indicates that it is a national occurrence, while it appears more in central and eastern provinces than in north and west China, partly because of climate conditions. Wang interprets the reclamation of urban wasteland by ordinary people, which they call “Chengshi Kaihuang” (城市开荒), as a bottom-up practice of ruralization set against the backdrop of dramatic urbanization. Contrasting the state-led strategy of rural revitalization, which underscores the general disposition of urban-rural relations, the informal urban agriculture by isolated individuals shows the latent but fundamental rural roots in the civic identity among ordinary Chinese people.

Both terms, kongdi, and kaihuang, were frequently mentioned by informants in my study sites in Shanghai. I echo Roast and Wang that the practice of informal urban agricultural practice unfolds the notion of “a meaningful ‘outside’ to the urban” – these irregular, patchy, and individualized vegetable lots are contested social spaces where “the inside and outside of the urban are negotiated.” The idea is not to simply advocate for a more dynamic form of rural-urban integration. Rather, these spaces challenge the assumptive and lineal logic of urban development. To put it further, they question the given modality of “becoming urban”: to what extent do ordinary people understand the boundary between rural and urban? Who, through what kind of manipulations and agencies, was selected to be an “acceptable” urban subject and have rights to urban land? What can be learned from the disparity between the state proclamation of the urban land title and the everyday practice of informal reclamation by migrants?

Moment One: Vegetables

When I heard from Ms. Cheng, a migrant worker who lived and worked in Zhangjiang , the development site for a Science City project in eastern Shanghai, that she has her own vegetable lots near her residence and does farming work every day, I was pretty surprised. My curiosity did not come after the plantation outcomes—she just got more than 20 kilograms of rapes on a single lot—but originated from the feasibility of her farming activities: how could she possess a land lot in Shanghai?

Ms. Cheng and her family live in a small urban village at the edge of Zhangjiang Science City. I call it East Village. With several construction projects of roads, metros, and housing blocks being launched over the past three decades, the village was cut into many small pieces. Some parts of the village were swallowed by the Science City spectrum, while some remained rural scenes. Due to land confiscation in the early 2000s, the ownership of the village’s land was entirely shifted from the rural collective to the city government. In development areas, previous villagers were relocated to concentrated vertical housing communities. In undeveloped areas, peasants still hold the property rights of houses and crops, which ought to be compensated in future land-taking programs. 

In China, the land deal of ownership between individuals is illegal. Rural lands are collectively owned by the village, while urban land ownership belongs to the city government (the state). What can be transferred are the contracted management rights and the operation rights of the rural land among registered village members or certificated organizations and individuals who possess the land operation ability (National People’s Congress 2002; Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, PRC 2021).  

Hence, there is no possibility for Ms. Cheng to obtain a single lot in East Village. She is neither a registered member of the East Village collective nor an occupational farmer who has the ability to sign the contracted management rights of croplands with the locals. My informant, a middle-aged woman busy with domestic work and caring for three grandchildren, must be an amateur farmer. 

“Not only me,” she supplemented, “my neighborhoods also have their vegetable lots.” Several migrant worker families live in the village. Most of them came from rural regions in the provinces of Sichuan, Anhui, and Henan, having worked in manufacturing factories and low-end service sectors in Shanghai for years. 

The Chinese domestic migrant workers are known as “peasant workers” (nong min gong, 农民工). The first generation of peasant workers appeared in the early 1980s when the Chinese government opened the coastal cities for foreign investments and allowed peasants to enter the city and work in the factories. The term peasant worker indicates the rural-urban divide in citizenship. As for the aspects of social insurance, medical care, housing, education, and other related rights, peasant workers are institutionally excluded from the entire welfare system of the city. They still hold the ownership of the farmland property at home. However, none of them could feed themselves by farming their own land. 

“I rented my land to others at a meager price, approximately 100 RMB yuan per year. Isn’t it common among farmers? We gave up farming and rented the land to whoever is able to run the business,” Cheng  said to me. She left her hometown at thirty, then moved to Shanghai with her husband in 1995. Since then, she has spent most of her life in suburban Shanghai. 

Only in the past five years did she pick up farming. 

Moment Two: Under the Electricity Pylons

So, where did Ms. Cheng get farmland for free cultivation?

She brought me to her “land”. Without her guidance, I would never have found the place. It is located behind a fenced parking lot in the middle of the village. We walked into a jungle-like wild grass through a narrow path beside a concrete wall. The field occupies around two hectares of land. The vegetable lots were on the west side. A slightly higher terrain on the east side was covered by tree rows. 

Three electricity pylons stand on the field. Under the interlaced overhead power lines, some people were hunkering on the riverside. They stooped down and fetched the water into plastic buckets. Then, they carried the buckets, walked through the furrows, and irrigated the vegetable lots. After four or five rounds of watering, some took a rest in the tree shadows. 

There were some thirty small vegetable lots. Cheng has three narrow pieces. She had cleared a new piece of land a week ago. She pointed her new reclamation to me. It was lying between tree rows. The location of the piece was bizarre, as it was very close to a huge electricity pylon. 

Most plants on the ground were edible, leafy, root, and tuber vegetables; I saw some herbs as well. Over time, I learned from Cheng and other people how to identify the names of vegetables from their leaves: lettuce, bok choy, rape, chard, cilantro, leeks, shallot, garlic, sweet peas, peanuts, sweet potatoes, carrots, and white radish. 

To Cheng and her neighbors, planting vegetables is a way to cut down the family’s living costs. They complained a lot about the food price inflation during and after the COVID-19 period in Shanghai. “Vegetables in the market are too expensive. Here, I spend little money on buying seeds and fertilizers, then I can have countless vegetables.” 

Cultivation is also for gifting and reciprocity. Usually, the harvest is more than a single family’s consumption. They would share it with neighbors, relatives, and laoxiang  (老乡), fellows from their hometowns. Fresh vegetables were circulated every week through their social network in the city. When I asked people whether they sell vegetables, the answer was a definite no. For them, cultivation is not a profitable business. The land piece is too tiny, so no one grew economic crops here. What worries them most is that the use of the land could be withdrawn by anyone at any time. It is not a secured land to devote all their strength and sweat. 

Moment Three: Rubbles

Sometimes, I saw rubbles appear in the soil. 

“The quality of the soil is not good enough. You see, I need to clear up those rubbles and bricks,”  Ms. Cheng once complained. 

The rubbles imply the “prehistory” of these lands. It was not an ordinary rural farmland. “There were factories on the site. The local authority demolished the factories a few years ago,”  Ms. Cheng told me. 

Her friend, Ms. Chen, who had reclaimed some pieces of land as well, recalled the scene of the place when she moved to the village in 2020. 

When I came here, it was a wasteland. There was nothing but trees. Tall trees, with thick trunks. No one did farm. One day, the excavators came to the place and dug up the tree roots. They dragged the trees away from the land and took out the heads (roots). Only dirt was left on the ground. Some days later, the urban greenery team brought saplings from somewhere and planted them here. The tiny trees grew up in rows. Well, since then, we have been able to plant vegetables. (Interview transcript, Oct 14, 2023)

Aerial images archived by Google Earth indicate the drastic transformations in the landscape. Buildings and trees were bulldozed between 2016 and 2020, and the vacant land was quickly covered by tiny vegetable lots and sparse trees.

The deterritorialization and reterritorialization of farmlands were operated in an unusual way. Unlike in most urbanization processes, where farmlands are replaced by buildings, in this area, the constructions were demolished, and the land was returned to agricultural usage. A trickier point is that neither industrial usage nor present agricultural usage legally accords with the land use regulation. The area was designated as the “basic farmland” area that is excluded from the urban development boundary of Shanghai (Pudong New Area Government 2023:22). It implies that the land must not be occupied by nonagricultural land use. However, as mentioned earlier in this text, autonomous agricultural activities by migrant workers are not allowed either, as migrants do not have any rights to the land even though it was “reclaimed” and cultivated by them. 

A massive demolition of the building blocks in the area happened in 2016-2017. As reported, these buildings were old factories renovated by private housing agencies as the group-rental housing. The group-rental housing (qun zu fang, 群租房) is a type of cheap accommodation in Chinese megacities. The house owner divides the house into several small rooms to maximize the rental profit of a single property unit. In such cases, a three-room condo can be reconstructed into a five-room group renting property. In East Village, it constituted the majority of affordable accommodation for migrant workers. Housing agencies remolded the old factory buildings into group-rental condos. Due to environmental regulations, these were previously polluting and low-productive manufacturing factories that had been forced to shut down. These informal housings once accommodated more than 3,000 migrants. 

However, between May 2016 and March 2017, the local authority evicted all residents and demolished the buildings.

The crackdown on informal housing in East Village had three distinctive goals: territorial control, population regulation, and environmental monitoring. The harsh measures in regulating informal land use were determined by the General Territorial Plan of Shanghai. Following the city’s master plan, the municipal government had to restrict the expansion of urban industrial areas and urban population. 

Another significant guiding policy was the top-down Land Reduction Operations (tudi jianlianghua, 土地减量化). It was to revert a certain amount of construction land into agricultural land. As claimed by the local authority, the eviction of informal settlers in East Village vacated 20 hectares of farmland, efficiently contributing to “reducing the pollution to the river, improving the environment, and eliminating the security risk”. 

Reclamation, 2021

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