How Migrant Workers Find Housing in Beijing: The role of individual agency in differential housing access and outcomes
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- As a rapidly developing country, China has experienced a surge of internal rural-to-urban migration. Migrant workers are powerful catalysts in the development of their host cities and have considerable agency in their lives. This thesis examines the following questions: 1) how do migrant workers find housing, 2) what are the living arrangements and housing conditions for different subsets of migrant workers, and 3) what are the available channels in which they can improve their housing conditions? It does not intend to deny or trivialize the institutional constraints that affect the daily lives of migrant workers; neither does it intend to be a historical survey of how cities around the world have relied on the labor of internal migrant workers to yield similar patterns of urban growth. Instead, this study focuses on migrant workers in Beijing without the urban household registration and their differential experiences with housing provision as evidence of individual agency. Residential patterns tend to vary with socio-economic mobility, therefore indicating the extent of migrant assimilation. This study asserts that migrant workers have a considerable degree of agency in their lives and have devised coping strategies to manipulate personal resources to improve their outcomes of housing provision, as opposed to remaining passive recipients of structural discrimination. The first chapter of this thesis will provide a historical overview of institutional barriers that migrant workers encounter in the city, summarize the current literature, and explain the need for further research beyond the urban household registration system. The second chapter will describe the framework of this study and the results. The final chapter will suggest how informal channels such as occupation and social networks may exceed the influence of structural discrimination, in contrast to previous studies.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2007 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Chan, Deland |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Seto, Karen |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Urban Studies |
Subjects
| Subject | urban studies |
|---|---|
| Subject | stanford |
| Subject | migrant workers |
| Subject | beijing |
| Subject | housing |
| Subject | migration |
| Subject | Stanford University Urban Studies |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Chan, Deland. (2007). How Migrant Workers Find Housing in Beijing: The role of individual agency in differential housing access and outcomes. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/pf272fp3810
Collection
Stanford University Urban Studies Capstone Projects and Theses
View other items in this collection in SearchWorksContact information
- Contact
- deland@stanford.edu
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...