Displacement and Relocation for Hongqiao’s Local Residents

Chapter 7, the business of compensation is a highly complex one for a number of reasons, as I show in this chapter. This complexity derives in large part both from the dual urban/rural land system that leads to the existence of urban villages within urban districts, but also from the informal status of much of the housing in the urban villages. As a result, households stand to lose a lot more than is officially recognised by the authorities as they lose the income they gained from the renting out of informal dwellings and extra floors built without permits on their residences. The upshot of these problems is that villagers felt they had been poorly compensated for their relocation to new apartment blocks built for them in the Hongqiao project area, having received compensation levels for rural not urban residents. Alongside this, however, they expressed positive feelings towards the new accommodation to which they had been allocated. While this complicated mixture of feelings is captured in the survey and interviews that I conducted, in this chapter I conclude that for many residents, the overwhelming consequences have been negative as a result of their reduced potential for gaining an income. The chapter ends with a brief examination of the problems faced by another group of relocatees, who were moved some years ago and whose longer experience of new conditions can be regarded as a proxy for those of the recently relocated residents I surveyed. Significantly enough, they have been protesting against aircraft noise from Hongqiao Airport.