EVENTS

In its Thirteenth Five Year Plan in 2016, the government of Shenzhen announced that establishing housing for ‘talent workers’ will be a priority for public housing in the future. In pursuance of this, in August 2018, the Shenzhen Municipal Housing and Construction Bureau announced that by 2035, at least 1 million housing units would be designated as housing units for non-local professionals. Currently, government-funded homes make less than 20% of the total housing stock in Shenzhen. Until recently, only Shenzhen hukou holders could buy or apply for housing in Shenzhen. The new policy changes that. This paper analyses the government policy of prioritizing housing based on skills (talent workers) by allocating affordable housing in the form of talent workers’ housing (TWH) and tries to understand whether skill could be the basis for efficient allocation of housing for migrant workers in Chinese cities.

About the Speaker

Reeja Nair is a Research Associate at the Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi. She was a China-India Visiting Scholars (CIVS) Fellow 2020-21, supported by Ashoka University and Asian Century Foundation. Her research broadly centres on issues related to labour and urbanisation in post-Mao China to the present. She holds an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Chinese Studies from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and an MA in History from the University of Delhi. Awarded in 2021, her Ph.D. thesis is titled, 'Workers and Urban Spaces in Post-Socialist China: A Study of Community, Leisure, and Resistance, 1994-2008’.

About the Chair

Solomon Benjamin is Associate Professor at the Humanities and Social Science Department of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, INDIA. Benjamin has a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a SMArchS thesis from MIT’s Department of Architecture. He has published in international journals such as the IJURR, SARAI reader, GeoForum, Third World Planning Review, and European journals like Clusters, Agone, and Review Trie Monde with works translated into French, Spanish, German, and Catalan. He was faculty in the School of Social Sciences at Bangalore’s National Institute of Advanced Studies, and earlier at the University of Toronto’s Dept. of Political Science, and a visiting faculty at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. His current work focuses on the relationship between Indian and Chinese cities connected via smart phone and electronics in Indian ones as 'China Bazzars' , and is part of several international research projects and groups.

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