Paper Short Abstract:

This study explores the everyday lives of elderly residents in Hangda Xincun, a neighborhood in Hangzhou stalled by a prolonged redevelopment. Through themes of infrastructural disrepair, atmosphere and temporality, it challenges neoliberal growth ideologies by centring residents’ lived experience.

Paper Abstract:

This research aims to enrich current anthropological explorations on precarious housing infrastructure under neoliberal development schemes, through an ethnography of the everyday lived reality of elderly residents in a transforming old neighbourhood named Hangda Xincun in Hangzhou, China. Through the tripartite themes of infrastructural disrepair, atmosphere, and temporality, this research finds that the lived experience of the original residents in the old neighborhood, affected by a prolonged redevelopment process, entails a navigation among multiple tensions, including social development and personal needs, economic interests and affective connections, future planning and cultural legacy.

Despite having mobilised various strategies to protect the neighbourhood from unwanted intrusion from external institutions, the original residents remain situated in a state of liminality, navigating multiple temporal experiences among the nostalgia of a collectivist living culture in the past, present realities engaging in everyday politics of care with their aging bodies, and an unknowable future due to the inconsistent prospects among planning authorities. The atmosphere of “quietness” in the neighbourhood, as mentioned by the elderly residents, epitomizes an emic view of the delicate balance they have achieved amidst cultural and material precarity and uncertainty for more than 20 years since the initial demolition plan. By attending to the under-narrated feelings, needs and temporal experiences embedded in the atmospheric “quietness”, this research challenges the neoliberal conception of growth in current planning practices, and advocates for a more sustainable future-making of housing infrastructure by highlighting the embodied intimacy accumulated through the mundane, long-term interactions between residents and their dwellings.