Introduction

Are the processes of urban change, urban conflict, and the competition for housing very different in Chinese cities when compared to the experiences of their Western counterparts or are we mesmerized by the scale and pace of change in China so that the quantitatively different is sometimes mistaken for the qualitatively different? Every city, every nation-state, every culture will mediate common processes, common developments to produce distinct configurations and outcomes. Equally, apparently similar outcomes and patterns may be produced by quite different forces and relationships. In exploring these and related questions with regard to the competition for housing in cities, the narrative will traverse almost a century and progress from Park's Chicago, via Birmingham in England, to the contemporary Chinese city.

Park's Chicago was a city represented as having a hierarchy of housing circumstances with a distinct spatial pattern. Rex and Moore's research on Birmingham in the 1960s refined this conception in their work on racial tensions in the UK with their Weberian conception of housing classes and their greater attention to institutional gatekeepers. Their idea of competition for housing being related to, but distinct from, processes of social stratification and class structuring in the workplace was highly influential as well as widely critiqued at the time (see, for example, discussion in Thorns, 1989). But it may be that their ideas find new resonance with regard to the impact of housing commodification on wealth accumulation and social stratification in the contemporary Chinese city.

It is appropriate to comment initially on the nature and understanding of competition for housing and how that varies across the narrative. In Park's 1936 essay in the American Journal of Sociology, the Darwinian influence on his view of competition is explicit. Among other things he observed “Human ecology, in so far as it is concerned with a social order that is based on competition rather than consensus, is identical, in principle at least, with plant and animal ecology. The problems with which plant and animal ecology have been traditionally concerned are fundamentally population problems” (Park, 1936: 14–15).

For Park, it was human culture in its various forms which made societies work in the face of potentially unrestrained competition.