ABSTRACT
As urbanisation and ‘townisation’, initiated in concerted efforts by the Chinese government and real estate developers, forcefully shape and reshape rural space, redevelopment calls entirely new place-based identities into being. Juxtaposed narratives of the original villager and the newcomer – namely the middle-class home-owner – during and after relocation render place fluid with different stories about ‘home’. Based on an ethnographic inquiry into the making of Liangzhu Culture Village (LCV) in Hangzhou, this chapter looks into the process of reconstructing a place’s ‘past’ and ‘present’ through stories told by developers, planners, architects, local government, and homeowners. All the while, local residents of former Liangzhu villages hold on to stories of a place that some families have inhabited for hundreds of years. Interweaving various voices about this place and its multiple narratives of relocation, I attempt to illustrate different meanings of home and place in the eyes of original villagers and middle-class newcomers. This is an attempt to understand how meanings of place are shaped by shifting stories and imaginations brought about in China’s current age of (re)development.
