Chinese urban migrants sense of place: Emotional attachment, identity ...

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Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Vol. 55, No. 1, April 2014 ISSN 1360-7456, pp81–101

Chinese urban migrants’ sense of place: Emotional attachment, identity formation, and place dependence in the city and community of Guangzhou Junxi Qian and Hong Zhu Center for Cultural Industry and Cultural Geography, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China. Email: [email protected] (J. Qian); [email protected] (H. Zhu, corresponding author)

Abstract: In this paper, we study urban migrants’ sense of place in Guangzhou, China, focusing on the structural relations between place attachment, identification and dependence as the three key place dimensions. Through both quantitative structural equation modelling and qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews data, our research suggests that migrants’ sense of place demonstrates complex relationships between the three registers of emotional attachment, identity formation and functional dependence. The construction of sense of place is also related to the personal experiences of living as urban ‘outsiders’. Our research also reveals a striking difference between the city and community levels in terms of the ways in which migrants’ sense of place is constructed. Urban migrants tend to exploit the functional utilities of microscopic urban spaces to meet their demands for recreation, education and socialisation. On the other hand, their sense of place to the city is largely compromised by their attachment to the hometown and conditioned by their personal identification to the city. Keywords: migrant

Guangzhou, place attachment, place dependence, place identity, sense of place, urban

摘要：本文中，我们研究中国广州城市移民的地方感，重点关注地方依恋，认同，依赖这三个重要的地方维度间的结构关系。通过SEM定量分析，以及对深度访谈数据的定性分析，本研究认为移民地方感的建构显示出情感依恋，认同形成和功能依赖这三个维度的复杂关系。地方感的建构和作为城市‘他者’的个人经历息息相关。本研究还表明，在移民地方感的建构方式上，城市和社区尺度之间有惊人的差异。城市移民试图利用城市微观尺度空间的功能以满足他们对娱乐教育和社交的需求。另一方面，他们对于城市的地方感会被他们对家乡的依恋大大削减，同时也会受到其自身对城市认同的影响。关键词：城市移民，地方感，地方依恋，地方认同，地方依赖，广州

Introduction Migration and the construction of sense of place The theoretical foundations in debates on sense of place can be traced back to the scholarship of humanistic geography which pioneered viewing place as the centre of cultural meanings and perceived values. Such a perspective towards place is built upon the argument that

human subjectivity and everyday spatial experiences contribute significantly to the production of the meanings of places (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977). In accordance with this argument, the concept of sense of place brings to the foreground the ways in which human agency actively interprets and narrates the role which place plays in framing emotional feelings and cultural identities. In this paper, sense of place refers to an affective, positive and emotional bonding of human beings with places and a

© 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

doi: 10.1111/apv.12039

J. Qian and H. Zhu

socially, culturally and psychologically constructed man–lieu relationship (Tuan, 1974; Hay, 1998a; Paradis, 2000; Williams et al., 2010). More recently, human geographical scholarship has begun to view place as physical space that is made meaningful through the active participation and practice by social members. The study of sense of place, therefore, needs to understand the ways in which place can ‘say something’ (Cresswell, 2004: 2) about our cultural identities, our roles in an overall social structure, and our possibilities of creating multiple ways of life through active and creative use of place and space. It connects our sense of place with the network of social relations, social structures and social identities (Anderson, 1991). This move towards social identities and social relations in understanding sense of place helps us to view place as an emotional investment as well as a social construct (Harvey, 1996; Sack, 1997). Bearing in mind the conceptual richness of sense of place, this paper attempts to contribute to the understanding of the relationships between migration, sense of place and the social construction of place-based meanings. While earlier studies regarded migration as a de-territorialising process associated with the annihilation of place-based emotional bonding, many recent scholarly works suggest that the concept of place should be positioned in a spatial context which involves migration as an important axis around which the meanings of place are constructed (Lawson, 1999). A number of scholars have argued that migration per se does not lead to the dissolution of migrants’ emotional bonding with places (Cuba and Hummon, 1993). Following this, studies have been advocating a more nuanced understanding of the interplays of identity and subjectivity, of emotional accommodations and longing, across the places of migration. This approach highlights the incessant re-negotiation of place-based identities in multiple sites in order to illustrate the complex processes of belonging and exclusion embedded in the trajectories of migration (Lawson, 1999). In places receiving migrants, there are close relationships between social, material, psychological and discursive spaces in which migrants’ emotional relations to place are continuously constructed and transformed (Kirby, 1996). 82

The process of migration combines various types of places at various locations and geographical scales under particular social, economic and cultural conditions (Pascual-de-Sans, 2004). On the one hand, empirical studies have shown that dislocation may result in pressure or grievance due to displacement from previous connections to places (Entrikin, 1991; Sharpe and Ewert, 2000). As Fried (2000) has suggested, displacement from a community can result in grief and mourning due to the disjunction between current physical space and more established cultural identities (Inhalan and Finch, 2004; Bog˘aç, 2009). On the other hand, however, it is also likely that migrants reconstruct a sense of place through intensive psycho-spatial engagements with new physical environments. Our social relations and emotional experiences are never confined to a single place, but located in a chain structure of roots and routes (Gustafson, 2001). Kothari’s (2008) research on transnational migrants also argues that the identity of migrants is produced in a web of connections which links personal identities with other migrants as well as local people through interactive social relations. This process creates ‘marginal urban spaces’ in which social bonds can be strengthened and hybrid cultural identities are formed. Thus, this paper argues that for migrants making a ‘home’ in a new place means not only the possession of a physical shelter but also the re-establishment of social and cultural relations which brings together spaces, objects and elements to represent and celebrate new relationships, emotions, events and experiences (Dayaratne and Kellett, 2008). It enables a previously dislocated individual to re-establish a point of orientation in relation to the world and organise social and spatial relationships around a referential geographical location in space (Bachelard, 1964; Tuan, 1977). However, while significant advancements have been made in more general theorisation of the relationships between migration and sense of place, there have been limited empirical attempts to investigate migrants’ sense of place under particular social, economic and cultural conditions of living as a non-local. This research is undertaken to engage with this inquiry through investigating the cultural and psychological complexities that underline the place-making process of migrants.


Chinese urban migrants’ sense of place

The approach adopted in this research is to examine and evaluate the various dimensions of migrants’ perceived meanings of place at two geographical scales, namely the city and the community space. On the one hand, for urban migrants a community space is a potential site in which intensive place-based experience can be fulfilled. Therefore, it is where complex processes of meaning-making and identity formation at a microscopic space within a community are likely to be observed. On the other hand, it has long been recognised that sense of place resides in a variety of geographical scales. A place in a house, the home, a neighbourhood, a city, a region and a country can all be the focal point around which meanings are produced and experienced (Tuan, 1975). A culturally or institutionally demarcated geographical region in which more microscopic spaces and place experiences are situated can become emotionally charged in general (Lalli, 1992; Hay, 1998a,b; Lewicka, 2008). In this process, more microscopic place experiences are translated into the cultural meanings of macroscopic places such as a town or a city. Thus, the city is always an assemblage of cultural symbols, discourses and representations. Thus in terms of the city, the intensity of sense of place is gauged via one’s representations and narratives that describe emotional experiences. Also, the city and the community may represent fairly different combinations of place-based experiences and place-based meanings. The main hypothesis made and tested in this research is that places at different geographical scales can contribute to different patterns and structures of sense of place, and display different relations between separate dimensions of sense of place. The quantifiable structure of place-based meanings can vary between a place at the microscopic scale and a place at a more macroscopic one. The production of sense of place is contingent upon the specific social, economic and cultural conditions of living as urban migrants in the city. Setting the scene: Internal migration in a developing Asia This research is situated in the large-scale internal migration, in particular the rural-to-urban

migration, in the context of China’s recent economic transition (Fan, 2008). Since the beginning of China’s economic reform, internal labour migration from less developed regions to more developed centres of industrial production has become one of the principal contributing factors to China’s economic development and rapid industrialisation (Fan, 1999; Liang, 2001). However, in the existing literature on internal migration in China, little has been said about the possibilities for urban migrants to actively participate in the social and cultural processes of the city for the re-negotiation of lifestyle and cultural identities. The primary institutional barrier for the urban migrants to actively adopt an urban cultural identification, without doubt, is the hukou system installed as a means for both social control and the allocation of public services (Cheng and Selden, 1994; Chan and Zhang, 1999). Urban migrants’ entitlements to social services and welfare are denied on the basis that they do not hold a local hukou (Solinger, 1999; Zhang, 2001; Wang, 2005; Chan, 2009). From a geographical point of view, the hukou system forecloses the possibility for urban migrants to participate in the cultural construction of many urban spaces and places. Internal migration in China resonates with other fast-developing economies in Asia. In Vietnam, the Doi Moi reform has created an institutional and economic milieu fairly comparable with that in China. Migration from less developed regions to more developed centres is the outcome of Vietnam’s transition to a market economy and the rapid process of industrialisation around its major urban centres (Dang et al., 1997; United Nations Vietnam, 2010). Similar to the hukou system in China, the Vietnamese ho khau system restricts migrants’ access to urban-based employment, resources and public services (Hardy, 2001; United Nations Vietnam, 2010; Nguyen et al., 2012). In Indonesia, similar migration to urban-based industrial employment has been observed among young women from the area of Lampung (Elmhirst, 2002). In Lampung, indigenous communities have been squeezed out of local spaces of livelihood due to the large-scale immigration of Javanese settlers (Elmhirst, 1999). As a result, migration for industrial work has been employed as an alternative strategy to earn a living in face of ethnic tension.


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Without doubt, urban migrants face notable difficulties in overcoming institutional and cultural barriers in adopting an urban identity. But in the meantime, urban migrants are also actively involved in the negotiation of identity and lifestyle. Urban migrants may develop new cultural identifications to adjust to urbancentred social and cultural fabrics, in both legal and cultural terms (Nguyen et al., 2012). Thus, this article attempts to present a detailed analysis of the ways in which urban migrants can actively appropriate certain urban space for negotiating ways of life and cultural identifications. It focuses on the ways in which urban migrants’ practices of space can contribute to the formation of place-based meanings and identifications, often within established institutional constraints such as the hukou or ho khau system. The remainder of the paper will be divided into four sections. First, we will outline the immediate social and economic context, methodologies adopted, and the conceptual framework used in this research. The following two sections report the empirical findings, starting with the results of our quantitative modelling and complemented by a qualitative analysis of the discursive materials gathered from in-depth interviews. The last section concludes. Research design and methods Guangzhou and Dadong Community Culture Center This research is conducted with regard to two geographical scales. Macroscopically, our research focuses on urban migrants’ place bonding with the city of Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province. In recent years, Guangzhou has witnessed unprecedented urban spatial and economic development since the implementation of China’s open-door policy (Xu and Yeh, 2003; Lin, 2004). Along with this drastic development process, the city has seen an ever-increasing number of urban migrants who come primarily from rural areas. The influx of these migrants has fundamentally reshaped the local labour market, contributing significantly to the city’s industrial and service development through a great pool of a low-cost labour force. In 2009, about 6 million migrants 84

were working and living in this metropolitan area, accounting for almost half of the city’s total population (Guangzhou Daily, 2009). At a microscopic level, our investigation is located at the culture centre of the Dadong Residential Community. Dadong Community lies at the centre of the Yuexiu District. It covers an area of 1.02 sq km with over 90 000 longterm residents. Of these residents, 8000 are urban migrants who do not have official hukou status but keep their permanent or long-term residence in the community. The community managerial authority emphasises the important role that this social group plays in stabilising and sustaining the community. Owing to a philosophy of benign governance, a communitybased project named ‘Golden Goose’ was launched to provide community-based social services to migrants in the community. This project was started in 2008 by the community managerial authority and is funded jointly by the District Government of Yuexiu and the Dadong Community. While the physical settlements of the sub-projects are sparsely distributed across the entire community, the Community Culture Center is the most important site associated with Golden Goose Project. The culture centre provides opportunities for regular recreational and social activities for both local and migrant community members. In the meantime, the culture centre is also the location for six sub-projects of the Gold Goose programme (Fig. 1). In Guangzhou, each neighbourhood features a community culture centre which is a publicly funded communal facility. Normally, such community spaces are open to both the local residents and migrants free of charge. But in most cases there is no specific government action to facilitate migrants’ participation, and thus migrants may feel culturally alienated among the locals. The community culture centre in Dadong, therefore, appears to be a notable exception. In the Western context, various studies on the community life of migrants, notably in ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns, have demonstrated the potential of shared communal spaces in both meeting the functional demands of migrants and strengthening social bonds (Thompson, 1989; Zhou, 1995; Lin, 1998). The culture centre in Dadong is precisely such a space which aims at fostering community soli-



Figure 1. Location of Guangzhou in China and the location of the Dadong Community Culture Center in Guangzhou

darity. The authors became familiar with this culture centre because of their involvement in a research project which focused on the provision of community-based cultural activities and public services. The community culture centre in Dadong was set as an example of community-based services provided to migrants by the District Government of Yuexiu. As such, the culture centre has been chosen as the point of entry in this research. The authors are positioned as ‘outsiders’ to the participants in the culture centre owing to their lack of personal involvement in the collective social and cultural activities in question. The culture centre in Dadong Community, as well as the Golden Goose Project as a whole, is reflective of Guangzhou’s recent changes in policies concerning hukou regulations and the provision of social services to urban migrants. In 2010, Guangzhou Municipal Government introduced a scoring system to quantitatively measure urban migrant’s eligibility to obtain a Guangzhou hukou. Yet it also established a social hierarchy among the migrants. According to this system, any urban migrant who intends to obtain a local hukou is scored according to a set of criteria.1 As a result, only those who are more educated and skilled, possess higher levels of economic and social capital, and have prospect significant contributors to the city’s economic development can expect to obtain a local hukou. On the other hand, the provincial government of Guangdong and the municipal government of Guangzhou have proposed several ways to promote the provision of basic social

services to urban migrants in terms of housing, work-skills training, legal services and medical care.2 Due to the institutional constraints imposed by the hukou system, many of the social services provided to migrants need to be located at the community level through semigovernmental and non-governmental organisations.3 The Golden Goose Project emerged precisely in such a context. Although it cannot build up a system of public services as sophisticated as that operated under the hukou regime, it has nonetheless created opportunities for the migrants to improve their human capital and develop alternative ways of living and socialising. The conceptual and analytical framework Before proceeding to the empirical research, special effort needs to be made to clarify the controversial nature of the measurement and evaluation of sense of place. In this research, sense of place is defined as encompassing a number of interconnected dimensions, among which the constructs of place attachment (PA), place identity (PI) and place dependence (PD) are at the heart of existing studies. The focus of our quantitative analysis is the structural relations between these three place dimensions. In other words, this paper sees sense of place as the joint effect of three separate yet mutually related perceptions of man–place bonding. There is no unitary measurement of the somewhat nebulous concept of sense of place. Rather, this seemingly all-encompassing


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concept needs to be deconstructed into more nuanced levels of analyses. In this research, PA is understood as the emotional bonds that people have developed with places (Altman and Low, 1992; Williams et al., 1992; Lewicka, 2008). It refers to the emotional or affective component of one’s relationship with places (Hay, 1998a,b; Trentelman, 2009). It can be measured by a tendency to keep physical proximity to certain places (Hidalgo and Hernandez, 2001). PI concerns the process in which personal identity emerges out of affective and social relations with particular places. Individual identities are defined on the basis of particular features of place, as places give rise to a sense of distinctiveness, continuity, self-esteem and self-efficacy (Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996). Finally, the concept of PD refers to people’s functional reliance on the amenities and resources that places can provide. It refers to a dependence on a place in order to achieve certain goals and do things that we want to do (Stokols and Schumaker, 1981; Trentelman, 2009). Place dependence is usually associated with people’s self-actualisation and selffulfillment via place experiences (Proshansky et al., 1983). So far there has been little consensus in terms of how to clearly demarcate and measure these dimensions. The structural relations between these place dimensions are also under continuous debates. Williams et al. (1992) identify two sub-dimensions under the construct of PA: PI and PD. Bricker and Kerstetter (2002), further complicating the conceptual implications of sense of place, suggest that three dimensions constitute PA, namely PI, PD and lifestyle. Kyle et al. (2005) develop a model of PA composed of PI, social bonding and PD. There are also researchers who suggest that PI and PA are identical concepts and use these terms interchangeably (Brown and Werner, 1985; Stedman, 2002). Others, however, argue that these two concepts are parallel constructs subsumed under a supraordered concept such as sense of place (Jorgensen and Stedman, 2001; Pretty et al., 2003). Furthermore, there are arguments suggesting that PA is a sub-dimension of PI (Lalli, 1992). For our point of view, the difficulty in reaching a widely accepted structure encompassing sense-of-place dimensions indicates precisely that the internal dynamics of sense of 86

place are highly contingent on specific social conditions and research contexts. Each dimension works in different relationships to others under different constellations of historical contexts and social relations. Methods of research A questionnaire survey was conducted in 2010 to measure the extent to which migrants have developed a sense of place to the culture centre and the city of Guangzhou. Data collected from questionnaire survey are processed via structural equation modelling, and the findings will be reported in the following section. Migrant in this research is defined as one who has no Guangzhou hukou, but has maintained residence in the city for a minimum of six months. All questionnaires were distributed in the culture centre and only regular participants in the culture centre were selected as questionnaire respondents. The questionnaire was divided into two parts. The first part was used to gather basic sociodemographic information about the respondents. The second part measures migrants’ sense of place through three place dimensions: PA, PI and PD. Each of the three dimensions was gauged at two geographical levels: the community culture centre and the city of Guangzhou. Different variables were designed under each place dimension to measure sense of place from various aspects. The variables for measuring each place dimension are presented in the questionnaire as positive narratives (Tables 1 and 2). For each narrative, a Likert scale of 1–5 is applied, with 5 denoting ‘strongly agree’ and 1 denoting ‘strongly disagree’. The respondents were then asked to score each narrative in the questionnaire. In total, 104 valid responses to our questionnaire were collected. Because the total population of migrants in the community is slightly beyond 8000 and the sampling rate is about 1.3%, the size of the sample suffices for a reliable modelling analysis. Table 3 presents the sociodemographic characteristics of the sample. The surveyed migrants are mostly ruralto-urban migrants, with 12 exceptions from less developed urban areas. Most of the respondents come from Guangdong or the neighbouring provinces of Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan, and Guangxi. Nearly 85% of all respondents are


Chinese urban migrants’ sense of place Table 1. The measured variables of each place dimension at the level of the community culture centre Constructs

Variable no.

Narratives

C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7

I love to be here and I am eager to come back during my leisure time I will argue with those who downgrade this culture center This place makes me feel comfortable and secure I am proud that there is such a place in GZ This culture center makes me happy and pleased. This place makes me happier than other places can do If this place is under threat (e.g. demolishing or relocating), I will defend it with my efforts. I hope this center will continue to function In general, I am satisfied with this place I think this place has been part of myself My characteristics and personalities are realized here The tolerant and integrative atmosphere here corresponds to my personal values I find who I am in this place I think I have a sense of belonging to this place The center is the best place for the activities I like My demands for leisure, entertainment and learning can be met through activities here My personal capabilities can be strengthened My horizon of knowledge is broadened I make a lot of friends here, which is good for my social network I get familiar with people through the activities here in this center This center frequents the talk between my friends and me My relatives and friends come here a lot, so I like this place also This place is good for me to better my understanding of GZ I can know many Guangzhou locals here. I can be better integrated into GZ locals through this place

Place attachment

C8 C9 C10 C11 C12 C13 C14 C15 C16 C17 C18 C19 C20 C21 C22 C23 C24

Place identity

Place dependence

Measurement of questions in either Table 1 or 2 is conducted through a 1–5 Likert scale (1: strongly disagree; 2: generally disagree; 3: neutral; 4: generally agree; 5: strongly agree). Table 2. Constructs Place attachment

Place identity

Place dependence

The measured variables of each place dimension at the level of Guangzhou city

Variable no.

Narratives

G1 G2 G3 G4 G5 G6 G7 G8

I love Guangzhou, if I have been away from it for a long time, I will miss it. I will argue with those who downgrade GZ This city makes me comfort and secure This city makes me happier than other cities can do I am proud of living in GZ I think I am a Guangzhou local already My characteristics and personalities can be fulfilled and shown here The tolerant and integrative atmosphere in Guangzhou is in congruence with my personal values I think I have a sense of belonging to Guangzhou Guangzhou can be seen as my second hometown My demands for leisure, entertainment, learning and self-realization can be met through activities in Guangzhou My personal capabilities and knowledge can be strengthened in Guangzhou I make a lot of friends in Guangzhou, which is good for my social network My relatives and friends all feel a sense of belonging to Guangzhou, so Guangzhou is important in my social network.

G9 G10 G11 G12 G13 G14

under the age of 40. Among them, 53 (51%) are men and 51 (49%) are women. The general level of education which the surveyed migrants have received is not significantly high, with only 13.5% of them holding a bachelor’s degree and

no one holding a postgraduate degree. Most of the migrants, instead, are junior high school or senior high school graduates. The distribution of their employments is highly dispersed and many of the migrants are employed in


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J. Qian and H. Zhu Table 3. Sociodemographic attributes of the surveyed migrants in the Dadong Community Culture Center

Gender Male Female Age (years) Under 30 30–40 40–50 Above 50 Place of origin Anhui Guangdong Guangxi Guizhou Hainan Henan Hubei Hunan Jiangsu Jiangxi Shanxi Sichuan Xinjiang Education Uneducated Primary school Junior middle school Senior middle school Junior college Undergraduate Graduate school Number of samples Profession Government Public sectors Large-scale public enterprises Small-scale public enterprises Private enterprises Small self-owned enterprises Self-run business Street peddlers Non-profit organisations Unemployed Residence length in Guangzhou (years) Under 1 1–3 3–5 5–10 10–20 Above 20 Residence length in Dadong (years) Under 1 1–3 3–5 5–10 10–20 Above 20 Participation in the culture centre (years) Less than 1 1–2 Over 2

88

Percentage

Frequencies

51.0 49.0

53 51

43.3 41.3 10.6 4.8

45 43 11 5

1.0 17.3 15.4 1.0 1.0 6.7 8.7 28.8 1.9 5.8 1.9 9.6 1.0

1 18 16 1 1 7 9 30 2 6 2 10 1

1.0 1.9 14.4 42.3 26.9 13.5 0 104

1 2 15 44 28 14 0

5.8 13.5 3.8 23.1 35.6 9.6 5.8 3.8 2.9 2.9

6 14 4 24 37 10 6 4 3 3

8.7 13.5 36.5 23.1 12.5 5.8

9 14 38 24 13 6

11.5 25.0 29.8 23.1 8.7 1.9

12 26 31 24 9 2

27.9 62.5 9.6

29 65 10

government offices and public institutions such as schools and hospitals. With reference to the length of residence in Guangzhou, the two largest groupings fall into the categories of three to five years and five to ten years, while in terms of the length of residence in the Dadong Community, the largest two groupings are one to three years and three to five years. Due to the relatively recent establishment of the Golden Goose Project, most respondents have been linked to the culture centre for one to two years (62.5%), while another 9.6% for slightly longer than two years and the rest (27.9%) for less than one year. We also conducted in-depth interviews with 14 migrants to gather detailed discursive materials about the actual emotional attachment to, identification of, and dependence upon the city and the community. The interviewees’ ages range from 24 to 55 and all of them are Han Chinese. Except one interviewee from Xinjiang, all other interviewees come from the provinces of Hunan (4), Hubei (4), Guangxi (3) and Guangdong (2). Eleven are from rural areas and three are from less developed urban areas. All interviews were conducted face to face in Mandarin Chinese. The primary purpose of the in-depth interviews is to understand how different dimensions of sense of place are mutually connected in constructing the meanings of places at the two different geographical scales. The interviews will also be used to elucidate the results from the statistical analyses and provide explanations of the findings from the structural modelling analysis. The interviewees are selected from among respondents of the questionnaire survey to ensure the consistency between the quantitative and qualitative studies. The research methodology adopted in this article is innovative in several aspects. First of all, in our quantitative analysis we do not see sense of place as a coherent and monolithic construct which can be described qualitatively under an overarching conceptual framework. Instead, via a structural modelling analysis we attempt to deconstruct sense of place into more nuanced place dimensions and understand the multiple aspects of meanings embedded in the construction of sense of place and the complex interrelationships between them. Second, we use data drawn from qualitative and in-depth interviews to elucidate the results from quanti-



tative statistical analyses with detailed discursive materials on the interviewees’ lived experiences. Although quantitative structural modelling reveals the statistical relations between various place dimensions, it does not automatically derive plausible explanations of concrete social and cultural realities. The explanations of the findings from structural modelling should instead be grounded in actual social conditions and cultural experiences; thus, the qualitative method can be an important explanatory power here. Third, this research is conducted on two interlinked geographical scales. In doing so, it has the potential to elaborate how geographical scale is a constituent element in the negotiation and construction of sense of place. A scalar construction of PA, PI and PD: A quantitative modelling analysis Our quantitative analysis of the data gathered from our questionnaire survey started with a careful assessment of the data. The reliability of the data collected from the questionnaire survey is tested with SPSS 16.0 statistic package (IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY, USA). The results of

the reliability test show that the variables C2 (‘I will argue with those who downgrade this culture center’), C7 (‘If this place is under threats, I will defend it with my efforts’), C10 (‘I think this place has been part of myself’), G2 (‘I will argue with those who downgrade GZ’) and G14 (‘My relatives and friends all feel a sense of belonging to Guangzhou, so Guangzhou is important in my social network’) should be removed from the framework of measurement due to low item-total correlations. Cronbach’s alpha ranges from 0.838 to 0.939 for all three place dimensions at two geographical scales after the removal of these five variables. This suggests that the reliability of each dimension as an aggregation of separate variables is now high. The arithmetic mean of the scores reported for all the narratives describing each place dimension is calculated as the indicator of this specific aspect of sense of place. Distributions of the scores reported by the surveyed individuals for each dimension are listed in Table 4. Scores for each dimension at either scale are not evenly distributed. For all three dimensions at both scales, the largest groupings fall into the categories of 2.5–3, 3–3.5 and 3.5–4. In terms of all three dimensions at both two scales, the

Table 4. Distribution of scores for each place dimension according to the questionnaire survey Place attachment

Culture centre scale 1–1.5 1.5–2 2–2.5 2.5–3 3–3.5 3.5–4 4–4.5 4.5–5 Mean Standard deviation Guangzhou scale 1–1.5 1.5–2 2–2.5 2.5–3 3–3.5 3.5–4 4–4.5 4.5–5 Mean Standard deviation

Place identity

Place dependence

Frequencies

Percentage

Frequencies

Percentage

Frequencies

Percentage

0 1 3 18 22 25 16 16 3.65 0.77

0 1.0 2.8 20.2 21.2 24.0 15.4 15.4

1 0 11 20 33 24 8 7 3.47 0.70

1.0 0 10.5 19.3 31.7 23.1 7.7 6.7

1 0 10 10 38 22 10 10 3.52 0.71

1.0 0 9.6 9.6 36.5 21.2 9.6 9.6

0 1 6 12 26 29 14 16 3.75 0.75

0 1.0 5.7 11.6 25.0 27.9 13.4 15.4

0 0 10 17 22 22 16 17 3.62 0.81

0 0 9.6 16.4 21.1 21.2 15.4 16.3

1 2 6 19 15 40 3 18 3.61 0.82

1.0 1.9 5.8 18.2 14.4 38.5 2.9 17.3


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intensity of sense of place for most surveyed migrants is at a moderate level. The mean scores for all dimensions are beyond or close to 3.5, showing that in general the surveyed respondents have indeed developed attachment and identification to the culture centre and Guangzhou. However, it is also noteworthy that neither the community culture centre nor the city has become a centre of meanings for all respondents. A tentative analysis into the correlations between the sociodemographic characteristics of the surveyed migrants and their sense of place provides some primitive insights. At each geographical scale, the intensity of the migrants’ PA, PI or PD is not significantly correlated to their age, gender or education. Interestingly, at each geographical scale the length of residence in Dadong and the length of residence in Guangzhou are not apparent contributors to migrants’ sense of place either. In other words, it is possible for a migrant to have lived in the city or community for a long period but demonstrate low sense of place. Other factors, which are supposedly more deeply embedded in the migrants’ everyday social life, need to be sought to explain the development of migrants’ emotional bonding with places. In our survey, two factors appear to be notable contributors to the constitution of migrants’ sense of place. First, a migrant’s profession exerts notable influences over his/her sense of place. Migrants employed in government departments, public sectors, public enterprises and non-profit public organisations report higher scores in all three place dimensions. For those migrants, these aforementioned organisations and institutions tend to create more inclusive social milieus and more opportunities for migrants to interact with Guangzhou locals. This has strengthened those migrants’ inclination to participate in local community activities and urban ways of living (Table 5). Second, the length of participation in culture centre is an important factor contributing positively to migrants’ sense of place at both geographical scales. On the one hand, migrants’ participation in the cultural activities and social life of the culture centre shapes their emotional bonding with this particular community space. On the other hand, the cultural implications of place experiences at the culture centre seem to extend beyond the microscopic 90

scale and into the construction of sense of place at the level of the city (Table 6). These findings, though tentative and premature, resonate well with the following analyses. The hypothesis to be tested in our quantitative modelling is that the relationships between the three dimensions of sense of place at the scales of community and city correspond to a hypothesised model identical to what was proposed by Williams et al. (1992) in which the dimension of PA is constituted by PI and PD (Fig. 2). The model fitness of the hypothesised models will be tested with Amos 18.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Each of the three dimensions at the two scales is defined as a latent variable in the Amos modelling analysis, and is predicted through the sub-ordered variables measured in the questionnaire survey. Relations between latent variables are established and tested with the Amos parameter estimates technique at the two scales separately. Each place dimension at either geographical scale is assigned with a variable name accordingly.4 Results of the parameter estimates5 demonstrate that at the scale of the community culture centre, the dimension of PI does not contribute to PA at any significant level. In other words, the migrants’ PA and PI to the culture centre can be regarded as two constructs independent of each other. On the other hand, the structural relationship between PD and PA at the culture centre level is notably strong. Thus, the hypothesised model at the culture centre scale is revised. The hypothesised connection between PI and PA is removed, and the double-headed arrow between PI and PD is changed to a singleheaded arrow leading from PD to PI. This is to test if PD may contribute to both PI and PA. The parameter estimate shows that PD indeed significantly contributes to the formation of PI at the culture centre level. The observed relations between place dimensions of sense of place at the scale of the culture centre (MC in Table 7) are shown in Figure 3. By contrast, at the level of the city the connection between PD and PA cannot pass the significance test. This suggests that at the scale of Guangzhou, the influence of PD on PA is minor. Further parametric analysis also affirms that any interconnection between PI and PD at the level of the city is statistically untenable. Thus we can propose a model of the interrelations between


Chinese urban migrants’ sense of place Table 5.

Scores of place dimensions in each professional category

Profession Government

Public sector

Large-scale public enterprise

Small-scale public enterprises

Self-owned enterprise

Private enterprise

Small self-owned business

Street peddler

Non-profit organisation

Unemployemnt

Mean n Standard Mean n Standard Mean n Standard Mean n Standard Mean n Standard Mean n Standard Mean n Standard Mean n Standard Mean n Standard Mean n Standard

deviation

deviation

deviation

deviation

deviation

deviation

deviation

deviation

deviation

deviation

cPA

cPI

cPD

gPA

gPI

gPD

3.8571 6 1.13569 4.3163 14 0.50485 4.1429 4 0.76488 3.5952 24 0.76139 2.9524 3 0.78680 3.4633 37 0.64277 3.6905 6 0.67259 2.8571 4 0.48093 3.8571 3 0.65465 3.5238 3 1.23167

3.3750 6 1.19111 3.6607 14 0.50580 4.0625 4 0.96555 3.5938 24 0.57960 3.4167 3 0.76376 3.3716 37 0.58518 3.5833 6 0.73598 2.7500 4 0.50000 3.4167 3 1.42156 3.5833 3 1.37689

3.3833 6 1.19736 3.6857 14 0.56276 4.0250 4 0.69462 3.6250 24 0.72846 2.8000 3 0.60828 3.4081 37 0.58802 3.8833 6 0.81833 2.8000 4 0.53541 3.9333 3 0.58595 3.5667 3 0.75056

3.5833 6 0.95743 4.5893 14 0.39960 4.4375 4 0.65749 3.5938 24 0.65030 3.1667 3 0.80364 3.6351 37 0.63899 3.8333 6 0.71880 2.8125 4 0.51539 3.9167 3 0.72169 3.5000 3 1.08972

3.5667 6 0.77374 4.6571 14 0.40328 4.0000 4 0.93808 3.5083 24 0.77791 3.0000 3 0.52915 3.4162 37 0.70298 3.6667 6 0.71181 2.9000 4 0.47610 3.8667 3 0.64291 3.1333 3 1.00664

3.2778 6 1.14342 4.2857 14 0.48670 4.0000 4 0.72008 3.4861 24 0.82227 3.0000 3 0.88192 3.5225 37 0.72240 3.7778 6 0.88611 2.9167 4 0.31914 4.2222 3 0.38490 3.1111 3 1.38778

cPA, place attachment at the level of culture centre; cPD, place dependence at the level of culture centre; cPI, place identity at the level of culture centre; gPA, place attachment at the level of Guangzhou; gPD, place dependence at the level of Guangzhou; gPI, place identity at the level of Guangzhou.

Table 6.

Scores of place dimensions in different lengths of participation in the culture centre

Length of participation in the culture centre Less than 1 year

1–2 years

More than 2 years

Mean n Standard deviation Mean n Standard deviation Mean n Standard deviation

cPA

cPI

CPD

gPA

gPI

gPD

3.1921 29 0.60882 3.7670 65 0.77615 4.1714 10 0.48934

3.2069 29 0.68813 3.5269 65 0.66896 4.0250 10 0.61745

3.1345 29 0.66616 3.6308 65 0.66824 3.9600 10 0.60406

3.3190 29 0.58209 3.8231 65 0.74572 4.5500 10 0.34960

3.1379 29 0.56847 3.7262 65 0.81284 4.3600 10 0.61680

3.1839 29 0.74847 3.7026 65 0.79303 4.2000 10 0.63246

cPA, place attachment at the level of culture centre; cPD, place dependence at the level of culture centre; cPI, place identity at the level of culture centre; gPA, place attachment at the level of Guangzhou); gPD, place dependence at the level of Guangzhou; gPI, place identity at the level of Guangzhou.

the three dimensions of sense of place at the scale of Guangzhou (MG in Table 7), which is presented in Figure 4. The model fitness indices of both models are stated in Table 7.

In sum, the relationships between the three dimensions of the sense of place in the hypothesised model can only be partly proved at either scale in this research. The model structure


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Place Identy Place Aachment

Place Dependence Figure 2. The hypothesised model (according to Williams et al., 1992)

observed at each of the two scales is also distinct from the other. A comparison between what we hypothesised and what is actually displayed in reality elucidates two important findings. First, PI is not an important factor in shaping migrants’ PA to the community culture centre. The relationships between PA, PI and PD are structured within a pattern that has not been observed in previous studies (e.g. Williams et al., 1992; Bricker and Kerstetter, 2002; Kyle et al., 2005; Jorgensen and Stedman, 2006), with PD as the sole indicator which contributes to both PA and PI. The measured variables contributing to the formation of PD also suggest that both physical rootedness and social bonding have important implications for migrants’ dependence upon the culture centre. The culture centre opens up possibilities that the migrants’ demands for leisure and cultural activities can be met through the physical facilities and amenities. Also, the culture centre provides the migrants with an important arena where they can socialise with both locals and other migrants. The social networks that migrants establish at the culture centre have contributed to their attachment to the centre as a social space. Also, it seems that the social aspect of migrants’ PD on the centre includes a process of local integration. Second, at the scale of the city, PD and PA are mutually independent latent variables. PD is not a component of PA, which means that the functional role that Guangzhou plays as a setting for self-realisation and socialisation does not contribute to the migrants’ emotional bonding with the city. As previous studies have generally supported, emotional attachment to a physical setting is inseparable from the functional advantages of the place (Scannell and Gifford, 2010). Yet data analyses at the scale of Guangzhou suggest a parallelism between PA and PD 92

instead of a contributive relation. Meanwhile, also different from the structural relations observed at the scale of the culture centre, PD at the level of Guangzhou does not significantly influence the construction of PI either. The functional aspect of migrants’ sense of place at the level of Guangzhou is fundamentally separated from emotional and psychological constructs of sense of place. The context-contingent nature of the entangled relations between/among the constructs of PA, PI and PD becomes very apparent here.

Interpreting the construction of sense of place: A qualitative examination Sense of place at the culture centre: Functional dependence as the central dimension of place meanings At the scale of the community culture centre, several important findings are worthy of further scrutiny. At the heart of these findings, we suggest, is the quintessential importance of the functional dependence on the culture centre as a space for utilitarian ends. Our interviewees unanimously agree that the functional aspect of the culture centre as a place for taking activities and developing social networks is the core of their perceived meanings about the centre. In other words, the migrants’ reliance on the amenities and resources that support their goals prevails in the construction of their attachment to the centre. For migrants in this research, the culture centre is an important physical and social space that supports diverse place experiences, while their belonging to the centre is also to a large extent conditioned by the degree of self-realisation and socialisation. One of the interviewees expressed her feelings about her identification to the centre: Well, I do think this center has been part of me and my life, and I feel a sense of belonging to it. But this sense of belonging is not the primary reason for me to come here. As any other migrant who come here regularly, I love this place because it provides all the activities I need and like. If other places would provide better activities, I think I will leave this center in any way. Interviewee B, female, 40


Chinese urban migrants’ sense of place Table 7.

Model-fit indices for models MC and MG

Model-fit indices

MC MG

χ2/df

GFI

CFI

RMSEA

AIC

CAIC

1.310 1.447

0.828 0.934

0.965 0.982

0.054 0.066

334.532 75.628

513.127 144.871

χ2/df, chi-square/degree of freedom: This index should be as close to 0 as possible. GFI, goodness of fit index: The GFI of a good model should be >0.9 or at lease close to 0.9. CFI, comparative fit index: The CFI of a good model should be close to 1. RMSEA, root mean square error of approximation: The RMESA of a good model should not be much greater than 0.05. AIC and CAIC, Akaike’s information criterion and consistent Akaike’s information criterion: The AIC and CAIC of a good model should be as small as possible. MC, the structural model at the level of the culture centre; MG, the structural model at the level of Guangzhou.

.61

.57 –.55 .78 .47

.65

c11 .78

c12

.76 .88

c13 c14

c1

.72

cPI

.69

c3

.69

c15

.73

c4

.84 .66

c16 .11

.48 .28 .55

.78

.80

c17

.85

.88

.74

c19

.70

c20

.50

c21

.50

c22

.57

c23

.73

.67 .81

.84 .71

c5

.70

.81 .69

c18

cPA

.83

cPD

c6 c8

.00

c9

.83

.48

.54

.71

.69

.49

.45 .38 .66

.71 .71 .76 .85

c24

Figure 3. The relationship among the three dimensions of sense of place at the level of the Dadong Community Culture Center c1, c3 . . . c24, variables of sense of place measured at the level of culture centre, see Table 1; cPA, place attachment at the level of culture centre; cPD, place dependence at the level of culture centre; cPI, place identity at the level of culture centre.

This utilitarian aspect of place-based meanings is further affirmed by the fact that PI is also shaped by PD. Instead of being a sub-dimension that contributes to PA, PI and PA at the centre level are parallel dimensions shaped simultaneously by PD. According to the mainstream arguments in existing literature, place-based identity is a key factor which keeps people staying in

physical proximity to place. If the very essence of PA, in congruence with Hidalgo and Hernandez’s (2001) widely accepted conceptualisation, is the tendency to keep physical closeness to a place, then it is theoretically convincing to view PI as one of the basic components of attachment to place. However, for the migrants in this research, PI is more an abstract


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Figure 4. The relations between place attachment and place identity at the level of the city of Guangzhou (place dependence is not included in this model because its correlations with both place attachment and place dependence have been disproved) g1, g3 . . . g10: variables of sense of place measured at the level of Guangzhou, see Table 2; gPA: place attachment at the level of Guangzhou; gPI: place identity at the level of Guangzhou.

mental feeling of belonging than a reason that explains migrants’ behaviour of staying in proximity: I do have identification to the center . . . I mean, as a member of the opera group the social life in the center is already part of my life, and the feeling of identification is strong. But in terms of my intention of frequently staying here and coming back, I think the reason is simple: I need this place to spend my leisure time, that’s all. You need not to think it as something too complicated! Interviewee C, male, 48

In fact, the pivotal role played by functional dependence has rendered the emotional bonding with place at the scale of the culture centre somewhat distinct from conventional definitions of the emotionally laden relationships between places and humans. Here our argument is that the migrants’ emotional attachment and identification to the culture centre must not be overestimated as functional reliance has indeed compromised to some extent the emotional significance of the place. For example, the variables C1, C7 and C10 demonstrate little relevance in constituting placebased meanings at the scale of culture centre, 94

indicating that the migrants do not tend to regard the culture centre as an indispensable element in the construction of a coherent self. Also, in situations in which the culture centre is threatened or endangered, it seems unlikely that a cultural politics of resistance will be staged by the migrants. Instead, the interviewees’ narratives of attachment and identification are fundamentally organised around the utilitarian aspects such as ‘pleasure’, ‘comfort’ and ‘functions’. Even though many interviewees suggest that the symbolic meanings which the centre represents fit with their personal values, the notion of personal value does not refer to a pre-given and fixed set of ideas or ideologies. Rather, a sense of ‘what is good’ is mediated by the migrants’ functional reliance upon the culture centre. It is also closely entangled with the migrants’ understandings of their social situation as migrants in Chinese cities: The most important identity for me now, as you know, is that of a migrant – it is a label that is so firmly attached to my life. And when I think about the values that I would like to emphasize in the society, I cannot ignore my own situation of living. It is easy to understand. For me, the best values are those of care, respect and considerateness and the whole society should also



adopt such attitudes towards us. I think the culture center can be seen as a first step in this project of social care and respect. Interviewee C, male, 48

The functional significance of the culture centre manifests itself in two aspects. On the one hand, the centre provides possibilities for the realisation of goals and aims for the migrants. The physical facilities and amenities support the migrants’ pursuits for activities, ability improvement and knowledge acquisition. The migrants’ affective bonds with the centre are closely related to their personal or collective experiences of individual achievements. Their sense of self-fulfillment and the happiness emerging out of it are shaped by their experiential interactions with the physical and social environments at the centre, especially through some important events they experienced in person. Through their lived place experiences, the migrants have formed a sophisticated vernacular understanding of life in the centre. The interviewed migrants are all well informed about the centre’s history and everyday social life. Some interviewees could also recall some events that happened in the centre in a highly detailed manner. Some of them have even developed a symbolic attachment to material objects in the centre. For them, these objects have transcended the functional definition of a thing and become aggregates of personalised meanings. One migrant spoke about her feelings about the computers and the art-lesson chamber in the centre: When I see the computers and the room for art lessons here, I feel familiar and close to them. It was in here that I learned how to use computers and learned about the art of Japanese ikebana. These things are important and meaningful for me. Interviewee L, female, 40

On the other hand, the culture centre also serves as an important social space for the migrants. Activities organised in the centre open up possibilities to socialise with both locals and other migrants. The social life at the centre involves a large number of Guangzhou locals. Most of the locals get acquainted with migrants

through group activities. In many migrants’ narratives, the communication between the locals and the migrants is viewed as a positive and interactive process located in a cultural ambience of mutual respect and open exchange. These interactive processes not only foster banal yet significant everyday interactions like chatting and playing together, but also mutual respect between established social identities such as ‘local’ or ‘migrant’. In the meantime, the cultural boundaries between the migrants and the locals are often blurred and re-negotiated through intensive mutual interactions. Many interviewed migrants have developed very positive impressions of the Guangzhou locals in the Dadong Community. For example, one interviewee described Guangzhou locals in a rather complimentary tone: The locals in Guangzhou, I think, are very nice. I don’t feel discriminated by the locals here. All the time, they treat me with respect and friendship. There is no tension between the locals here and me. I think the locals in Guangzhou are very different from urban locals in many other large cities, especially Beijing and Shanghai. They are really good people. Interviewee H, female, 32

To borrow the four principles of PI proposed by Twigger-Ross and Uzzell (1996), we can see that PD on the centre works around all the four principles of identity formation. In terms of distinctiveness, the centre provides a unique atmosphere for the migrants in Guangzhou – a space they believe to be tolerant, equally accessible, kind and friendly; in terms of continuity, the centre makes it possible for them to continue with their personal preferences for activities and social life; in terms of self-esteem, the migrants feel that they are respected in such a space where their values are recognised in a positive way; and in terms of self-efficacy, the centre can apparently provide the migrants with possibilities for self-realisation and socialisation: It is no doubt that the center is a quite unique place in Guangzhou: you can see all the equipments here and I doubt that any other community culture center in Guangzhou would spend so much money for catering to


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the needs of migrants. The center is a very important place for me to both spend my leisure time and to make new acquaintances. Interviewee L, female, 40

In fact, the pragmatic and utilitarian construction of place-based meanings is not unique to the culture centre. Rather, it is common for the migrants in their daily socialisation with places, especially more microscopic sites in which they encounter in their everyday life. These sites are situated in a chain of functional spaces which support their demands for self-realisation and everyday sociality. It seems to us that how the migrants develop psychological bonding with these sites largely depends on the extent to which they can exploit these spaces for utilitarian uses. A plausible explanation for this unique process of self–place interaction may be that owing to the institutional constraints imposed by the hukou system, the urban migrants have relatively limited access to the resources and services which are supposed to be provided exclusively to formal urban residents. Not having a local hukou also means limited opportunities for encounters with spaces, people and facilities. As a result, the migrants have a natural inclination to focus more on the functional aspects in their use of space and the government-supported culture centre is exactly such a space that meets their utilitarian demands. As one interviewee told us: Our mental reliance on places is much dependent on how those places can meet our everyday needs. As you know, the resources to which we have access are so few, and for most places, the functional side is our first concern. Interviewee A, male, 55

Sense of place at the level of the city: The interplay of places along the route of mobility At the scale of Guangzhou, the most interesting finding is that PD does not contribute to PA. Although migrants demonstrate a relatively high degree of PD upon Guangzhou, this sense of dependence does not translate to a positive emotional bonding with Guangzhou. Two reasons emerge from the interview data to explain this lack of emotional connection. 96

First, even though migrants develop PD on Guangzhou, the contribution of functional reliance to PA is largely compromised by migrants’ more established attachment to their places of origins. Stepping back and forth between the identification to their places of origins and a newly negotiated sense of place to a new sociospatial environment, the migrants’ attachment to Guangzhou is ambiguous. As a result, the functional significance of the city – in terms of employment, leisure activities and socialisation – is considered a marginal dimension in place experience which is not significantly related to emotional feelings like identification and attachment. In this sense, different places across the route of migration are not culturally separate physical locales where sense of place is developed in independent trajectories (Pascual-deSans, 2004). Rather, place-based meanings are negotiated across various nodal points in a place-network. The relational construction of sense of place is well manifested in migrants’ negotiation of the relationship between functional reliance and emotional attachment at the scale of Guangzhou. One interviewee used the situation of ‘in-love-with-a-girl’ as a metaphor to describe this psychological process: It is true that I am dependent on Guangzhou for many things, primarily job, then leisure, socialization, etc. But it does not mean that I love it and want to always to stay in this city. Well, this feeling, it is just not so strong. I still love my hometown much more. It is like being in love with a girl. If you have reserved love for one, you will not love another easily, even though she can be better in many ways. Interviewee F, male, 25

Second, the migrants also believe that their demands for participating in activities and establishing social networks can be better met in their home places. The comparison between their hometowns and Guangzhou has remarkably enhanced a sense of indigenous identity and compromised the emotional significance of Guangzhou. As one interviewee tells it: Surely, it is not entirely impossible in Guangzhou to participate in recreational activities and develop social relations. The culture center is a good example. But this kind of possibilities is still less than often in



Guangzhou. In our hometown, there are a larger number of sites for those cultural activities; and in there I certainly can develop better social networks – it is easier for people sharing the same hometown to communicate with each other. Interviewee B, female, 40

For many interviewed migrants, dependence upon a physical place or a city is also viewed as a universal phenomenon which does not necessarily lead to a sense of positive emotional attachment. As functional dependence is culturally ‘insignificant’ and embedded in banal everyday encounters with places, inter-place comparisons between Guangzhou and hometowns contribute significantly to the comparative and relational construction of place-based meanings. To justify this comparison, the interviewees would either employ the discourses of Chinese cultural traditions, as indicated below: Hometown is always the most important place for anyone in China. A strong sense of root is a cultural tradition for Chinese people. There is no complicated reason for that – we simply believe in that. It is a social rule and a cultural norm. Interview A, male, 55

Or alternatively, some interviewees would insist that their social life is more deeply rooted in the sociocultural fabric of their hometowns: You know, I lived in my hometown for more than 20 years and I am familiar with everything there – including cuisine, clothing, cultural customs, etc. Most of my social network is located there and you can’t help thinking that your hometown is the most important place for you in your life. Wherever you go, your love to a new place must be influenced by this preexiting, natural bonding with your hometown. Interviewee B, female, 40

On the other hand, at the scale of Guangzhou the dimension of PI is the only indicator that contributes to migrants’ emotional attachment to the city. In fact, for the migrants in the research, PA to the city is not associated with the functional reliance on the city, but with the more abstract dimensions of symbolic meanings

and psychological identification. To a large extent, the migrants’ self-identification to the city is built upon the cultural image of the city which they have actively constructed. Migrants’ everyday experiences of more microscopic places such as the culture centre help to reconstruct their perceptions and imaginations about Guangzhou. To establish their psychological connections with the city, the migrants extract from their lived experiences abstract symbols, representations and cultural images about the cultural and social ambience of Guangzhou. The image of city, notably, is reconstructed at a highly ideological level. The migrants build up their own notions about ‘what Guangzhou is like’ and find the converging point between the values and ideologies the cities represent and the values they favour in person. In this way the migrants situate themselves in place through their socialisation with the city as an assemblage of meanings (Proshansky et al., 1983). For example, most migrants in our research believe that they can perceive a liberal, integrative and tolerant cultural ambience in Guangzhou through their place experiences at the culture centre. The convergence between an abstracted city image and one’s personal values then further contributes to the formation of PA. It is interesting to see that while PD does not contribute to PA and PI at the scale of the city, it is significant, nonetheless, at the scale of the culture centre. Here the socially contingent nature of geographical scale plays a pivotal role in producing this distinction. When the migrants evaluate their dependence on the culture centre, they compare the centre with its counterparts within the city of Guangzhou, which makes the meanings of the centre stand out among different places. However, when they evaluate their dependence on Guangzhou, they tend to compare Guangzhou with their hometowns, which can render their dependence on Guangzhou less emotionally laden. The entanglement and interplay of geographical scales constitute a fluid comparative field of placebased meanings. In many interviewees’ narratives, the culture centre, as well as other microscopic places in Guangzhou, is not an abstract or independent place whose cultural meanings can be freely interpreted without any reference to the social and cultural construct of the city. Instead, how it is culturally represented


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is contingent upon the physical boundaries in which it is situated: Researcher: So you do not compare the culture center with any other places in your hometown? Why? Interviewee: It is hard to explain, but you know, they are simply located in different cities. And since each city is different from another, you need a coherent background when you assess and compare those ‘small’ places. That is why I do not compare the center with the places which I am familiar in my hometown. It is just unfair – I cannot say the center is not good with a comparison of a place which I have known for thirty years. Researcher: You mean ‘unfair’? Interviewee: Yes. I mean in Guangzhou the center should definitely be seen as a ‘good’ place. You cannot demand too much in which we are still categorized as ‘outsiders’. Without a hukou, how should we ask more than this small, but already very comforting place? Researcher: But your attachment to the city, I mean the whole city, is not so good, it seems? Interviewee: it is hard to say – sometimes I feel that I am someone who belongs to Guangzhou. The city is not bad. But how can I develop a true attachment to it? It is quite difficult, and I would rather stay at my hometown when it is possible.

Conclusion Although important efforts have been made to conceptualise the sophisticated relationship between spatial mobility and the reconstruction of sense of place, relatively less has been done to understand place-based meanings in the context of internal migration in China. This research has made attempts to address this issue. It reports the findings of both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the ways in which Chinese migrants constructed place-based meanings in the context of a fastchanging metropolis where the impacts of marketisation, economic development and migration are arguably more pronounced than elsewhere in the country. Our research has demonstrated how the particular conditions of living as an urban migrant contribute to the structure of feelings that underlines the migrants’ bonding with places. In this research, sense of place serves as an overarching concep98

tual construct to capture the social and emotional connections between human subjects and places. It is viewed as the product of ordinary people’s active participation in the ongoing social and cultural production of places. But in the meantime, the basic analytical approach in this paper rejects a unitary measurement of sense of place and sees it as co-produced by the multiple dimensions of dependence, identification and attachment. It is hypothesised that one place dimension can shape place-based meanings and feelings manifested in other place dimensions. It is through the structural relationships between these nuanced place dimensions that sense of place is actually shaped; and the complex flows of meanings have fairly differentiated implications for understanding this supra-ordered conceptual construct. At an empirical level, the contributions which this paper makes can be summarised in three major points. First of all, it has demonstrated that at different geographical scales social members are likely to interpret and construct the meanings of place in radically different ways. The construction of place-based meanings is entangled with the mutual plays of different boundaries and geographical contours. In this research, at a more microscopic scale the principal significance of place lies at the functional aspect. The community culture centre is important for many migrants because it serves their demands for self-realisation and socialisation. On the other hand, our research has also shown that urban migrants’ imaginative reconstruction of the city as a place embodying positive values appears to be fundamental to a sense of belonging and attachment. Given that migrants’ places of origin are often interpreted as the sites of stronger functional dependence, PD on Guangzhou does not contribute directly to migrants’ identification and attachment to the city. However, through multiple place experiences in more microscopic spaces the migrants can establish a sense of belonging to the city which further contributes to their emotional attachment. Related to the first point, the second point made in this research emphasises that the use of a small community space – in this case the community culture centre – can be essential to the formation of sense of place at both micro-



scopic and macroscopic levels. Urban migrants’ active exploitation of the functional uses of the culture centre determines a genuine sense of dependence. This sense of PD, in turn, shapes both the migrants’ identity as cultural insiders and the emotional attachment to a microscopic urban space. More interestingly, our qualitative analysis shows that this sense of functional dependence upon microscopic urban spaces also works in a subtly discursive way to shape migrants’ emotional relations to the city as a whole. Finally, the relationships between PA, PI and PD observed in this research have important implications for a better appreciation of the particular social and cultural situations characterising China’s unprecedented internal migration. It is essential to note that the formation of placebased meanings is intrinsically embedded in particular social relations and social identities. For example, if we take into account those structural factors contributing to the social construction of the migrant labour force, it should be reasonable to hypothesise that migrants’ barriers to accumulate social capital under less favourable institutional environments and the relatively limited access to social facilities and services all account for their functional reliance on microscopic urban places. On the other hand, the migrants’ construction of the ‘image of the city’ and their ambiguous identification to the city suggest that migrants’ emotional connection with more macroscopic places is closely related to abstract ideological significations, representations and meanings. Their perceptions of the city are assembled through more abstract cultural discourses produced in particular social contexts to legitimise their symbolic socialisation with the city as a culturally coherent and intelligible centre of meanings. In sum, the urban migrants’ negotiations of place meanings constitute a dynamic cultural terrain which speaks to a diverse array of issues related to the social construction of place, geographical scales and identities. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Laurence J C Ma, Werner Breitung and Xiaobo Su for their encouragement and support in the writing of this paper. The research is funded

by National Science Foundation of China (NSFC Grant nos. 41171125, 41201141 and 41130747) and a research grant from the Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (No. 10251063101000007). Notes 1 Guangzhou Bureau of Public Security: http://www.gzjd .gov.cn/pub/index_jsp_catid_81_88_id_76152.html 2 Guangzhou Bureau of Public Security: http://www.gzjd .gov.cn/pub/index_jsp_catid_81_88_id_55273.html 3 Guangzhou Daily, 14 August 2011, http://gzdaily.dayoo .com/html/2011-08/14/content_1445793.htm 4 Names of the latent variables are as follows: cPA = place attachment (culture centre level); cPI = place identity (culture centre level); cPD = place dependence (culture centre level); gPA = place attachment (Guangzhou level); gPI = place identity (Guangzhou Level); gPD = place dependence (Guangzhou level). 5 In the Amos software package, the index of critical ratio (C.R) will determine the significance level of any link we will establish between (latent) variables. If critical ratio cannot support a minimal significance level of 0.05 (when C.R > 1.95), the link then is abandoned.

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