China constructs: Architecture, labor, and value on a Chinese construction site

China Constructs traces the social life of rural migrant construction workers and the value they create on contemporary Chinese building sites. This dissertation focuses on architects and builders as contrasting roles at opposite ends of the process of building. Architectural professionals occupy the socially-esteemed position of named author of design. At the other extreme, physical construction work in China is borne by an anonymous migrant workforce from the countryside. By taking this dual perspective on building, the project asks how architecture and urban economies gain from the contributions of construction labor, while at the same time materially and symbolically excluding workers from sharing in that value. The ethnography is based on twenty-two months of fieldwork research spent living in construction dorms, working at height on a building site, and accompanying migrants on return trips to the countryside. On the other side of the division of architectural labor, the research included multiple interviews with international architects working in China as well as a semester spent teaching at the Graduate Institute of Design at the Xi’an Technology and Architecture University. There is a prevailing tendency to describe China’s development and growth as the result of vast economic pressures or natural urban tendencies. In contrast, by approaching the construction site not simply as an object of research, but as a subject and a position from which to view the full building system, this ethnography places individual human experience and the collective everyday back into accounts of development. The products of building labor circulate in ways that exceed simple commodity exchange. Beyond their material forms, built architecture also represents non-material assets of intellectual property, attributions of authorship, and objects of knowledge. Key issues that arise include questions of national belonging and local identity, conceptions of skill and value, the governing practices of zoned economic production in contemporary China, as well as the implications to architecture theory of making construction labor visible as the necessary social and material mediation of design. The dissertation concludes with suggestions for new directions for an anthropology of architecture and for interdisciplinary collaborations with design practice.