Remaking Urban Life in Chongqing's Public Rental Housing: A Family-Based Account

Remaking Urban Life in Chongqing’s Public Rental Housing follows migrant families through an ordinary day—out the door for work and school, back after dark through night markets and shared courtyards—to show how a large state-led public rental housing (PRH) program becomes a lived urban form. Drawing on ethnography, 120 interviews, and sustained site observations across multiple estates, the book links predictable rent and indefinite tenure to the practical work of composing routines, and then shows how transport reliability, school access, and the governance of streets and plazas determine whether those routines feel possible, safe, and shared.

Set within Chongqing’s distinctive policy architecture—land-ticket exchanges (dipiao), a more permeable hukou door, and metropolitan PRH build-out—the analysis treats planning documents and management contracts as maps that seek synchrony with household rhythms. Using Henri Lefebvre’s “production of space” as a steady guide, it traces how conceived policy space and spatial practice sediment into the lived city: queue lines at bus loops, after-school relays at gates, micro-commerce along edges, and neighbourly care in stairwells and lift lobbies. The book closes with actionable design and governance tools that help agencies keep the housing platform, tighten the links, and design for the day.

Who should read this book? Urban planners and designers; housing and transport policymakers; sociologists and geographers of migration; property and facilities managers working on social-rental estates; graduate students in urban studies and China studies.

Key features include:

• Ground-level evidence connecting policy instruments to everyday mobility, schooling, and shared-space use
• Practical templates for governance and retrofit—service standards, micro-budgets, and a “kit-of-parts” for day-to-day operations.
• A clear theoretical through-line using Lefebvre’s production of space to interpret migrant integration and urban sustainability.