Fractal Borders: Locating the Boundaries of Urban China

Despite common scholarly understandings of rural-urban migrants in Chinese megacities as lacking the various benefits or protections of urban citizenship, the implied boundaries of urban China seem to have vanished from scholarship. Based on long-term participant observation in Shanghai’s migrant construction industry, this paper examines these boundaries as experienced by migrants themselves. As I argue, the city might be better understood from the perspective of migrant construction workers as a fractal urban borderland in which ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ spaces interpenetrate and constitute each other: Although migrants remain excluded from the legal structures of urban citizenship, these exclusions are only tangential to the everyday experiences of bordering and spatial exclusion that are central to migrant experiences. These findings contribute to scholarship that has expanded and deepened understandings of where borders can be found and how they operate, as well as to recent debates on how to interpret the boundaries and periphery of Chinese cities, arguing for an understanding of fractal border structures that limit mobility and divide spatial access even far from territorial boundaries.