‘Living by packaging’: housing pathways of African migrant entrepreneurs in Guangzhou

Abstract

With China’s entrance into the World Trade Organisation, an increasing number and diversity of international migrants have moved into Chinese cities, including entrepreneurs. Efforts to manage this migration influx are fraught with ambiguities. Business is welcomed but national visa requirements are very strict and local surveillance is abundant. For African migrants in particular, everyday discrimination adds to their exclusion from larger parts of the city and to insecure housing. This article analyses housing pathways of African entrepreneurs to identify ways in which they find access to housing over time and space in an institutional and geographical context that is highly constrained by formal rules and (informal) practices of urban gatekeepers. Drawing on extensive observations and in-depth interviews detailing housing biographies, the results show migrants’ agency through coping strategies. They also reveal how transiency in housing arises from social practice, from the interaction between migrants’ needs and landlords’ interests in particular. The paper adds to existing housing pathways studies by identifying how these strategies and interactions are embedded in structural conditions that limit housing mobility patterns by confining access to limited residential locations.