10 Exploring the Spatial Dynamics of the City

A Case Study in China

Zhongyuan Zhang

Introduction

Lefebvre’s reflections on social space have profoundly changed the ways scholars think about the physical environment of organizations. As researchers start from their own perspectives to engage with Lefebvre’s thinking and develop research agendas for organizational space, new questions also arise that require closer scrutiny. One such question concerns the dynamics of social space. Earlier seminal works (Dale, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2008) recognize organizational space as social materiality; more recently, a body of literature points to the direction that organizational space may be seen as social processes. For instance, Beyes and Steyaert (2012) invite us to view organizational space as undergoing an ongoing process of making and remaking. A number of empirical works use Lefebvre’s triad of conceived, perceived and lived spaces to understand and trace changes in organizations’ spatial formations and their underlying power rationales (Beyes and Michel, 2011; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011; Zhang and Spicer, 2014). So far, however, little is known about how the conceived, perceived and lived elements of Lefebvre’s triad inform, affect and perhaps transform one another during the ongoing processes of spatial production. I think that knowledge of this kind is important as it would allow us to further register organizational space as a social process, which is one of the central ideas laid out in The Production of Space (Lefebvre, 1991). This chapter makes an effort in this direction.

The chapter is based on the assumption that investigations into the dynamics of organizational space can learn from investigations of the dynamics of urban space. My reasoning is that, since Lefebvre’s spatial thinking is closely related to his earlier writings on urban space (Shields, 1999), by reading Lefebvre’s urban writings and applying some of his frameworks to the analysis of empirical urban space, we may gain some lessons of how future research on organizational space, in particular the dynamics of social space, may proceed.

To this end, the chapter first reads The Right to the City (RtC) and borrows from this work the logic frame of exchange-value/use-value. The chapter then uses the logic frame to analyse the urban space of Hangzhou, a Chinese city. It presents an autoethnographic case study that looks deeply into some examples of everyday lives in Hangzhou: redesigning roads, using the sidewalk and practising square-dancing. In doing so, the study reveals the city’s space as an ongoing dynamic process that is played out among the interactions of the conceived, perceived and lived moments of space as these moments inform, affect and transform one another. Based on these findings, in the concluding part the chapter raises some suggestions concerning future research on the dynamics of social space in the organizational setting. The chapter makes a two-fold contribution to organizational studies. It contributes a case study that invites researchers to think of organizational space as social processes, and some advice on how this might be done in future research.

The Right to the City and Organization Studies

In RtC, Lefebvre used a powerful set of Marxist concepts—exchange-value and use-value—to read urban reality. The city is related to exchange-value (city-as-product) in that it can be traded and consumed just like any other product in the market. The city is also related to use-value (city-as-oeuvre) in that people can use it in non-economic ways such as meeting others and visiting places. The city is at once a ‘beautiful’ work of art and a not-so-beautiful piece of commodity (Lefebvre, 1996: 67).

In the West, the exchange and use values of the city were balanced out against each other until the arrival of industrialization. Since then, ‘exchange value is so dominant over use and use value that it more or less suppresses it’ (ibid.: 73). For instance, in Paris, public gardens were increasingly replaced by shops and private estates, and slums were demolished to make room for shopping boulevards. The poor who, up till then, used the city non-economically were banished from the city centre; their return to the city was justified on economic grounds (e.g. paid tours and shopping). The rich who owned and traded estates in central Paris hardly ever used the city as oeuvre, for they lived in country villas. The city of Paris became predominantly exchange-value.

Lefebvre found this situation highly problematic. ‘Urban consciousness will vanish … consciousness of the city and of urban reality is dulled for one or the other, as to disappear’ (ibid.: 77, 80, italics in original). When the city is informed only by economic thinking, which is typical of ‘the ruling class or fractions of ruling class’ (ibid.: 74) such as technicians, city planners, and key decision-makers, our consciousness of the city is rooted in a network of signifiers that refer to one another, disconnected from the vital—and, in the sense of the signified, also real—insights that the city-as-oeuvre can offer. The result is that our once ‘warm’ sense of the city as the founding base of humanity’s meaningful social existence is gone: ‘the urban remains in a state of dispersed and alienated actuality’ (Lefebvre, 1996: 148, italics in original).

The restoring of the city-as-oeuvre is thus at the centre of urban revival. For Lefebvre, this task cannot be achieved without the participation of the working class: ‘a new humanism’ connected to the best heritage of pre-industrial rural traditions (i.e. of festivity and boundless creativity). Hence Lefebvre’s famous pledge ‘the right to the city’—the right for the working class to participate in everyday urban activities, not simply as tourists or shop-goers, but in ‘a transformed and renewed right to urban life’ (ibid.: 158, italics in original). Our urban consciousness would be rescued from its alienated actuality once the city-as-product and the city-as-oeuvre start to interact, to talk to and inform each other, and the closed (and in a way empty) thinking of the ‘ruling elites’ torn open by myriad alternatives that the working class may offer.

Lefebvre’s urban thinking—that through everyday practices, the spontaneity of the ruled class would call into question the symbolic fabrication of the ruling class, and in so doing set a spatial system of alienation into one of open and recurring evolution—would reappear, in the form of the conceived/perceived/lived spatial triad, in his magnum opus The Production of Space. This book, which since the publication of its English translation in 1991, has inspired a growing body of literature on organizational space (Clegg and Kornberger, 2006; Kornberger and Clegg, 2004; Beyes and Michels, 2011; Beyes and Steyaert, 2012; Dale, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2008; Ford and Harding, 2004; Hernes, 2004; Spicer, 2006; Taylor and Spicer, 2007; Wapshott and Mallett, 2012; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011; Watkins, 2005; Zhang, Spicer, and Hancock, 2008; Zhang and Spicer, 2014). These writers follow Lefebvre in viewing the physical space of organizations as a phenomenon of power, though they focus on different aspects of Lefebvre’ spatial thinking. Some dig into power rationales that are materialized in and hidden under organizational spatial forms (Dale, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2008), others build up connections between the logics of space and those of organizing (Clegg and Kornberger, 2006; Kornberger and Clegg, 2004), while still others try to unravel the dynamic processes of the production of social space in organizations (Beyes and Michels, 2011; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011; Zhang and Spicer, 2014).

This last body of work turns to Lefebvre’s spatial triad to understand the becoming of organizational space. It shows that organizational space shapes and reshapes as it is informed by representations of space (the conceived space), representational space (the lived space) and spatial practices (the perceived space). What is less clear, however, is how the elements of the triad affect and perhaps transform one another in the process. I think that it is important to address this challenge if we are to understand social space as intrinsically processual and dynamic, as Beyes and Steyaert (2012) point out, and to locate social space firmly in its own history, as Lefebvre (1991) insisted.

Reading Lefebvre’s urban writings makes me think that perhaps we could learn something about the dynamics of organizational space by observing the dynamics of urban space. To this end, below, the chapter presents a case study that investigates the spatial dynamics of Hangzhou, a big second-tier city of China situated in the nation’s economically developed coastal regions. The author of the chapter is very familiar with the city as this is where he was born and raised, and where he has been living and working for the last seven years.

The case study starts with an introduction of the urbanization project of China, citing Hangzhou as an example. This part of the study relies on archival documents collected from newspapers, the internet and government websites. The study then reads into Hangzhou’s urban space in more details, focusing on some particularly telling examples of everyday city lives and using autoethnography as the main research method. This method is chosen for two reasons. First, since unearthing spatial dynamics inevitably involves engaging space in its history of changes, close observations of the mundane aspects of spatial practices, and intimate encounters of lived experiences, autoethnography seems a good choice (Boyle and Parry, 2007). Secondly, although risking triangulated validity, autoethnography generates crystal imageries from the vantage point of the researcher’s own political situatedness (Jones, 2005). This is suited to the study since the researcher—being unable to drive and having commuted by walking and biking for years—can look at the use-value/exchange-value rationale through the unusual angle of a non-consumer.

The Case of Hangzhou

Urbanization in China

Urbanization occupies a very important position in the Chinese government’s development strategy. Specifically, the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan 2016–2020 reads that ‘the key of the urbanization project is to accelerate the transformation of rural citizens into urban citizens’ (State Council Report, 5 March 2016, www.gov.cn).¹ To this end, a particularly noticeable change in China’s urban space is the fast expansion of major cities’ geographic boundaries. Take my hometown, Hangzhou, as an example. For a very long time, the city consisted of just six administrative districts (designated as districts 1 to 6 in Figure 10.1 below). Among these six, only districts 2 (the Lower District) and 3 (the Upper District) were quintessential urban areas in the traditional sense. Districts 1, 4, 5 and 6 remained relatively underdeveloped until around 2000. For instance, the Lake District (district 5) consisted largely of tea farms and fishing villages that were isolated from one another by the Westlake—a UNESCO heritage site—and its surrounding hills. Until quite recently, ‘city-folks’ of Hangzhou typically considered it beneath them to marry ‘tea-leaf pickers and fishermen’ from the Lake District who were under-privileged rural citizens. However, with the expansion of urban boundaries, things have taken a dramatic turn. Today, Lake District residents find themselves not only proper urban Hangzhounese, but also the wealthiest of all urban Hangzhounese, almost overnight, for as peripheral fishing villages became the centre of Hangzhou’s urban landscape their market values skyrocketed.² In 2001, districts 7 and 8 (previously rural townships) were added to Hangzhou’s geographic map. This is followed by district 9 in 2014, and district 10, very recently, on 12 August 2017. In just ten years from 2006 to 2015, the registered urban population of Hangzhou rose from 6.6 million to over 9 million.

Figure 10.1 The ten districts of Hangzhou.

With courtesy of Metropolitan Express 12 August 2017.

The ‘transformation of rural citizens to urban citizens’ draws from another important source: immigrant workers. Two issues, it seems, weigh heavily on the minds of policy makers in terms of urbanization. The first is regulated mass production. An article at the official website of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference reads, ‘big cities are effective in pooling together resources, taking advantages of economics of scale, reducing emission waste, and positively impacting on surrounding rural regions’ (2005, http://cppcc.people.com.cn/). Making effective use of resources is key to industrialization, and the crucial resource that adds value to raw materials is the human resource. Urbanization creates jobs that are attractive to the rural populations. In 2015, immigrant workers contributed another 2.23 million to Hangzhou’s registered urban population. These immigrant workers are referred to as ‘new Hangzhounese’, a kindly gesture from the local media to give immigrants a new welcoming urban identity. Many new Hangzhounese work on jobs that a rapid urbanization process gives rise to: infrastructure constructor, real-estate salesperson, automobile servicer, taxi drivers and logistic workers. The last of these is perhaps most revealing of China’s urbanization: the need for consumer items to be delivered at the doorstep increases as the city grows bigger and less convenient. In 2016, the top five logistic firms in China employed some 820,000 people, most of whom are immigrant workers, to work as warehouse keepers, deliverers and customer managers, and the industry is growing at an annual rate of 40% (Chinese Industrial Information, 14 December 2016, www.chyxx.com). A local Hangzhou newspaper cited a food deliverer: ‘It is a hard job, but I love it!’ (Metropolitan Express, 16 August 2017) This deliverer makes 8,000 CNY a month after tax; this is over four times the average income of his place of origin and well above the salary of an average Hangzhou citizen (about 5,400 CNY in 2017). By attracting the rural population to work in cities, urbanization has control over a labour force that is crucial to ‘the economies of scale’.

The second issue that I think policy makers of urbanization have in mind is regulated mass consumption. According to the Twelfth Five-Year Plan 2011–2016, ‘expanding the domestic basis for consumption’ is the second most important strategy of twelve strategies all together (State Council Report, 29 October 2010, www.gov.cn). Such an expansion is achieved, partly, through giving immigrant workers not only well-paid city jobs that make consumption possible, but also a new city life that makes consumption necessary. In recent years, the local governments of major Chinese cities are increasingly lowering the criteria for the application for urban citizenship. The once pronounced differentiation between rural and urban citizenships is quickly diminishing.³ In Hangzhou, for instance, the basic criterion is ‘a labour contract that lasts more than two years, a legal residence (purchased or rented), and a record of social security payment of the last six months’ (Hangzhou Immigration Household Policy 2017, www.hzpolice.gov.cn)—hardly a demanding one for anyone who seriously considers life and work in the city. The urban citizenship, however, marks only the initial step for immigrant workers to access the city’s superior medical, educational and financial services. For instance, all public schools (which have better teaching quality) in Hangzhou require that enrolled students have a registered private residence, which is only possible with a purchased (not rented) apartment in the city. It is not a mere coincidence that Hangzhou’s urban expansion is at the same time a process whereby the city’s real estate price skyrocketed: the average market price of 2017 (30,000 CNY per square metre) is twenty to thirty times of that of 2000 (1,000~1,500 CNY per square metre)! Clearly, the urbanization of Hangzhou and of other major cities of China is closely linked to the promotion of mass consumption.

The capitalist market economy gains sustainable growth only when there is a correspondence between ‘both the conditions of production and the conditions of [consumption]’ (Harvey, 1990: 121). Such a correspondence is not easily achieved, for it involves the orchestrated efforts of all major players of the capitalist labour process—the state, big industries and labour representatives—and over an extended period of time. Harvey (1990) notices that, in the West, it took the Fordist regime of accumulation (mass production plus mass consumption) some fifty years to mature, before the regime was gradually overtaken by a more flexible post-Fordist regime of accumulation (e.g. innovative production plus quick-changing consumption) in around the mid 1970s. The Chinese case is arguably singular. For a long time the planned economy dominated, and the capitalist economy was introduced, initially only as a supplement to the planned economy, in the late 1970s. Since then, however, capitalization has been picking up speed and momentum in China, especially after 2000.⁴ The global trend of flexible accumulation has clear impact on China: ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘innovation’ were highlighted as new orientations of development in 2015 and had since become buzzwords in government reports. If, in the West, regimes of accumulation (Fordist and flexible) have experienced something of a transition from one to the other, the two are likely to be coexistent in China today. Viewed in this way, I think that China’s urbanization project is part and parcel of the formational process of the Fordist regime of accumulation in the country.

Consumers-Come-First

The laying out of the urban landscape epitomizes urban planners’ customary thinking and value assumptions. Two examples below illustrate that the overall layout of Hangzhou’s urban space aims to promote mass consumption.

Following Soja (2000), I first turn my eyes to the layout of Hangzhou’s metro routes. Metro construction in Hangzhou was proposed as early as 1986 but was considered unfeasible due to Hangzhou’s weak geological structure. Technological advances in recent years, coupled with the fast expansion of the city and its population, makes metro construction a top priority on the government’s agenda. Thus, metro one (M1) started construction in 2006, M2 in 2014, M4 and M5 in 2017, and another ten metro lines (M3, M6~M14) are currently at the planning stage. The route of M1 (Figure 10.2) tells an interesting story. It starts at the northeastern part of Hangzhou (district 4), which, as of 2006, was a vast underdeveloped suburban area where huge residential projects were being planned (as they stand now), goes west until it reaches the old-town shopping centre, and then heads south, quickly leaves the central city, and finishes at a newly developed scenic attraction in district 8 (this district became a part of Hangzhou in 2001). The first metro of Hangzhou thus connects real estate projects with the shopping centre and a tourist attraction; it does not connect where most people were living and where they were working. Urban planners readily ‘rewarded’ citizens who purchased new apartments, shopped regularly, and spent money touring.

Figure 10.2 Metro #1 (the red line).

With courtesy of www.image.baidu.com

Here is another example. In Hangzhou, road congestion became so serious recently that the government implemented, in 2014, a ‘rush-hour’ policy. During the morning and evening rush hours of certain workdays, some private vehicles are not allowed into central urban areas. For instance, cars licenses that end with 1 and 9 are denied accesses on Monday, those with 2 and 8 on Tuesday, and so on. This policy is a blow to salary-earners who travel significant distances between work and home relying on just one vehicle. The government, however, does not put a limit on the number of vehicles that a person, or a family, can possess.⁵ In fact, if you are unlucky enough to own two cars that are banned on the same day, you are allowed to change the license number of one of them. Clearly, although the policy hits everyone, those who cannot afford a second car suffer the most. Connecting the rush-hour policy to Hangzhou’s metro routes, it is not hard to see that the underlying logic of the city’s urban planning is that people who have strong consuming powers are given preferential spatial treatment.

This logic—I call it ‘consumers-come-first’—fits well with the Fordist regime of accumulation. A regime of accumulation is backed up and supported by its correspondent mode of regulation: a ‘body of interiorised rules and social processes’ (Harvey, 1990: 122). What Hangzhou’s urban planners said, intentionally or not, through the laying out of urban space, is a normative message that would soon be picked by, made use of, and internalized, consciously or not, by millions of people who come to dwell in the city day in and day out. This message invites citizens to think of mass consumption (more cars, apartments, shopping and touring) as desirable and indeed normal aspects of everyday lives, in much the same way as images of driving (Ford) cars and drinking Coca Cola portrayed normal ways of consumption for Americans in the 1960s. ‘Consumers-come-first’ belongs to the mode of regulation that corresponds to China’s urbanization project of Fordist accumulation.

Having introduced the general background of China’s urbanization, and the more specific background of Hangzhou’s urban planning, I will now look into three moments of Hangzhou’s urban lives that correspond roughly with Lefevre’s spatial triad: how urban planners redesigned roads (the conceived space), how working-class shop owners gave new meanings to space (the lived space), and how spatial practices such as square-dancing were regulated and absorbed into the city’s economic lives (the perceived space). I will use Lefebvre’s exchange-value/use-value logic to investigate the interrelations of these three moments.

Redesigning Roads

The road is commonly designed to consist of several parts, each of which is reserved for the use of an identifiable group of people and usually with visible boundaries in between them: the automobile lane, the bike lane and the sidewalk. Using Lefebvre’s framework, we may classify road parts as related to either use-value or exchange-value, depending on cultural contexts. In many European countries, for example, the bike lane can be considered as primarily of use-value because biking is a leisure activity in those countries. Similarly, in the UK, A/B-level roads usually do not have sidewalks, because walking from one town to another is considered economically unlikely, and inappropriate as a leisure pursuit. In China, bikes (electric scooters are classified as bikes in China) have been used mainly as a means of transport inside the city. In China, also, walking on the city sidewalk is a traditional leisure activity. The Chinese saying ‘going for a walk’ connotes ‘going for a date’: young men and women often start their relationships by window-shopping together. Thus, in major Chinese cities, the automobile lane and the bike lane are primarily of exchange-value, while the sidewalk, of use-value. In Hangzhou, the use-value of the sidewalk constantly gives way to the exchange-value of automobile space. I will illustrate with two examples.

In many parts of the city, metro construction is taking place on a large scale. Construction sites take up much of the road space, making the already congested traffic even worse. The government responds by re-designing traffic lanes. A common practice is to narrow the bike lane significantly, and to get rid of sidewalks altogether, as a temporary solution to road congestion (Figure 10.3). Changes such as these happen overnight, and they are unpleasant for everyone. Drivers zigzag along newly routed mazes, barely able to follow freshly painted road signs. Bikers—many of them are deliverers who ride dangerously fast in order to make more money—race against each other in close combat formations, using their horns aggressively. For pedestrians it is a nightmare, for they suddenly find themselves totally and literally ‘out of place’. They now tread on an undefined territory, unprotected by the kind of fences or uplifted pavements that the sidewalk once had.

Figure 10.3 The redesigned road.

Picture by author.

Another example concerns parking. Urban planners clearly did not anticipate the dramatic increase in private cars. According to official year-book statistics (www.hangzhou.gov.cn), there were 233,000 private vehicles in Hangzhou in 2003; this number jumped to 1,849,100 in 2015. Interestingly, statistics of private vehicles before 2003 are not available, presumably because the consumption of automobiles was a relatively insignificant economic activity then. Residential apartments built around 2003 were typically six to seven storeys high with the ground-floor space reserved for garages: it was assumed that one in every six/seven families in Hangzhou owns a car. The situation today, however, is that almost every family that could afford an apartment owns at least one car. There is thus a huge gap between the number of private cars, on the one hand, and available parking space, on the other. To address this gap, the government—and this should not strike us as surprising by now—appropriates the space that previously belonged to bikers and pedestrians. One common practice is to carefully squeeze in a new ‘parking lane’ between the bike lane and the sidewalk. A more crude practice simply seizes the sidewalk for car parking (Figure 10.4). Local authorities white-paint square boxes on the sidewalk and charge car owners for parking inside these boxes (those parking outside the boxes receive tickets from traffic wardens). The power of the state plays a direct role in instituting spatial changes.

Figure 10.4 Using the sidewalk as car parks.

Picture by author.

‘Innovation dedicated to the removal of spatial barriers in [production, circulation and consumption] have been of immense significance in the history of capitalism’ (Harvey, 1990: 232). What is significant and perhaps unique in the disappearance of the sidewalk (temporary or permanent) in Hangzhou is the removal of pedestrians’ territorial rights. In most Western countries, road reconstruction narrows the sidewalk, but it does not eliminate it, and pedestrians retain their exclusive use of space. This exclusiveness is gone (in the case of road re-routing) or at least made highly ambiguous (in the case of parking) in Hangzhou. In other words, pedestrians’ space (i.e. use-value) is made relative and drivers’ space (i.e. exchange-value), absolute. What is quite alarming is not whether people have enough sidewalks in Hangzhou (they generally do), but the rationale that pedestrians’ right to walk depends on drivers’ right to drive and park. This rationale, of course, is nothing but a footnote to the ‘consumers-come-first’ logic that I outlined earlier. In the conceived moment of Hangzhou’s urban space, use-value is subjugated by exchange-value.

Alternative Uses of the Sidewalk

A typical feature of many of Hangzhou’s side streets is that they have residential parks on both sides of the road. Here, a scene that immediately grabs the attention of the observer is that, on occasions, the sidewalk is used in ways other than being walked on.

Apartment buildings with one side facing the road usually have their ground-floor space converted to shops that conduct a number of small business: groceries, restaurants, retailers of various kinds, pet clinics, automobile maintenance, mahjong houses, laundries, and so on. These shops are, on most occasions, run by ‘new Hangzhounese’. Making a living in Hangzhou is not easy for them. Some shop owners may have worked and lived in their shops (one sees a part of shop interiors converted to sleeping quarters) to save apartment rents, but even if they don’t, their businesses operate for such long hours (from 9 am to 10 pm, or even later) that the shop becomes the de facto place for both working and living activities. In my observations I saw people using the sidewalk—that stretch of space that their shops open onto and which they have conveniently appropriated—for different purposes. For instance, they dry their laundry on the sidewalk, cook and sometimes have meals there; on several occasions I even observed people washing their face and brushing their teeth, and one grocery owner installed a large television outside his shop, so that his family and his colleagues in adjacent shops could sit around a hot-pot stew (also placed on the sidewalk, but hidden discreetly in the grocery when not in use) and watch television together on summer evenings. Little children of shop owners also play on the sidewalk all the time. The shop and its surroundings are, literally, home to our Mr. and Mrs. New Hangzhounese.

It is almost impossible for people to take evening walks on sidewalks such as these. There is no place to set down steps; besides, it is awkward to walk into somebody’s ‘backyards’. So, would I go to local authorities to complain about the loss of my right as a pedestrian? Perhaps not. The economy behind these apparent ‘misuses’ of the sidewalk is more complicated than it appears. To begin with, if you observe the shops carefully, you would see that they were not initially designed for commercial activities. They were actually part of the buildings’ ground-floor garage space—cubical space with no designed-in window or ventilation. If you ask shop owners about taxes and rents (I asked one or two shop owners with whom I had made acquaintance), you would see that they pay business tax to the government, and rents to the relevant residential committee. Each residential park is maintained by a residential committee (a kind of estate maintenance firm) that provides nearly free services to residents (cleaning, security, gardening, and so on). Every household of the residential park pays a small household fee to support the committee’s functioning, but the major part of the committee’s income comes from rents generated from the park’s collectively owned space (e.g. parking space). Converting some garage space to shops and renting them to shop owners contributes a substantial revenue. Residential committees that make a good business out of renting can charge a relatively low household fee to residents.

A residential committee represents the major and hence collective voice of the residents. There are high-end residential parks in Hangzhou where most residents prefer paying large sums of household fees over renting out garage space. These residents have thus ‘bought’ surrounding sidewalks for their leisurely walks. I have no reason to complain because by purchasing my cheap apartment I have acknowledged myself as a lower-end consumer and hence, according to the consumers-come-first logic, not entitled to preferential spatial treatment (i.e. my evening walks). On the other hand, shop owners have amply demonstrated their consuming power. Through their hard labour, they are paying substantial fees for pieces of space which otherwise could be used only as garages. Thus, shop owners are rightfully entitled to preferential spatial treatments (i.e. using the sidewalk for various living activities).

The logic that justifies local authorities’ appropriation of the sidewalk also justifies shop owners’ unconventional uses of the sidewalk. This, I suspect, explains why the government is reluctant to check on shop owners’ conduct (Figure 10.5). My suspicion was partly confirmed when I visited my regional city council one day and asked an officer in-charge whether the government has any regulation over shop owners’ ‘misuses’ of the sidewalk. The officer explained that only under two conditions was the council allowed to take regulatory actions: when unlicensed peddlers use the sidewalk as their business sites, and when shop owners’ actions endanger public safety (e.g. fire hazards). Otherwise, the officer said, all the council could do was to ‘persuade’ shop owners to behave more properly. A Lefebrian interpretation might suggest that since peddlers do not pay tax or rent, they demonstrate no consuming power. Likewise, public safety hazards decrease the potential consuming powers of many others and this, by a large margin, outweighs shop owners’ economic contributions. Either way, the consumers-come-first logic provides a viable explanation.

Figure 10.5 Alternative uses of the sidewalk.

Picture by author.

As I watched these people during my evening walks, I saw only ordinary human beings trying to cope with their everyday lives. They had to keep one eye on their children while dealing with customers, watch out for the boiling kettle while unloading new deliveries, and they certainly like to lie down a bit on a bamboo sleeper (the grocery owner sometimes did this) outside their stuffy garage space when the evening was still young, thinking that it was perhaps too early to close for the day. I suspect that there is no elaborated intention to get back at urban planners, or cold calculations to squeeze planners’ pressure points. People have simply chanced upon new ways of using the sidewalk that the planner could not say no to.

The self-positing of human beings is an ontological fact of everyday lives and the source of the latter’s endless creativity (Lefebvre, 2008). Shop owners’ practical engagements with the sidewalk—the ‘making do’ of space and life out of phenomenological necessity (de Certeau, 1988)—generate practical meanings of space with which shop owners make sense of what they do and make plans for what they are about to do; they become nodes in the Weberian web of meanings that shop owners spin for themselves. ‘The idea that there is some “universal” language of space, a semiotics of space independent of practical activities and historically situated actors, has to be rejected’ (Harvey, 1990: 216). In this sense, shop owners’ alternative uses of the sidewalk (and local councils’ silence on these acts) do more than just bringing actors extra utilities (or the government extra revenues), for they effectively redefine the sidewalk. Importantly, these action-generated definitions of space do not remain only individually relevant, for they are symbolic devices with which people gesture towards one another in the concerted efforts of conducting and concluding collective social acts (Blumer, 1969). The fact that neighbouring shop owners could dine, chat and watch television together, naturally and easily, on the sidewalk, suggests that alternative meaning frames of the sidewalk were already widely shared by the local communities of shop owners. In turn, these meaning frames would inform and sanction yet more spatial practices of similar nature. If people can cook on the sidewalk, perhaps they can also organize a dancing party on it? Before moving on, let me summarize this part by saying that in the lived moment of Hangzhou’s urban space, alternative use-values of space are created.

Square-dancing

Square-dancing is popular in China: popular in terms of its large number of participants but also widely incurred social critiques. The practice takes place more often on street-corner sidewalks than public squares—indeed, the public square is something of a rarity in Hangzhou. Early in the morning or late in the evening, when the weather is fine, people come out in groups and dance in unsophisticated, orchestrated motions to some rhythmic, slow-disco type of music. Dancers are often organized. Organizers provide equipment (e.g. music players, amplifiers, sometimes costumes), and being better dancers they also set the pace and lead the dance.

Participants consist mainly of elderly citizens, usually females. Square-dancing is a suitable form of physical exercise, but its primary function is social. Living in a big, fast-expanding city can be an alienating experience, particularly so for senior citizens who have newly immigrated to Hangzhou, where their children have recently found jobs, purchased apartments, and got married.⁶ For these senior citizens, who initiate most dancing groups, doing the dance is almost like a social ritual. Dancing together melts down social barriers, offers useful information channels on child rearing, grocery prices, and matchmaking, and provides a welcome relief from daily household chores. Square-dancing is very popular in Hangzhou; there are dancing groups in almost every residential park, and many local citizens join them, too.

Square-dancing is a recent event. When it first appeared in major Chinese cities around 2005 (a time that coincides with the acceleration of China’s urbanization), it was looked on with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. The official media (e.g. China Central Television) welcomed it, describing it as an element of the Chinese culture (it was reported that one professional dancing group gave a performance on Moscow’s Red Square), as a style of a vigorous life (square-dancers prefer songs such as ‘Hot Mothers’), and as a sign of urban diversity and inclusiveness. But public attitude soon turned when the practice of square-dancing proliferated in cities. Square-dancing is often noisy (dancers use powerful amplifiers), its music verges on the distasteful, and it invaded public space in such a non-negotiable manner that other less collective forms of leisure activities felt threatened.⁷ Angry bickering broke out between some dancing groups and nearby residents, and for some time around 2014 and 2015, the local media was full of such conflict stories. For instance, it was reported that some residents took revenge against square-dancers by dumping garbage from higher grounds, or using even louder amplifiers to drown out dancers’ music. Others littered the ground with broken glass and lubricant oil so that dancers could not set foot on it. The term ‘square-dancing’ was on China Central Television’s list of ‘ten hottest issues of 2015’. This alone speaks of the heat of the contentions.

When square-dancing was in its early, unobtrusive stage, participants bought their right of space use in much the same way as shop owners occupied the sidewalk. For one thing, by coming to stay with their families in Hangzhou, these senior dancers effectively pushed their children to purchase or rent bigger apartments in the city. But when square-dancing became a public nuisance, the interests of many other consumers were being harmed: local residents were not getting what they paid for. Responses from urban planners could thus be anticipated.

Local governments responded in a number of ways. In Hangzhou, new criteria were proposed to specify appropriate music volume and time slots for dancing practices (People’s Consultative Conference, 30 July 2014, www.hzzx.gov.cn). Regional city councils also set up hotlines to monitor ‘noise abuse’ and to conciliate related disputes. In this way, small groups of square-dancers could still use street corners for the sport but were obliged not to disturb neighbouring residents. Alternatively, the government rented vacant space to be used exclusively for proper (i.e. noisy) square-dancing. For instance, an area was set aside at the city’s spacious railway station, and hundreds of people came to dance every evening (Figure 10.6). A third solution was to set up government-business partnerships: ‘the government makes specifications for real estate developers that a minimum amount of sport-space per household needs be designed into the public space of residential parks’ (Hangzhou Daily, 26 May 2014).

Quite a few MBA students at my university work in the real estate industry, and I rang up some of them to find out how real estate developers responded to the government’s call. It turned out that low-end and high-end developers both responded to the issue of square-dancing, but in different ways. For low-end residential parks, having in place some hidden-away dancing areas in parks and public green spaces is not only a government mandate, but a key to business success. ‘People need a place to do square-dancing’, one MBA student told me, ‘and sometimes we add pavilions and roofed corridors so that they can dance on rainy days’. High-end residential parks, to the contrary, eliminate open-air dancing space. ‘If we brag about having dancing areas in our (high-end) parks we’d never be able to sell any house’, another MBA student said. He added that to his knowledge no high-end parks in Hangzhou ever installed open-air dancing space. If residents want some sport, they go to the park’s club, which is usually a detached building with many functional areas. There people can swim, do body building exercises, and of course, square-dance, without putting other residents to inconvenience. A colleague of mine owns an apartment in a high-end water-front park. In this park, the entire public space is covered in green in order to prevent people from using it for dancing. But residential clubs charge users membership fees. What about elderly people who live in expensive parks but nevertheless hold on to their frugal consuming habits? ‘Well, they usually go to a piece of water-front platform across the river and join the others (who come from nearby parks, low-end or high-end). From that distance they are unlikely to disturb anybody here.’

Figure 10.6 Square-dancing at the railway station.

Picture by author.

The regulation of square-dancing and the absorbing of it into Hangzhou’s urban routines gives rise to a singular effect: people with different consuming powers are given different space to conduct the same leisure activity. High-end park residents dance in clubs, less well-off house buyers dance in open-air dancing areas, dwellers in old apartments dance on street corners, and so on. This differentiation renders square-dancing more or less enjoyable to different consumer groups in terms of both material utility (i.e. privacy, guaranteed use of space, convenience in travelling to and fro, protections against weather conditions, and the need to limit music volume) and the kind of social status that often comes together with modern consumption (Bourdieu, 2010). Thus, people who lived in expensive apartments and wanted to dance for free got pushed out to blend in with a group of nondifferentiated general consumers (‘the others’). Whether people actually use the space that they are given is a matter of personal choice. The important point is that through spatial practices such as square-dancing, urban planning responds to people’s lived needs, not by denying them altogether (as in the case of redesigning roads), or merely tolerating them (as in the case of shop owners), but by assimilating them into the consumers-come-first logic. In the perceived moment of Hangzhou’s urban space, alternative use-values are assimilated by exchange-value.

Discussion and Reflection

Above, I have looked into three examples of urban lives in Hangzhou. With the help of Lefebvre’s exchange-value/use-value logic, I’ve outlined a process of dynamic interactions among the conceived, perceived and lived moments of Hangzhou’s urban space. In the conceived moment of space, the sidewalk lost its territorial independence or simply disappeared in road redesign projects, and use-value was subjugated by exchange-value. In the lived moment of space, shop owners used the sidewalk for everyday living in such a way that their practices were at once consistent with space’s conceived power rationale and generative of alternative use-values of space. In the perceived moment of space, through the practice of square-dancing, its emergence, development and becoming of urban routines, alternative use-values thus generated were maintained but only to the effect that they were assimilated by exchange-value. Thus, the urban space of Hangzhou reveals itself, in the Lefebvrian analysis, as an ongoing dynamic process that is played out among the interactions of the conceived, perceived and lived moments of social space.

Some organizational researchers believe that similar dynamic processes can be said about organizational space (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012; Zhang and Spicer, 2014). The case of Hangzhou invites us to think in this direction. I also think that further insights on organizational space as social processes could be gained from future studies that look deep into the interactions of the elements of Lefebvre’s spatial triad in the organizational setting. Admittedly, studying urban space may be very different from studying organizational space. But since organizations, like cities, are essentially spatial realities (Clegg and Kornberger, 2006; Dale, 2005), and since cities are structured similar to organizations (Anthopoulos and Fitsilis, 2014), there may be lessons that studies on organizational space can learn from the case of Hangzhou. To conclude this chapter, below, I tentatively offer some observations.

My first observation concerns lived space in organizations. Some researchers invite us to see lived space as consisting of marginalized and sometimes embittered voices in organizations that seek to sidestep, disrupt, or even confront the dominant conceived space (Halford, 2004; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011; Zhang et al., 2008). Such a view highlights the subversive aspect of lived space but in doing so unwittingly narrows the scope of the lived space to those of intentional subversions. The case of Hangzhou suggests that lived space can be subversive in non-intentional ways. Experiences of coping with basic biological desires and maximizing utilities may yet give rise to new representational forms of space which, though sporadic and incoherent, grow into poignant critiques of the existing order of spatial conceptions through daily practices. ‘With daily life, lived experience is taken up and raised up to critical thinking. It is no longer disdained, regarded as an insignificant residue’ (Lefebvre, 2008: 10). However, this is not to say that lived space in organizations is always subversive in its effect. Quite the opposite. Social space is incessantly dynamic, and because of this we should always expect that the conceived space is momentarily ‘ready’ for whatever surprises that the lived space might offer. The case of Hangzhou suggests that the conceived space is often quick to assimilate emergent lived appeals, and although the conceived space may be an empty network of abstract signifiers (Lefebvre, 1991), it is a network sophisticated enough to have ‘a time and a place for and everything’ (Harvey, 1990: 214). Dale and Burrell caution us against too romantic a view of lived space. They point out that what look like ‘free choices of spatial practices’ may be nothing but designed-in power effects (2008: 110). I think that their warning needs be taken seriously.

All this boils down to a rather subtle approach to studying lived space in organizations. One needs to observe a wide array of mundane and quotidian lived experiences that may seem little related to what is commonly known as organized work life, to look deep into their underlying tensions, and at the same time reflect whether such tensions are already accommodated by the existing order of things. I think that an approach such as this may yield further insight into the social space of contemporary organizations. Accordingly, companies like Google where the boundaries between work and life activities are wiped out may be ideal sites for study.

My second observation concerns conceived space in organizations. I suggest that we pay special attention to changes in organizations’ spatial designs and treat them as revealing moments of the ongoing processes of power struggle in organizations. For instance, an organization may purposefully construct new office buildings (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011), redecorate architectural facades and office interiors (Strati, 1996), demolish miles of internal walls (Dale and Burrell, 2008), replace the private office with hot-desking (Edenius and Yakhlef, 2007), introduce home-working schemes (Wapshott and Mallett, 2012), and so on. Daily organizational processes are often routine and repetitive, leaving the researcher little clue as to where to start her enquiry into social space. Just like the disappearance of the sidewalk in Hangzhou, changes in organizations’ spatial designs open up space’s functionality and reveal power rationales hidden underneath.

Some scholars view major changes in architectural forms as reflective of transformations in social power paradigms (Forty, 1980; Prior, 1995). This Foucauldian approach informs studies of organizational space in important ways since organizations are necessarily embedded in their larger social contexts. However, in the organizational setting, we should not likewise assume that changes in spatial designs correspond to shifts in power relations. The case of Hangzhou tells us that the conceived space can be remarkably consistent, thanks to its ability to respond to and assimilate lived space. This links back to Lefebvre’s insight that behind the physical metamorphosis of the absolute space the abstract space of capital ‘nevertheless lives on’ (1991: 49), adapting and remaking itself. Indeed, in Berman’s (2010) analysis, the conceived space of capitalist cities achieves its consistency precisely through the constant demises of old physical spatial structures. All this, when translated into organizational studies, asks researchers to keep eyes open for consistent patterns of power relations underlying changes in organizational spatial designs. Organization researchers have argued that marked changes in spatial designs (e.g. the introduction of home-working schemes) often reflect management’s longtime power obsessions (e.g. to colonize the sphere of living) (Fleming and Spicer, 2004). If this is so, a careful investigation into the history of conceived space and of its metamorphosis through spatial dynamics could bring out a sort of genealogy of organizational space that maps out the ups and downs of those power obsessions.

The third observation concerns perceived space in organizations. I understand perceived space as an everyday arena where multiple power relations play off against each other while space, as a whole, achieves its expected functional ‘performance’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 33). The spectrum of perceived space in organizations may cover a very extensive array of spatial forms, making it hard for the researcher to conduct concentrated observations. Learning from the case of Hangzhou, I would suggest that one form of perceived space merits particular attention: the space-in-between (‘between’ in both physical and semantic senses). The sidewalk serves as an example. It is a piece of space between the public and the private, between business and leisure, and between local residents and people who come and go, and it was on the sidewalk that some vivid forms of urban struggles were observed.

This is of course not a new discovery. Clegg and Kornberger see ‘interstitial spaces’—spaces ‘where things, people and knowledge overlap and interact’—as central to organizing space (2006: 154–5). Dale and Burrell point to ‘liminal spaces’—spaces ‘which exist at the margins of the orthodox but abut to other conventional spaces’—as one way to think about radical forms of organizing (2008: 234). Concurring with these writers, I’d like to highlight space-in-between as central to the unfolding of spatial dynamics. In the organizational setting, space-in-between can be found in communal corridors (Hurdley, 2010), ‘transitory dwelling places’ at work (Shortt, 2015), and perhaps in other common areas which are easily accessed by different user groups and of which there are no strictly set prescriptions for spatial uses.

My final observation is a methodological one. Lefebvre’s writings on social space have inspired many organizational scholars; in contrast to this, the amount of empirical work dedicated to the unfolding of the production of social space in organizations looks disproportionately small. Lefebvre’s spatial triad, after all, is a broad heuristic framework; it encapsulates all possible interplays of social space in one single framework but makes no attempt to elaborate these possibilities. In my opinion, such an elaboration is still much needed to further our knowledge of the social space of organizations.

But then there comes a difficulty. Being a broad framework, the triad does not lend itself as readily applicable in empirical organizational settings. If the researcher takes conceived space to mean all that is the ‘representation’ of space, and the lived space all that is ‘representational’, she may end up with data sets that look quite disconnected. There are just too many logical sets that could be subsumed into the category of ‘representation’ as there are into that of ‘representational’, so much so that a focused analysis becomes very difficult. Lefebvre’s writings on urban space provide a clue to address this difficulty. It may be advisable that the researcher uses single sets of logic (derived either from theoretical deduction or initial observations), one at a time, to penetrate (so to speak) the spatial triad when investigating the dynamics of social space. The exchange-value/use-value logic that this chapter relies on is but an example of many other logic sets with which researchers could narrow focus. One example is the linear-time/biological-time logic that Lefebvre discussed in his last work Rhythmanalysis (2004). Lefebvre’s reflections on space are closely related to his writings other than The Production of Space; together, they have yet much to teach us as we approach organizations and organizing as socio-spatial phenomena. It is precisely this notion that guides the effort of this chapter and the case study contained within.