It’s the hard knock life in forgotten ‘villages’

A slum neighborhood on Zhongyi Road in Minhang District. Many such "villages" have become havens for crime. — Ma Yue

For Jin Fengying and her husband, home is a 10-square-meter room where two bunk beds and a wooden table vie with them for space.

The couple are residents of one of Shanghai's slum neighborhoods, carefully screened from adjacent boulevards and modern high rises by concrete walls. Their neighborhood is called a "village" within the city, but it's hardly the idyllic place the name suggests.

The narrow lanes lined with back-alley hovels are marked by peeling gray walls, detritus, tangles of overhead electricity wires, washing flapping from clotheslines and the fetid smell of squalor. It's not a site commonly associated with modern, gleaming Shanghai.

This blight is Shanghai's urban headache. According to a report by the Shanghai Comprehensive Management Committee published last year, the city has about 104 such "villages" in districts that include Minhang, Yangpu, Baoshan, Putuo, Xuhui and Pudong.

Many of them are former rural communities that were gobbled up in rapid urbanization and then forgotten. Old farmhouses were subdivided into tiny rooms with low rents, and became magnets for poor migrants and criminals.

Jin's neighborhood, along Zhongyi Road in Minhang, was called Youyi Village in its rural past, but the three blocks of farmhouses that once stood here have been converted into tiny hovels.

Jin is not one to complain. Cramped conditions in her home have eased since her two children left home to look for jobs outside Shanghai.

"My room is luxurious compared to other homes in the neighborhood," she said.

The couple pays 530 yuan (US$85) a month in rent. Their landlord wants to raise that to 1,000 yuan.

A native of Anhui Province, Jin, 44, earns 1,620 yuan a month working in a private company. Her husband is in the transport business, earning hardly much more. They simply can't afford anywhere nicer to live.

Her landlord, she said, carved up two two-story houses into 30 small units with a hodgepodge of concrete walls and wooden boards. Most of the tenants, who largely come from poor inland regions of China, work in factories or on construction sites.