‘There’s no place like no home’: Progressive displacement and silent unmaking of homeless spaces in urban China

Abstract

Despite mounting concerns about homelessness in the Global South, scholarship remains disproportionately focused on advanced economies. This article introduces the concept of ‘progress displacement’ – the systematic erosion of survival spaces through seemingly beneficial urban improvements – to understand how exclusion operates without direct confrontation while possessing exceptional legitimacy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, including extensive observations and interviews with people experiencing homelessness and other stakeholders, we examine how technological modernisation and governance improvement initiatives silently displace people from survival spaces. We analyse four key mechanisms: the transformation of public telephone booths into smart infrastructure, e-payment-driven commercial space reorganisation, waste classification reforms that eliminate informal recycling opportunities and efficient commercial operations that restrict access to previously available spaces. Distinct from (post-)revanchist politics and recent findings on soft policies of exclusion, progressive displacement operates through improvements that appear rational, beneficial and inevitable – making exclusion particularly difficult to identify or resist. These processes exemplify how China’s distinctive state–market nexus produces sophisticated forms of exclusion that embed displacement within urban modernisation itself. The analysis contributes to the literature by demonstrating how technological modernisation and governance improvement function as mechanisms of displacement, offering new theoretical insights for understanding progressive forms of exclusion in rapidly modernising cities.