城市新区作为“家”的表征与实践——以鄂尔多斯康巴什新区为例

本文基于表征与非表征的研究视角,分析了以鄂尔多斯康巴什为代表的中国城市新区作为“家”的表征与实践过程。研究发现：针对康巴什新区,外部媒介与地方政府以表征手段建构了截然不同的“家”的意象。其中,BBC、Times等外媒将康巴什新区描绘成充满荒凉景观的“鬼城”和不健康的中国城市居住空间,而在地方政府的重构中,康巴什新区则充满了生态栖居必备的城市景观并成为了先进的城市文化空间。而作为“家”中的居住者,康巴什居民“家”的营建经历了从陌生到认同的渐进过程,这一过程包含了日常生活实践中的空间转换与情感边界的构建。不同行动者共同塑造了康巴什新区多元的、充满矛盾意义的“家”的空间身份。本文旨在丰富中国快速城市化背景下“家”的地理学研究视角与类型,回应“鬼城”话语对地方政府主导的城市化“无家”的质疑,亦是城市新区社会文化研究的有益拓展与补充。

The representation and practice of new urban district-as-home in China: A case study of Kangbashi New Town,Ordos

Recent cultural geographical research on the home reflects engagements not only with the material form of residential space but also the embodied, emotional and performative nature of home in different geographical scales. This article takes Kangbashi, a typical new town in Ordos, as a case area to analyze the contradictory representation and construction of "new town" and the ways in which different social actors construct, practice, and negotiate with the new town's subjective identity as home. The result indicates that: On the one hand, the discourse of popular media outside the Kangbashi New Town, BBC and Times in particular, describes it as a "Ghost City", a weird and unhealthy home space with largely the quality of desolated and abandoned landscape. In contrast, the local government endeavors to re-shape the image of Kangbashi New Town as a vigorous and livable space of the city that is filled with ecological and cultural landscape. On the other hand, residents living in Kangbashi New Town tend to negotiate the meanings of home through their own everyday practices beyond the social representation and authorized discourses. First, daily life mobility enables residents to overcome the spatial constraints of the new town, permits them to break out the social isolation and integrate into the broad urban society. Second, local residents' identity of city-as-home is gradually fostered through re-mapping of the emotional boundary of their living place. In this sense, local residents are not passive recipients of the representation imposed by either the government or the media. We argue that home making is a dynamic negotiation process instead of a fixed and dominant one, which opens a diversified and contradictory image for continuous negotiation by different social actors in everyday life. We hope our findings can provide some insights for further studies on critical geographies of home, and provides some useful ideas on the development of new town research in China.