99% Invisible - 478- Art Imitates Art

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

There's a small neighborhood within the SEZ of Shenzhen that is known for mass-producing copies of the most celebrated works of Western art, all painted quickly and by hand. The place is called Dafen Village. There is a very good chance that you've been in the presence of a painting made in Dafen. Perhaps you passed by one at the dentist’s office, or in a conference room of a Marriott in Orlando. You may have even hung one up in your home without even realizing it. To learn more about the origin of Special Economic Zones listen to the previous episode Call of Duty: FreeArt Imitates Art   

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's a phrase from Shenzhen China that goes, Time is money, efficiency is life, and over the last 40 years, the city has wasted no time becoming one of the most productive manufacturing hubs in the world. But along with making 90% of the world's electronics, it's also a place that is known for producing lots of convincing high-end knockoffs. Not just sneakers, but imitation Yeezies.

Not just purses, but counterfeit Gucci clutches. Producer Vivian Leigh. Shenzhen even has a mall that's famous for its faux versions of big designer brands. It's a popular destination for YouTubers to drop by and film ClickBady videos titled China's Fake Shopping Mauser, Shenzhen Fake Market Insanity! What is up? Good morning, we're at now in Shenzhen and we are on the way. Once again, to the fake market here, but first let's get a future. Hey guys, don't forget to smash that subscribe button.

But there's a small neighborhood within Shenzhen that will have you second-guessing the line between fake and authentic. It's known for mass-producing copies of the most celebrated works of Western art. Monéis, mayonnaise, mateises, all painted by hand, all painted quickly, and all painted in one place. It's called Daven Village. I had heard about Daven Village and when I first heard about it I thought, of course, there's a village in China. That was completely uninterested because it

seemed so stereotypical. This is Winni Wong. She's an art historian and author of the book Van Gogh on Demand. China and the Ready Made. I used to take a lot of people through Daffin Village, and one time I was taking a woman from Hong Kong through it. And as we walk through, the first question she asked me was, which of these are the fakes? I thought, well, that's actually a very complex question. We typically think of the craft of oil painting as a slow, meticulous, even romantic process, but the piece is dramatically different in Daofeng.

At its height, 60% of the world's oil paintings were made in this point-four-square-kilometer village by Chinese workers. This type of manufacturing is called trade painting. Trade painting is not necessarily art with the capital A, it doesn't command the same kind of respect because it's made quickly and cheaply in order to sell as generic decor. There's a very good chance that you've been

in the presence of a painting made in Daphne. Perhaps you passed when at the dentist's office or in the conference room of a Marriott in Orlando. You may have even hung one up in your home without even realizing it. Daphne is a place that's been vilified, romanticized, and analyzed since it came into the world's collective consciousness, specifically because of what it manufactures.

If you think about it, it's completely arbitrary. But it's arbitrary in that it's a product of Western culture. That oil painting means something, something different from a ceramic pot or an iPhone, right? We can imagine the mechanical processes involved in mass producing something like a lamp or exercise equipment. But what happens in Daffin feels entirely different, simply because the objects being mass produced are oil paintings. Prior to the 1980s, the city of Shen Zhen was mostly farmland.

And Daffin was just an ordinary rural rural village not really known for anything in particular. Let alone art. I have one photograph of it from probably 1970s and it is yeah just three two three rows of houses one taller we call it Dello and a a lot of fields. That's all. But Dafein's fate was very quickly transformed by a monumental moment in modern Chinese history, the creation of the Shenzhen special economic zone. There's a legend about the founding of Shenzhen. That in 1979, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping drew a circle on the map by the South China Sea and determined that Shenzhen would be the home of China's first special economic zone.

It would be a controlled area where China could open up to the rest of the world and experiment with market capitalism by offering special tax benefits to encourage foreign investment. It was a modern neoliberal fairy tale that was even celebrated in song. This song actually called Story of Spring. It depicts the moment when Shen Zhen sprang forth from anonymity, mythically building a city that rose to the sky

and mountains of gold, as if by magic. But it was not. There are very good historical strategic reasons to place a special economic zone there. If you want to know more about SEC's, as you go back and listen to the previous episode of 99% invisible, the one right before this one, it involves a little airport in Ireland. I can't explain it here. Just listen to it. Okay.

Carry on. As Shenzhen rapidly transformed through the 1980s, businesses started moving there for the cheap real estate, inexpensive migrant labor, and low cost of living. Many of these businesses came from neighboring Hong Kong. Among all the first, enterprising business people to move into Shenzhen were Hong Kong businessmen, of course, because

they were right there. One of those early enterprising businessmen was a former painter named Huang Jiang. According to the plaques in Da Fan, in 1989, Huang Jiang traveled from Hong Kong and rented out a residential building in Da Fan, with intent to manufacture and export oil paintings. Wang Zhang recruited a team of 20 painters and began churning out hand-painted copies of Picasso's Van Gogh's Indivinches. Here he is in an interview explaining how he was able to divide the labor between many different painters.

I told them to paint as if they were on an assembly line, Some painted a sky, some painted the mountains, and others painted trees. When you divide it, the painting to different parts is easier for them to handle, especially for wholesale that really matters because otherwise you cannot finish the painting. This is June Wang, associate professor in the Department of Public Policy at the City University of Hong Kong. Huang Jiang and other entrepreneurial painting bosses focused on copying famous works of Western art, because any artist who had been dead for more than 50 years wasn't protected by Chinese copyright laws. But also, they were aiming to sell their products to businesses all over the world.

Huang Jiang matters at a time in a leisure period because he has the connection to quite a lot of Hong Kong theaters. All around Hong Kong, hotels, financial centers, and airports were being built. And those brand new buildings needed to be decorated with lots of cheap, non-descript art. But really, those connections to Hong Kong were important because that was the gateway to businesses in the West.

Daphne's oil paintings were sold and exported to hotels, realistic developers and retailers like Kmart and Walmart. And painters were churning out wholesale orders just as quickly as the Western businesses were gobbling them up. It's actually pretty common for factory towns in mainland China to develop around a single type of production. There are areas that specialize in manufacturing only buttons, or jeans, or violins. And in this case, DaFen developed around manufacturing oil paintings.

When people came to DaFen in the first phase, it was really truly people with no education, like really people, rural people who had no outlet, but who had some aptitude and maybe their parents or cousin or friends said, hey, you're like painting, why don't you come and try this? If a person was looking for work and had a little bit of artistic ability, Daffin was the place to go. By the late 1990s, Daffin had millions of artworks, and the streets were becoming packed with painters, people stretching canvases, art supplies. Honestly, it's a little bit claustrophobic.

You've never seen so many paintings. This is Philip Tanare, director and CEO of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Streets and streets, you know, stores and stories that go on and go in. And, you know, there's just more than you could ever, thing you could ever see. And you could find all sorts of paintings in Dauphin. The most well-known were the replicas of famous works of Western art, the Mona Lisa, the Birth of Venus, etc. Then there was a smaller market for original

creations by local artists. You know, you had a wide variety of different kinds of production going on. There everything from a hotel decorator who would come in with an order for a few hundred canvases made to certain specs in terms of color and content. You could also commission a painter to copy any image. So if you had a picture of say, oh, I don't know, you're boss singing karaoke at a staff retreat, you could actually email that photo to a painter in Duffen

and they would send that image back to you as an oil painting on canvas. Sorry, what was that? Nothing. It's sort of an earlier moment of e-commerce, but very primitive. But I think that was kind of an interesting way of looking at how images moved and were transformed

and this moment when they're transformed from digital and to physical and what that meant. Winni Wong spent a lot of time in Dafen, and actually a apprentice is a painter in a workshop. She found out that some artists are easier to copy than others. The easiest paintings than the lowest paid were van Gogh paintings.

And van Gogh just can't catch a break. And then I learned that there was a progression. You go from van Gogh painting to impressionism, and then from impressionism eventually to sort of French academic painting. In the hardest and most highly regarded style would be neoclassical paintings. So let's say a David with the coronation of Josephine would be like, what you would paint to show that you're a really good painter.

Repetition, a strong network of workers and efficiency, is how daffin painters were able to fulfill large wholesale orders. Wong says that the average painter could produce one to two paintings a day, but experienced workers could turn out much more. People would challenge themselves. One of my friends, he explained, he's like, I didn't believe it too when I started, but I came to specialize in fruit paintings. This particular friend was really competitive, so kept working at it until he could figure out some shortcuts to reduce a painting down to a few brushstrokes. And he said, finally, he reached the peak of 26 paintings a day,

and he did it by using a specific set of brushes that he would tailor in such a way that he could paint a grape with two stripes and an apple with three stripes. Right, so he developed essentially his own kind of repetitive method, his own specialized tools. Of course, not everyone was producing 26 paintings a day, but many painters could work very long and very tiring hours for not a lot of pay. But June Wong told me that, especially in the early years, most painters in Daphne came from rural farming backgrounds who didn't have a pathway to a career in the arts.

Also, painting was a very different type of creative labor that pushed against stereotypes of what migrant workers could do. Because of the discrimination, migrant workers are very tired about this image. They are either on construction site or in the factories. So for many painter workers, they also take this as a success.

If you ask a thousand different painters from DaFen, whether they're happy, you will probably get a thousand different answers. Everyone has their own motivations for going there and what they ultimately want to do. DaFen painters probably would have continued quietly creating millions of the world's art replicas with little fanfare.

But in the early 2000s, it happened to catch the attention of the government of Shenzhen. Shenzhen is trying to change its image, become more, you know, high-end. But Shenzhen doesn't really have that kind of base, especially if you talk about some culture, and although Shenzhen doesn't really have a long history, so for Chinese people, Shenzhen is the desert of culture. Wang says that Shenzhen had quickly become an epicenter for science and technology. But when it came to culture and social cohesion, the local government felt like it was behind,

mostly because the city was still so new. The population of Shenzhen had exploded from around 59,000 people in 1980 to 7.7 million by the early 2000s, most of whom were migrant workers who came from all over the country with different local customs and even languages, and when it came to culture and the arts, leadership needed to start from scratch. This wasn't just unique to Shenzhen. A lot of areas of mainland China had undergone incredibly rapid urbanization.

And by the early 2000s, the Chinese government was beginning to understand how fundamental cultural and creative industries like the arts or music were to urban and economic development. Science and technology parks were great for job creation, but they believed that if you wanted to foster a strong society, you needed things like museums, opera houses, and arts districts. In order to incubate creative development, the government decided to target

interesting regions of the country, like DaFan, and promote them as cultural hubs. This is something that happens pretty often in Chinese urban development. DaFan had distinguished itself as this place where painting happens. And then what's the next step? Can you make it into a cultural hub? Can you make it into an art district?

Can you build a museum? Can you attract tourists? Where do you go from there? However, the government wanted to lean away from the image of fake masterpieces because to them, Replicating Art was not the same thing as creating art. They didn't want Daven to settle for being a copy village

when it could be a center for original art and creativity. So the goal was to transform Daven from a copycat village into a legitimate artist district starting with its urban development. They did, you know, fix the sewage, you know, beautify the sidewalks, you know, they did do these things

that one would expect a good government to do. The local government paved the roads and updated housing. They also formed artists associations who stood cultural fairs and offered incentives to attract art school educated artists in order to bolster Daphne's art cred. The propaganda department even got involved

to come up with more inventive ways to elevate Daphne's reputation. They hired a novelist to write a novel. There was a movie. There were songs they made a television series. There were actually multiple television series based in Daven, like this show called The Fate of Painting, about a woman who comes to a Daven-like village

to find her strange father, but is confronted by secrets, romance and art. The local government even took pains to address concerns of copyright infringement in daffan. They handed out copyright law books. They held like sessions on copyright infringement, right? They were concerned about this narrative that they were a copyright infringers and they wanted to promote creativity originality.

But as Daphne's profile rose, it didn't just gain the attention of the local government or artists, it was also starting to catch the attention of the rest of the world. Around the same time that Daphne was undergoing this government-led culture project, Western media outlets were beginning to catch wind of this small village in China that pumped out hand-painted revocas of Western works of art. The West had been buying these paintings for years, but most people were just now beginning to understand where they came from and who was making them. In the beginning, the international coverage was the opposite of what leadership was going for.

A lot of news coverage focused on the image of an army of factory workers, slaving away to pump out counterfeit paintings into the art market. There were headlines like own original Chinese coffees of real Western art and Van Gogh from the sweatshop. There was a New York Times story early on

and I think it confirmed a lot of prejudices people had about China at that moment as a place where things were being knocked off and copied. And you know, what's the highest level of knock off and copying? It's forging art. Here's Philip Tanari from the UCCA again. This is the moment of fake DVDs and counterfeit products and IP theft. So it was also easy to come at it from a lens. If here they are copying this person or that person in a kind of a parodical way where it wasn't.

I'm not sure that was essentially what was going on. At the time, Duffen was being swept up in a larger debates about China's place on the global stage. What was happening in Duffin was a complex intermingling of migrant labor, craft, local policy, and globalism. It was reduced into yet another story about how the West was the source of authenticity, and China was ripping it off.

Ironically, Duffin painters were being criticized for fulfilling a market that was created by the very people who demanded these paintings. Of course, art forgery can and does happen in China, but it also happens everywhere. Plus, no one believed that the 30-dollar painting they ordered from Shenzhen was an original Gustav Klimt. These paintings were not intended to sit in a gallery or museum. They were meant to spruce up the wall of a conference room. By 2008, Daphne had undergone its urban makeover, and it even formally changed its name to Daphne Oil Painting Village, but it was never quite able to shake its image as the copy capital of the world.

It is very successful, a very well-known in terms of high concentration of painters, but at the same time, Daphne is always hunted by this image of a copy. It might not have become the bastion for, quote, original art, but the streets were cleaner. There was a lot more creative energy in the air and the industry was booming. At least it was until... This is going to be one of the watershed days in financial markets history. It was a manic Monday in the financial markets.

The Dow tumbled more than 500 points after two pillars of the street tumbled over the weekend. In 2008, the global financial crisis rocked Wall Street and reverberated throughout the rest of the world, even reaching the small painting village of Daven. Before 2008, around 80% of the paintings made in Daven were exported to the West. But the financial crisis had a severe impact on real estate development all over the world.

Fewer construction projects meant that there were fewer blank walls that required cheap, unobjectionable decoration. Sales in Daven plummeted by 50%. You know, by 2015, it was very, very quiet in DaFen. And a quiet, meaning there was a lot less business. But even though business dropped a lot for DaFen, it didn't disappear completely. With a Chinese real estate boom

and with a rising middle class within the country, DaFen had a new Chinese market to tap into, which meant that there were different artistic styles to cater to. I know a while back the famous, like, Van Gogh and the Mona Lisa, and those used to be popular, that's not so popular anymore. Um, just a few customers by these kind of paintings. Most of the customers buy more than art.

And I'm very, very popular, very beautiful images. This is Chris Schur. He's the owner of a painting company called Shenzhen Melga Art that's been based in Daphne since 2017. He says that those replicas of classical Western art that put Daphne on the map aren't really invoked anymore. His buyers want modern, abstract, and original paintings. In recent years, things have been more challenging in DaFen.

Business never fully recovered after the 2008 financial crisis, and a lot of painters and bosses have moved out of the area because gentrification made it a less affordable place to live. The internet has made it possible to work from anywhere, so people have been moving to places with lower costs of living. There isn't as much reason to have a centralized painting industry anymore. The stores, the stores in Daven Village, their business become worse and worse. Coming into reporting this, I thought that the type of labor that was happening in Daven was wholly different from fine art.

But I'm not so sure anymore. The truth is that the distinction between mass production and individual artistry has always been blurry. Artists all over the world like Jeff Coons have quietly used laborers and fabricators in order to execute their grand ideas. Daffin painters actually let us in on that process and show us that relationship in an unambiguous way.

You could look at Damien Hurst or Coons and say, well, that's what they're doing. You know, we're going back to Warhol and the factory. We're really overseeing a project. You're sort of the architect of the project, but the labor is being done by multiple people or in multiple places or in multiple stages. This is Eddie Cola. He's a mixed media artist who spoke to me from beautiful, noisy East Oakland, California. A lot of notable artists have actually used Dauphin painters, sort of like ghost writers.

They come up with the concept and then outsource the labor to Dauphin in order to execute their ideas because it's efficient. And Eddie thinks that there's actually something creative and undervalued happening in the mass manufacturing of oil paintings at places like Daven. He decided to blur the line between production and art even further by incorporating the Daven copying process into his artwork. I mean, part of the reason I want to go back to Daven

is because there's so many possibilities about what you could do as an artist. Eddie visited Daphne back in 2018 while he was doing an artist's residency based in Shenzhen. And while he was there, he decided to conduct a bit of an artistic experiment. He had a graphic that he had designed. It was an image of a woman staring straight forward, sort of like in a passport photo. Aside from some red text running down the sides, it's a pretty monochromatic image, kind of like something from an edgy graphic

novel. He chose a Duffen painter randomly and asked him to copy the graphic as an oil painting. About a week later, he got a message that the painting was ready. Then he repeated the process, asking another painter to make a copy of that copy. ready. Then you repeated the process, asking another painter to make a copy of that copy. I went to pick it up and then just basically walked 20 or 30 feet down the street and handed the second painter the first copy. So can you copy this? Please, like sure. He did this every week for seven weeks, each time bringing the newest copy of the copy of the image until he was left with six different paintings that all built upon the last version.

And so the whole point of the process was, how does the idea of copying something over and over again change? And it does, like the last painting compared to the original painting are completely different. By the six painting, the image had changed in a ton of obvious and beautiful ways. While the first painting was muted in somber, the six painting was exploding with color. The subject of the painting even looks like a different person.

One thing that's overlooked about oil paintings produced in Daphne is that they're not exact copies. Every painting is actually unique because it is done by hand. We just tend to focus on the similarities and not the differences. Eddie sees this project as a reflection of greater shenzhen, a place that's been criticized by the West for copycat culture. When in fact, copying is an essential part of the artistic process

or really any learning process for that matter. In his interpretation, the quote, real art can exist without the quote, fake art. We always start copying. In fact, I mean, that's how all knowledge really works. If you learn to play an instrument, they teach you how to play existing songs. They don't say, well, write an original composition. And so I think that's exactly the way all things evolve. Duffen Labor has been used in a lot of different ways.

I don't hold on to it. When the West demanded affordable masterpieces, Duffen painters made them. When China wanted original works of art, Duffen created them. When professional artists needed skilled labor, DaFen supplied it. Okay, so I have this package from China.

It's about two and a half feet by one and a half feet. To Rowan Mars. And when I reached out to a painting company in DaFen, and asked them to create something truly absurd. This is the picture of me holding a microphone. Which was an oil painting of my boss doing karaoke at a staff retreat. They really delivered. And honestly, it was worth every penny. Now that is art right there.

Vivian comes back to tell me about a curious byproduct of China's rapid urbanization villages in the middle of the city. After this. So I'm back with Vivian Light. Hey Vivian. Hey Roman, how are you doing? How's the painting? Where'd you put it? It is, it is in the closet. We have this walking closet.

It's on joy side. So like when she's getting ready in the morning, there's just like this oil thing, you know, me, like, crooning at her, you know, and it's so it's this kind of funny inside joke for us. But every once in a while, if somebody's like, I don't know, coming by and they haven't been to the house because people haven't been to the house very much. So you give them a tour or whatever. And then you realize that there's this oil painting of your own face. Like in the closet and they kind of walk away.

Yeah, man, this, Romans really entered his megalomaniac phase, I guess. He's got this painting of his face. Yeah, it freaks out the kids a little bit. It has a very fun effect on the household. I'm very happy with it. So I'm assuming you don't want to just talk about the oil painting of my face in the house. There's something that you research that didn't make it into the story.

Yes, yes. You monsters actually cut it out of the script. But I really wanted to talk about urban villages. This thing called urban villages because Duffen is sort of both a good and a bad example of one. So what exactly is an urban village? Yeah, so they're this very fascinating urban design phenomenon that came out of the rapid development of Shenzhen. So this also happens outside of Shenzhen, but I'm just going to focus there because we're already there. If you're to look at Shenzhen today, it is a gigantic, mega-city full of towering skyscrapers,

technology parks, and these big, open city blocks that were centrally planned and are managed by the government. For the most part, it looks like this cohesive, even futuristic metropolis. I've actually dropped a photo below to give you an idea of what it looks like from. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. Like multi-colored fancy glass.

It looks like a future city. Yeah, exactly. But when I say that it's cohesive for the most part, it's because scattered throughout the city are these small pockets of neighborhoods that actually disrupt the urban fabric of modern Shenzhen in this really interesting way and these neighborhoods are the urban villages. So what do you mean by disrupt? Like what do they look like? So there are essentially these blocks within the city that develop

entirely differently from the rest of centrally planned Shenzhen. Like, I mentioned that most of the city is composed of giant steel and glass skyscrapers that seem super modern with these wide streets. But urban villages are these incredibly dense neighborhoods packed with multi-story apartment buildings divided by very narrow alleyways. And you can instantly tell that the same building codes do not apply in these places as the rest of Shenzhen, because the apartment buildings, they're way smaller, like, three to 10 stories tall. But they're just so densely built next to each other. Like, they're so densely packed that they're actually called handshake buildings, because supposedly,

you could reach your arm out the window and shake the hand of the person in the next building. Whoa, okay, you're talking very, very close. Yes, very, very close together. So these apartments are also mixed used so people might live in the floors above and then down below, it's like bustling with markets and shops and restaurants and schools. And I actually have another picture

of the meeting point between an urban village and the rest of the city. Okay, so we're looking at a sort of top down view of, you know, buildings surrounding, like tall buildings surrounding and then a real, like, Mishmash, Hodgepodge of buildings at different ankles and different heights. And it's, it really is very, very different. It's just like this informal enclave, like, enveloped by, you know, square angle rest of the city. So you mentioned that the building codes are different. I mean,

are they just regulated completely differently than the rest of Shenzhen? Yeah. So while most of Shenzhen is managed by the government, these urban villages are owned and managed by village collectives, which is why, you know, the same building codes don't apply to them, and why their development almost looks improvisational compared to the rest of the city. So if the rest of Shenzhen was so meticulously planned, how did urban villages, you know, come about? If you were to go back to the creation of the Shenzhen special economics zone in 1980, you know, Shenzhen was chosen as a location for a number of reasons, but a key reason was because it was this very rural area with a lot of farmland prior to the 1980s. So it was much more sparsely populated, but there were still tens of thousands of people

who lived there prior to the SEZ. These are people that we call original villagers. And it's kind of interesting because people tend to hype up the idea that Shenzhen was built from nothing and it was this blank slate prior to Shenzhen S.E.Z. And it's spring forth because of capitalism or whatever. But the presence of the original villagers actually had this huge impact on the development

of the S.E.Z. In what way did they have an impact? When Shenzhen was selected as a location of the first SEZ, the government bought up all of that vast uninhabited farmland, but it did not purchase the plots of land that the original villagers actually built their homes on, meaning the actual village community land where the houses were.

Oh, why not? It seems like that's the thing you do. Yeah, like apparently it was just like too expensive to buy that land and relocate the actual people. So the government just let them stay and manage those plots of lands themselves and then built the rest of Shenzhen around these villages. So these villages literally became surrounded by skyscrapers. Oh, okay. So they really predate everything and they just built around them. Which is actually like, I don't know, it's kind of a good sign.

They didn't just move them in Balthosam. And so much of world history is built on that premise that it's kind of a nice, I don't know, change of pace. Yeah, it's shockingly nice. It's surprising. Yeah. Just given pace. Yeah, it's shockingly nice. It's surprising. Yeah. Just given history. Yeah.

So how did these urban villages grow to what they look like today? Because I can't imagine the original houses and villages that used to occupy this space look like this. I mean, they look like urbanized areas. They just look like a different kind of urbanization than the skyscrapers around them. Yes, exactly. So, you know, the original villagers, they didn't have this farmland to make a living off anymore

after the creation of the SEC. But there was this huge opportunity because they had their hands on this prime real estate that was in the middle of a very rapidly growing city. So, with the original villagers ended up doing, as they formed village collectives to manage the land, and then they tore down their houses that were there

and then constructed these really dense multi-story apartment buildings to run out to like the millions of new migrants that were flocking to Shenzhen for job opportunities. Wow, so they really just bought into the whole, like we're gonna become a capitalist economy, right? Yeah, they just leaned right into it. Okay, good for them.

Yeah, but like the remarkable thing about urban villages is that you know, especially they only make up a small part of the city, but by the year 2000, they housed essentially half of the population of Shenzhen. Oh my God, that doesn't compute from the pictures I see. Yeah. That's really, really insane. So these are really desks, like people are really packed on top of each other.

And it makes it seem like also that those buildings surrounding these urban villages are not very desks. Like they don't have enough housing for people. Yeah, exactly. So urban villages basically became some of the only affordable housing options for a lot of migrant workers in Shenzhen. So, you know, for a lot of new low income residents, you have students, restaurant workers, construction workers, factory workers, basically blue collar workers. Urban villages are the first stops

when trying to find housing in Shenzhen because it's a very expensive city. And because you could find all of these different types of people and different types of shops and resources condensed into one small area. Urban villages are full of life and really have become the center of a lot of culture. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, nothing is more dead than some dumb business district. Tall buildings, right? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, earlier, when I said that

Duffen is a good and a bad example of an urban village. It's a good example because it's a similarly dense multi-use neighborhood that developed in this very different way from the rest of Shenzhen. But it's also a bad example because Duffen was a place that was given a lot of special treatment and attention by the government because it already had this flourishing painting industry. So, Duffen was allocated money to modernize its infrastructure, but urban villages on the whole are not places that get a lot of respect.

And what do you mean by that? So, because these are spaces that are accessible to the poor, urban villages are often associated with, you know, overcrowding, shoddy construction. They're also linked with drug use and seen as dangerous areas. Of course, it's been debated how much of that reputation is just classism. So urban villages, especially in the last couple decades, have been targeted for quote, urban

renewal. And a lot of them have been torn down and redeveloped into more modern housing that more closely fits into that master plan for the rest of the city. But when urban villages get demolished, like hundreds of thousands of people get displaced from their homes. Yeah, I definitely can recognize that maybe urban villages have their problems, but not having affordable housing in the center of large city

is a problem that all cities seem to have. Like they just seem to push low wage workers that work in the city and serve people's needs further and further away and have to commute. And it just makes life harder for the people that we rely on. These people that we call essential workers at this point, because of the pandemic, it's just, it's really awful to see that happen everywhere. Yeah, yeah, that's totally right. And, you know, I think it's really important. In the case of urban villages, it's really important to understand how important they've been to Shenzhen's success. I spoke with a professor of architecture and urban design named Jean-Dou,

who actually has written extensively about Shenzhen. And you know, she said that if you were to think about it from an ecological point of view, she compared urban villages to the wetlands of the city, because they've provided all of this overlooked support to, you know, its overall health and development. Yeah, I mean, these interstitial places where people have a little bit more freedom to solve problems and create the spaces that they need to live and become like little places to experiment. There's exactly like creating a healthy ecology with lots of different, like Nietzsche's

being fulfilled and represented. I mean, not everyone can live in a gleaming downtown skyscraper. Yeah, totally. We know that. Yeah, I know that firsthand. Well, this is fascinating stuff. I mean, I just, I'm so intrigued by these places,

they're very cinematic. And I think they are a little odd to us in different ways, but they serve this vital purpose of figuring out how people actually need to live. And it's important to pay attention to what services they provide. But it's a fascinating space. I'd love to hear more about them. I can't believe us monsters told you not to talk about it. I see.

I knew it. No, it's super fascinating stuff. Well, thanks for bringing this little extra information to us. I really appreciate it. And thank you for letting me rent about it. 99% invisible was produced this week by Vivian Le. Edited by Emmith Fitzgerald.

Mixed in tech production by Martin Gonzales, fact checking by Graham Haysha, music by a director of Sound Swan Rihout with additional music by Jenny Conley-Driesos, John Newfeld and Nate Query. The Lennie Hall is the executive producer Kurt Colestay is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Christopher Johnson, Lashemadon, Joe Rosenberg, Christopher Ruppe, Jason Dalyone, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Lose We and Joanne Du,

whose interviews did not make it into the piece, but if you want to read more about the complexities of Shen Zhen's special economic zone, Joanne wrote a great book about it called the Shen Zhen Experiment, the story of China's instant city, you should check it out. We are part of the Stitcher and serious XM podcast family. Now, it had quartered six blocks north in the Pandora building and

beautiful uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 PI or we're on Instagram and read it to you can find links to other stature shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI, and also pictures of that creepy oil painting that Viv had commissioned up my face at 99PI.org. The End Look out on a serious ex a day The thighs that no darkness in my soul Shadows on the hill The sketched trees and down the hills