The last days of Shenzhen’s great urban village

Early this spring, the character for “demolish” appeared in red spray paint on a strip of shops in Shenzhen’s Baishizhou neighbourhood. Wang An, 41, has been selling women’s underwear from one of these shops for the past 10 years.

“When they knock it down, I guess we’ll just go home to Hubei [province] and grow vegetables,” he joked in April. The spray paint marked Wang’s shop as one of the buildings scheduled to be torn down in the first phase of Baishizhou’s renewal. He responded to the news with a buy-one-get-one-free sale that continued throughout the summer.

On August 31, he received notice that his power would be cut in a week. The next day, the demolition of a swathe of buildings behind his shop began. With his store due to close, Wang still wasn’t sure what he and his wife would do next. Bricks-and-mortar underwear stores couldn’t compete with e-commerce, he said, so, after taking some time to look for new opportunities, they would decide whether to leave Shenzhen.

The planned destruction of Baishizhou will affect roughly 150,000 people, many of them recent migrants looking for a new life in one of China’s most prosperous cities. But it also threatens to erase a neighbourhood whose dynamism rivals that of any in the world. Baishizhou is a labyrinthine dream on 0.6 sq km of mixed-use space, with a population density more than 20 times that of the city average.

A tangle of damp alleyways opens at odd intervals onto wider avenues of frenzied commerce – fruit carts, shoe repairers, blind-massage parlours, vendors of hot pot, pigs’ feet on rice and coal-roasted sweet potatoes, fortune-tellers, handymen for hire, smartphone engravers, karaoke parlours, love hotels, furniture dealers, lamb butchers, elementary schools, mahjong rooms, communal laundry wells, open-air billiard halls and a vast number of hair salons, where customers can get a head massage, wash and cut for about HK$30. All hustling under a sun-blocking canopy of braided telephone wires.