Urban village on a global scale: Diverse interpretations of one label

In recent years, “urban village” has become a heated topic in urban research on informal settlements in the Global South, particularly in the Chinese context. However, this critical review uncovers that at least three different interpretations of urban village exist in the literature: ethnic enclaves in American metropolises, new models of community development in the Anglosphere, and informal settlements within the rapidly expanding metropolises in the Global South. In tackling the complexity of the urban village discourse, this study employs fundamental linguistic knowledge to probe the urban village in cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic contexts. The resulting argument is that urban village is a label that denotes diverse ideas. This work expands the discussion on the flexibility and mutability of popular keywords in the contemporary discourse on urban research.