Enclosure of fragile-fungible citizens: urban villages’ constrained resurgence in Wenzhou

Enclosure has gained analytical traction in critical urban geography as a way of conceptualising the displacement and dispossession of marginalised communities in contemporary cities, extending Edward P. Thompson's account of primitive accumulation into the present. This paper argues that enclosure in this context of Chinese urban village redevelopment comprises three mutually constitutive structural dimensions: the registration system that appropriates migrants’ labour whilst their civic claims are administratively withheld; fragile-fungible citizenship, which is fragile in that migrants’ protections are provisionally extended and readily withdrawn, and fungible in that citizen-subjects are valued only insofar as they are interchangeable inputs into accumulation processes; and state-led redevelopment, the territorial strategy through which the city administration severs migrants’ socio-spatial ties and transforms their settled land into developable assets serving registered urban interests. Drawing on three years of community-controlled fieldwork in Xiawang Village, Wenzhou (2021–2024), the paper demonstrates that enclosure operates through spatial exclusion and social marginalisation, rendering migrants’ collective governance capacities invisible within the administrative rationalities through which demolition is justified. Against these conditions, Xiawang migrants have developed constrained resurgence: deliberative governance structures, spatial modification practices, and dense social networks that simultaneously resist enclosure and are shaped by it.