“I have anxiety attacks because we have no income, no job, nothing,” said Feng Aiju, 40, a former farmer who moved to Huaming in 2008 against her will. She said she had spent a small fortune by local standards, $1,500, on antidepressants. “We never had a chance to speak; we were never asked anything. I want to go home.”

The situation in these new towns contrasts with the makeshift housing where other migrants live. Many of those are created by farmers who chose to leave their land for jobs in the city. Although cramped and messy, they are full of vitality and upward mobility, said Biao Xiang, a social anthropologist at Oxford University who has studied migrant communities.

“These migrant neighborhoods in big cities are often called slums, but it’s the new resettlement communities that will be harder to revive, partly because they are not related to any productive economic activity,” Professor Xiang said. “And the population tend to be homogeneous, disadvantaged communities.”

Addressing ‘Disorder’

The idea behind Huaming was radically different. In 2005, Huaming Township was chosen to be a demonstration for successful, planned urbanization. A township is an administrative unit in China above a village but below a county, and Huaming had 41,000 people living in 12 small villages dotted across 60 square miles, most of which was farmland.

For northern China it was unusually fertile because water was plentiful. On the outskirts of one of China’s largest cities, the port of Tianjin, it was well known for its local handicrafts, such as decorative paper-cutting, and, especially, its vegetables that were easily sold in the big city.

City planners, however, saw it as a major problem.

“The naturally formed villages had undergone disorderly developments resulting in low building density, in disarrayed industrial space and layout,” according to a publication explaining the need for change. (Officials refused requests for interviews, but have published copiously on the project, allowing insights into their thinking.) The villages had no sewage treatment, and were “dirty, messy and substandard.”

The idea was to consolidate the villages into one new town called Huaming that would take up less than one square mile, versus the three square miles that the dozen villages had occupied. A portion of the remaining 59 square miles could be sold to developers to pay for construction costs, meaning the new buildings would cost farmers and the government nothing.