State-engineered precarity: Infrastructural selectivity and migrant improvisation in urban China

This paper examines the condition of partial development in which infrastructural provision in second-tier cities has become increasingly selective, creating new geographies of inequality for lower-middle-class migrants. The resulting precarity is not a by-product of growth but is state-engineered through a governing logic of infrastructural selectivity. The paper analyses the mechanisms that produce this condition. Findings reveal a bifurcated system where state investment in transport and subsidised housing is channelled towards prioritised New Town Initiatives (NTIs) at the expense of bottom-up self-urbanised peripheral entities. This institutionalised selectivity compels migrants into a range of everyday improvisations, navigating informal housing and transport markets to secure their livelihoods. By centring these bottom-up practices, the study offers a critical account of how partial development is governed and lived, contributing to debates on state entrepreneurialism, infrastructural governance and urban justice in China.