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By Root 1570 0

Wang and his wife still send a third of their earnings back to the village, to support their two surviving retired parents, and the year before, he’d bought a small restaurant down the road in Liu Gong Li, for his son to run. Mr. Wang’s margins are tiny, because the competition is intense: There are 12 other wood-bathtub factories in Chongqing, one of them also located in Liu Gong Li. “Mine has the highest output,” he says, “but we’re not necessarily the most profitable.” So it will be years of saving, and hoping for the best in the bathtub trade, before they will be able to buy their own apartment, send their grandson to university, and get out of Liu Gong Li—although by then, if the dream comes true, Liu Gong Li might have evolved into the sort of place where they’d want to stay.

All down the valley, the gray cubism materializes into a quilt of tiny, officially non-existent industries hidden behind ramshackle concrete slum buildings. Down the street from the bathtub shop is an exceptionally noisy place where 20 employees are making metal security railings; a little farther, a shop making custom walk-in refrigerators; a powdered-paint blending shop; a place churning out computer-guided embroidery patterns on half a dozen massive machines; a factory making electric-motor windings; a sour-smelling place where barely teenaged workers hunched over heat-sealing machines make inflatable beach toys; similar family shops, of every description, making shop displays, vinyl-frame windows, extruded industrial air-conditioning ducts, cheap wood cabinetry, ornamental wooden bed frames, high-voltage transformers, computer-lathe-milled motorcycle parts, and stainless-steel restaurant range hoods. These factories, most of whose goods are destined for Asian consumers, were all launched during the previous dozen years by villagers who arrived here or by the former employees of the first wave of villagers.

In every unpainted concrete cube, it is the same rhythm of arrival, struggle, support, saving, planning, calculation. Everyone who lives in Liu Gong Li, and all 120,000 people in this strip of land, has arrived, since 1995, from a rural village. Everyone who remains here beyond a few months has decided to stay for the long haul, despite the filth and the crowding and the difficulty of life and even though their children are often left behind with family members back in the village, because they have decided that it is a better life. Most have endured extraordinarily long odysseys of self-denial and austere deprivation. Almost all send money, quite often almost all of their earnings, back to support the village and put some into savings for their children’s education here in the city. All are engaged in a daily calculation that involves the unbearable burden of rural deprivation, the impossible expense of full-fledged urban life, and the broken pathway of opportunities that might someday form a bridge between the two.

In other words, the main function of this place is arrival. Liu Gong Li, like millions of other new and peripheral urban neighborhoods around the world, performs a specific set of functions. It is not merely a place for living and working, for sleeping and eating and shopping; it is, most importantly, a place of transition. Almost all of its significant activities, beyond mere survival, exist to bring villagers, and entire villages, into the urban sphere, into the center of social and economic life, into education and acculturation and belonging, into sustainable prosperity. The arrival city is both populated with people in transition—for it turns outsiders into central, “core” urbanites, with sustainable social, economic, and political futures in the city—and is itself a place in transition, for its streets, homes, and established families will either someday become part of the core city itself or will fail and decay into poverty or be destroyed.

The arrival city can be readily distinguished from other urban neighborhoods, not only by its rural-immigrant population, its improvised appearance and ever-changing nature, but