Abstract

The city of Shenzhen is the product of China's «reform and opening» era that started in 1979, Its creation has been driven by an ideology of urbanization-as-modernization. This article concentrates on one of Shenzhen's former villages, Pine Mansion. It examines how its native community of residents haven taken part in the urban transformations while attempting at saving some of their spatiotemporal landmarks. Building on Foucault's concept of «heterotopias» and «heterochronias» and the critiques that it has received, it retraces how they have collectively mobilized to preserve specific sites - the ancestral tomb, the school, the temple - and their associated festivals against the threats posed by urbanization policies. However, these sites are also homotopic and homochronic with urban development. Not only have the principles that drive urbanization been applied to them; these sites are logically integrated into these transformations.