Next to the gleaming offices of some of China’s leading technology companies in Shenzhen lies a maze of concrete towers built so close together that local residents call them “handshake buildings”.
With 150,000 inhabitants, Baishizhou is the largest of Shenzhen’s so-called urban villages — densely populated areas that house about half of the city’s 12m population, attracted by cheap rents.
But now these urban villages, an anomaly in the centrally planned city, are at the heart of a battle over the future of the city, as the government steps up plans to demolish them and use the land to build more lucrative, high-end development projects.
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