Entitlement to the Benefits of Urbanization: Comparing Migrant and Peri-urban ‘Peasants’

Abstract

This chapter compares rural migrants and peasants from suburban villages with respect to rights to the benefits of urbanization. It argues that the entitlements facing the former are static because of the lack of scarcity of low-cost urban labour, while the entitlements facing the latter have increased because of the scarcity of peri-urban collectively owned land. This chapter offers a speculative reflection on the poverty experiences of two groups of villagers: migrants who have moved to the city to work; and villagers whose land has been expropriated by the state to build cities. The former are exercising their relatively recently acquired right to use the most fundamental of resource – their own labour – and have chosen to work in the more productive urban sector. At the same time, former farmers living on the periphery of the city have used ambiguities in their collective landed property rights to become landlords to rural migrants. With these immense empowering effects in mind, this chapter considers the results of the property rights lottery that turned some peasants into low income renters and others into landlords. The chapter does three things: (a) conceptualize the entitlement problem facing rural migrants; (b) contrast this with the entitlements of peri-urban villagers; and (c) using this contrast, demonstrates how the institutions that distribute the rights to the gains from economic growth are themselves dynamic.