Government-backed ‘laundering of the grey’ in upgrading urban village properties: Ningmeng Apartment Project in Shuiwei Village, Shenzhen, China

Abstract Urban informality and informal settlements, as research concepts rooted in the global south, have the potential to reveal the relationship between property improvement, tenure security, uneven distribution of resources and asymmetric power relations embedded in urban studies. Investigations of urban villages in China are also inspired by these ideas. The present study of the Ningmeng Apartment project in Shuiwei Village, Shenzhen, China, aims to contribute to these exciting research fields by (1) offering a new governmental mechanism – government-backed informal formalizing of informality – that can strengthen perceived tenure security; (2) investigating a new approach to regenerating problematic urban villages; and (3) revealing a new social-psychological effect underlying the operation of urban informality: perceived formal informality. These three dimensions can be interpreted as government-backed methods of laundering the grey, ways in which state actors use informal operations to strengthen the perceived tenure security and upgrade the spatial quality of informal properties to achieve governmental goals. Based on these three academic contributions, interactions between rule-breaking innovations and a pre-innovation environment emerge from the examination of the Ningmeng project. Such interactions may reflect the experience of China during its post-1978 reform and may inspire new policy practices in other developing countries.