Discursive village walls: (in)visible (in)formality in the semiotic loci of Gangxia Village, Shenzhen

Amid the semiotic landscape of Chinese cities, urban villages are unique sites of text- and image-based communication and particular locales in which the modernizing city reveals itself. They took shape differently from the cities that sprawled around them when China’s cities began expanding. Their walls – surfaces – reflect their daily operations, overarching ordering system(s) and the negotiations between these two. This article researches the surfaces of Gangxia Village, an urban village in China’s youngest megacity, Shenzhen. Located beside the central business district (CBD), it is an example of a village that is increasingly acknowledged and regulated by municipal and district governments while remaining distinct. Following an expanded notion of urban informality and through the lens of visibility, the article engages geosemiotics as it surveys Gangxia’s walls, and the socio-spatial and visual negotiations registered on them. These walls display attempts at assimilation into the modern city alongside signs emerging from the village’s everyday operations. Beyond (within) the ‘semiotic landscape’, focusing on what could be called semiotic loci, the authors’ reading of the village manifests locationally specific versions of (in)visible (in)formality, positioning Gangxia as an (in)formal urban context embedded, through negotiations of (in)visibility, within the wider city.