Infrastructuring mobility via state-led school franchising

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Biography

Dr. Qiong He recently joined the University of St Andrews as a lecturer. Her research focuses on the intersection of urban, housing, and population studies, encompassing areas such as residential segregation, residential mobility and migration, housing inequality, critical geographies of education, and urban/regional governance. She earned her PhD in Urban Geography from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2022, after which she held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Social Infrastructure for Equity and Wellbeing (SIEW) Lab at the University of Hong Kong. Her work has been featured in leading academic journals, including Environment and Planning A: Economy & Space, Urban Geographies, Housing Studies, Housing, Theory and Society, and Habitat International. Additionally, she has led a seed grant project on the residential integration practices of Chinese immigrants in the Netherlands, funded by the Center for Urban Studies at UvA.

Abstract

Drawing on the literature of geographies of education, mobilities, and critical infrastructure studies, this study introduces a novel analytical lens of infrastructuring mobility to examine the prevalent phenomenon of school franchising in China. From the vantage point of mobility with an infrastructure focus, we examine how strategic school infrastructural substrates are selectively leveraged to facilitate desired (im)mobilities of middle class for promoting urban (re)development. Drawing on rich empirical evidence, including policy documents and 38 in-depth interviews with various stakeholders, we found that school franchising mainly revolves around exporting the sub-infrastructure, i.e., the brand of key schools, from the city centre to strategic locales in the suburb, and to a less extent in the city centre. Other infrastructural substrates essential for high-quality schooling experience like good teachers are lagging behind. These franchised schools are nonetheless highly sought after by middle-class parents anxious about social reproduction as infrastructures of promise, who subsequently enact residential mobilities to these urban (re)development areas to access these schools. These mobilities and their infrastructuring processes are underpinned by a nexus of the entrepreneurial local states, profiteering developers and expansionist schools. Particularly, the state strategically orchestrates and meticulously calibrates school franchising and its geography to enable desired mobilities and facilitate urban (re)development. This study hence unpacks the multiple mobilities (of infrastructural substrates and middle-class households) and the infrastructuring process enabling it. It foregrounds the importance of education as an apparatus of urban governance and an integral part contributing to reshaping the wider socio-spatial restructuring processes.