The complex social, political and spatial issues, typical of the Chinese context, brought the emergence ViCs.

Ma and Wu (2005) pointed out that what seems to be an illegal settlement actually is not to be mistaken as a ghetto of despair where disadvantaged people are trapped hopelessly but are oasis of inexpensive housing and self-organized land transformations. The landlords earn a great deal of rent income and work hard to improve the villages quality.

When the city government confiscates the farmland, while leaving residential areas of villages, the latter demands a higher amount of compensation. Thus the Village in the City become recognizable by its dual urban- rural structure.

Deprived of their traditional agricultural resources, the villagers, out of need, become builders. The illegal buildings serve as housing for the masses of migrants, who are institutionally and economically excluded by the urban system. Consequently, ViCs become migrants enclaves, characterized by high density and overcrowding. Therefore, they work as twilight zones: the entrance to the city, the foothold for opportunities in development.

With the developments of urban areas and ViCs, migrants have massively floated to work in industries and service sectors into Guangzhou. Although, the majority of them cannot acquire the citizenship that links to formal urban housing, education, employment and social welfare. The city government recognizes them just as temporary workers and assumes that - theoretically - they will return to their home-towns in the future.

Unable to access public and commercial housing in state redistribution and formal market spheres, migrants turn to informal market options; therefore villagers who lost their farmland during the processes of urbanization and find difficulties to participate in the formal urban labour market, illegally build their houses to meet the cheap housing demand of migrants.