fillette jouant entre deux immeubles s'embrassant

Guangzhou, Chine. 5/8/2018 © Cinzia Losavio)

A little girl plays in a thread of light between two “kissing buildings” in the heart of an urban village in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China.
Kissing buildings” (接吻楼, jiēwěnlóu) or ” handshake buildings” (握手楼, wòshǒulóu), refer to multi-storey buildings constructed by the indigenous inhabitants of urban villages in China, neglecting all regulations and building standards imposed by the urban planning system, including safety codes and security distances. At the street level the buildings maintain a distance ranging from one to two meters. However, from the first floor onwards, in order to maximise the use of space, the buildings stand so close that residents from one building can literally reach out and kiss or shake hands with their neighbors.

Cinzia LOSAVIO is a Phd candidate at the University Paris 1, affiliated to Géographie-cités. Her thesis, entitled “Public policies and urban space: what role for Chinese migrant workers in the development of the middle-sized city in the People’s Republic of China”, is supervised by Natacha AVELINE, CNRS Permanent research director and member of Géographie-cités.

The photographs taken by Cinzia Losavio in Zhuhai, Guangzhou or Datong, as part of the Medium project “New pathways for sustainable development in China’s medium-sized cities”, focus on the spatial, social and architectural complexity of urban villages, former rural spaces now embedded in the city and doomed to disappear. Several of Cinzia Losavio’s photographs were on display at the CNRS exhibition Les métiers de la Recherche, at the Condorcet Campus from October 5 to 20, 2021.