Compassion, a New Mechanism to Explain Neighborhood Mutual Aid: China's Privatized Danwei Neighborhood vs Commodity Neighborhood

Abstract

Following the Financial Crisis of 2007, neighborhood mutual aid has become an increasingly crucial means for people in both the Global North and the Global South to obtain what they want and need. This backdrop reinforces the importance of studying the mechanisms influencing the degree of neighborhood mutual aid, as it can inform planners how to promote such a quality. This paper's central argument is that compassion is an understudied mechanism in City and Regional Planning and studying it can inspire innovative methods to promote neighborhood mutual aid. This paper constructs this argument by referring to China's privatized danwei neighborhoods and commodity neighborhoods. Planning literature has established that these two types of neighborhoods tend to have a systematic difference in their degree of neighborhood mutual aid. This paper summarizes their contextual differences, then demonstrates how such variations lead to differences in compassion and, ultimately, differences in neighborhood mutual aid.