Since 2006, the urban population across the globe has surpassed the rural for the first time in human history. What comes along with this rapid urbanization is the proliferation of informal settlements—and, increasingly, their forced demolition at the hands of political authorities. What motivates authorities to carry out such demolitions and evictions? The social sciences have a long tradition of addressing this question through the lens of development, viewing demolition as a tool used by political or business actors to enable gentrification and urban renewal. However, the role of informal-settlement demolition in maintaining political power remains relatively under explored, particularly in non-electoral or authoritarian contexts.

My book project introduces the concept of the spatiality of preemptive coercion to explain the political control logic behind the demolition of informal settlements under authoritarian regimes. The inherent spontaneity and lack of standardization in informal settlements render them less legible to authorities. When illegibility unfolds in urban spaces, it bears a fuzzy character: it exists in an overlapping zone between signaling substantive and symbolic illegibility to authorities. This double-layered challenge prompts anxious autocrats with strong state apparatuses to pursue both threat anticipation and order visualization in the routinized governance of informal settlements, often favoring preemptive and coercive measures, such as demolition and surveillance.

This project focuses on Beijing, a typical city governed by strong yet anxious autocrats, where prevailing theories of gentrification fall short in explaining recent dynamics. To investigate the case, I employ a mixed-methods approach that combines remote sensing analysis, design-based inference, and qualitative interviews.

In the first empirical part, I present both qualitative and quantitative evidence showing how preemptive logic and political control shaped the demolition of informal settlements in Beijing. At the operational level, the state's intent is reflected in the types of neighborhoods it targeted for demolition. Using satellite imagery, digital street views, and fieldwork observations, I construct an original dataset of 320 demolished and surviving informal settlements from 2017–2018. The analysis shows that less legible settlements faced significantly higher likelihood of demolition.

In the second part, I explore the evolution of preemptive coercion from demolition to surveillance. The COVID-19 pandemic marked a critical juncture in China, as some previously hard-to-monitor communities became more visible to authorities due to pandemic control measures. Some demonstrated obedience to lockdown orders, while others openly resisted state restrictions. Using a time-series dataset of 159 Beijing townships from 2017 to 2023, I find that improved knowledge of compliant settlements led to fewer post-pandemic demolitions, while resistance prompted intensified demolition efforts.

The third part examines a broader scope. Using AI-assisted analysis of remote-sensing imagery, I trace the emergence and disappearance of informal settlements across China since the late 1980s, an important phenomenon that has long lacked systematic data. This evidence allows me to assess how the two core rationales behind demolition—the economic incentive of gentrification and the political imperative of stability maintenance—have waxed and waned across the reform and post-reform eras.