The crowded, dilapidated buildings in the city started to disappear. Scaffolding went up overnight. Streets that had been lined with laundry hanging between windows and bicycles parked in narrow lanes became construction sites. New buildings appeared, made to look traditional. The city looked new but not quite new. But one thing had unmistakably changed: the people who had lived there were gone.
During the decades when China was remaking its urban landscape at speed, the stories of chaiqian, demolition and relocation, were everywhere. The version people loved to tell was not one of loss, but of transformation. If your family owned one of the worn-down places in the alleyways of downtown Shanghai, the government’s compensation could be life-changing. People got new housing or a handsome settlement, and the real estate market boomed and property values soared. Some became financially secure for life almost overnight.
But this was not the only story.
Across China, an estimated 150 to 200 million people have been directly or indirectly affected by demolition and redevelopment since the country’s reform and opening-up policy in the late 1980s. In cases studied in Shanghai and Hangzhou, more than 60 percent of displaced residents were relocated to peripheral areas, where access to public services declined by an estimated 35 percent.
Demolition also raised local land surface temperatures by between 2.8 and 4.3 degrees Celsius (5 to 7.7 degrees Fahrenheit) within three years through vegetation loss and increased building density. In Xi’an, low-income resettlement zones faced heat risk levels more than three times higher than affluent neighborhoods. The people displaced to the margins absorbed costs the development never accounted for.
The story of chaiqian and urban renewal is not only the story of what was built. It is equally the story of what was unbuilt, what the unbuilding displaced, and what the displacement left behind.
Significance, as established in our previous essays, is about leaving something observable behind. It is the condition of the built environment: the moment you alter the physical world, you make signs and leave marks.
If significance is the condition of the built environment, then displacement is the condition of that significance. Development and displacement are simultaneous, not sequential. When you make a mark, you displace another. The significance of a project does not begin when construction starts. It begins with what was already there: who and what was living on that land, from the people who called it home to the natural ecosystem beneath and around them.
If significance is the condition of the built environment, then displacement is the condition of that significance.
This condition is not abstract. Its consequences are borne by real people, sometimes at the cost of their lives.
In January 2020, members of the Huwaitat tribe in northwestern Saudi Arabia were told to accept $3,000 per family and leave the land their community had occupied for centuries to make way for NEOM, a planned megacity whose development team described the site as virgin land. Tribal activist Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti was killed by Saudi security forces after announcing his intention to resist eviction. At least three tribe members were sentenced to death for peacefully resisting forced displacement.
Describing their land as virginal did not erase their presence. The now vacant land is an even more legible sign of the erasure and displacement that happened here.
Construction on The Line, NEOM’s flagship linear city, was suspended in September 2025, with only 2.4 kilometers of foundation work completed. The project that cost the tribe their land may never be built as envisioned. But the mark of loss is permanent.
NEOM sits at one extreme. But displacement occurs at every scale, on every construction site. In the United States alone, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 structures are demolished every year. People are relocated. Land is cleared. Ecology is altered. Wildlife loses habitat.
The built environment professions do not always arrive before displacement occurs. More often, it arrives after the land has been acquired, the community relocated, the prior condition cleared. The decisions may have been made by governments, developers, or institutions. The argument is familiar: the technical work is separate from the financial and political conditions that preceded it, and social justice concerns are someone else’s jurisdiction.
But the building that goes up on cleared ground is the permanent record of every decision made in its production, including the displacement that preceded it. The profession is the one that gives those prior decisions their final and most durable form. That is not a peripheral role. It is a central one.
The profession is the one that gives those prior decisions their final and most durable form. That is not a peripheral role. It is a central one.
This central role places professionals inside the ethical ambiguity they did not create but cannot avoid. In the NEOM case, some firms withdrew from the project, treating the human cost as a threshold that cannot be crossed. Others remained engaged, describing their contribution in the language of technical expertise, sustainability, and professional responsibility. Neither position is inherently right or wrong. Both are choices made inside the inevitable condition. Both leave marks.
Which raises the question: If displacement is a condition of significance in the built environment, and if that condition is unavoidable, how do you practice inside it, and what does it mean to do so consciously and intentionally?
References
Al Jazeera. (2020, October 9). Al-Huwaitat tribe seeks UN help to stop Saudi forced displacement. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/10/9/al-huwaitat-tribe-seeks-un-help-to-stop-saudi-forced-displacement
ALQST for Human Rights. The Dark Side of NEOM: Expropriation, Expulsion, and Prosecution. https://alqst.org/en/post/the-dark-side-of-neom-expropriation-expulsion-and-prosecution
Lin, Z. and Li, G. (2025). Socio-spatial logic of demolition and relocation in urban China. PLOS ONE. PMC13089722. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13089722/
Middle East Eye. (2023, February 17). Saudi Arabia jails nearly 50 tribespeople for resisting displacement. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-neom-tribespeople-jailed-resisting-displacement
New Civil Engineer. (2025, October 8). Saudi authorities accused of attempted displacement of community impacted by NEOM port. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/saudi-authorities-accused-of-attempted-displacement-of-community-impacted-by-neom-port-08-10-2025/
