Infrastructuring Mobility via State-Led School Franchising: Leveraging Public Educational Resources to Facilitate Middle-Class Residential (Im) Mobility

Abstract

Drawing on the literature of geographies of education, mobilities, and critical infrastructure studies, this study introduces a novel analytical lens of infrastructuring mobility to examine the prevalent phenomenon of school franchising in China. From the vantage point of mobility with an infrastructure focus, we examine how strategic school infrastructural substrates are selectively mobilized to facilitate desired (im)mobilities of the middle class for promoting urban (re)development. Drawing on rich empirical evidence, including policy documents and thirty-nine in-depth interviews with various stakeholders, we found that school franchising mainly revolves around exporting the subinfrastructure (i.e., the brand of key schools) from the city center to strategic locales in the suburbs, and to a lesser extent in the city center. Other infrastructural substrates essential for high-quality schooling experience like good teachers are lagging behind. These franchised schools are nonetheless highly sought after by middle-class parents anxious about social reproduction as infrastructures of promise, who subsequently enact residential mobilities to these urban (re)development areas to access these schools. These mobilities and their infrastructuring processes are underpinned by a nexus of the entrepreneurial local states, profiteering developers, and expansionist schools. Particularly, the state strategically orchestrates and meticulously calibrates school franchising and its geography to enable desired mobilities and facilitate urban (re)development. This study hence unpacks the multiple mobilities (of infrastructural substrates and middle-class households) and the infrastructuring process enabling it. It foregrounds the importance of education as an apparatus of urban governance and an integral part of reshaping the wider sociospatial restructuring processes.