Stress and the ecology of urban experience: migrant mental lives in central Shanghai: Migrant mental lives in central Shanghai

Responding to claims in urban studies and epidemiology that modern urban living negatively affects the mental health of the poor and newcomers to the city, this article offers a different account based on an ethnography of a neighborhood in central Shanghai, where precarious rural migrant lives unfold. Drawing on the concept of “ecologies of experience” to recognize the making of everyday sensibilities and affective tensions in urban dwelling, it focuses on subjectivity formed in habits of negotiating the urban environment, in coping with troubled thoughts and feelings posed by precariousness. The article considers ecologies of experience arising in distinct prosaic locations ‐ a public library, a large bookstore, and a café – found to be important in the everyday spatial practices of migrants, grounding to different degrees of success hopes for their present and future in the city. In such dwelling, the stresses to mental health – consistently described by migrants as “pressure” (yali) – seem to be moderated through varied forms of respite, slowing‐down, and “moments of being,” though always in ambivalent ways. In recognizing the everyday materiality of urban living, the article looks beyond the tendency in studies of China's internal migration to read off migrant mental health outcomes from structural disadvantages related to work, welfare and living conditions. Conceptually, it opens new ground in thinking by acknowledging the role of the felt qualities of lived experience in managing mental states, building on work in geography, sociology and anthropology attentive to the affective resonances of place and to practices of urban negotiation.0