We just received these really great collaged images from Beijing taken by Rufina Wu. Another post below (http://unhoused.livejournal.com/8298.html) mentions her exciting research and a postcard project she did about it. I mistakenly wrote that the hostels developed as a result of the 2008 Olympics and the clearance of informal settlements. Rufina corrected that in an email:

Just to clarify though - Beijing's underground migrant hostels emerged not as a result of the city's clean-up campaigns for the Olympics. Migrants started to pour into the cities as a result of Deng Xiaoping's political and economic reforms that started in the late 1970s. Alternative/informal housing emerged as a result of the lack of public housing provision for non-urban residents - underground hostels constitute one form of housing tactics exercised by migrants (note - this is a very simplified explanation of the current situation in China).

Talking to some of the new colleagues I met at the conference led me to discover an "inverse" of Beijing's underground space: rooftop shanties. Like Beijing's underground spaces, rooftop shanties form a dispersed layer covering the city. The success of these two forms of alternative housing is hinged upon their invisibility from the urban proper. I haven't had much time to look into this phenomenon in depth, but they are commonly found in Cairo and Hong Kong. Here are some links that might be of interest:

On Cairo: http://home.barton.ac.uk/curriculum/sc_env/geology/Geography%202/CAIRO.htm

An article on Hong Kong: http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200702210118.html

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More images: