Chinese Urbanism

Critical Perspectives

Mark Jayne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138201729
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315505831
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book provides a definitive overview of contemporary developments in our understanding of urban life in China. Multidisciplinary perspectives outline the most significant critical, theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in our appreciation of Chinese cities in the context of an increasingly globalized world. Each chapter includes reviews and appraisals of past and current theoretical development and embarks on innovative theoretical directions relating to Marxist, feminist, post-structural, post-colonial and 'more-than-representational' thinking. The book provides an in-depth insight into urban change and considers in what ways theoretical engagement with Chinese cities contributes to our understanding of 'global urbanism'. Chapters explore how new critical perspectives on economic, political, social, spatial, emotional, embodied and affective practices add value to our understanding of urban life in, and beyond, China.

Chinese Urbanism offers valuable insights which will be of interest to students and scholars alike working in geography, urban studies, Asian studies, economics, political studies and beyond.

1

An introduction to critical perspectives on Chinese urbanism

Mark Jayne

It is surprising that the unprecedented scale and speed of urbanisation in China over the past two decades has not placed theoretical and empirical study of Chinese cities at the heart of contemporary critical urban scholarship (see Jayne and Ward 2017). Growing academic interest in Chinese urbanism around the world has nonetheless led to writing about Chinese cities mirroring the diversity of arguments, approaches, topics and case-studies that characterises international research agendas. So how can we explain this curious situation? Given the remarkable transformation of Chinese cities and the now voluminous, and ever growing, amount of research and writing, why is it that scholarship focused on urban China is not making more of an impact as cutting-edge, innovative and adventurous urban thinking? To what extent, and how, are Chinese urban scholars, and scholars of urban China responding to this lack of international influence? Chinese Urbanism: Critical Perspectives is the first collection of essays to ask, reflect on, and respond to these questions and challenges.

Urban theory and Chinese urbanism

In order to frame the contributions made by authors throughout this book this introduction begins by discussing the relationship between urban theory and Chinese urbanism followed by a summary of key theoretical debates and empirical topics addressed within and across the chapters. Beforehand, however, I make a brief detour to address what might well have been the first thing to spring to the mind of anyone with an interest in critical urban perspectives whose gaze was drawn to the title or cover of this book. Did you ask yourself how is it that an urban social and cultural geographer living and working in the small city of Cardiff, in the small country of Wales has come to edit a book that claims to advance our understanding of Chinese cities?

A rather convoluted answer to this question begins with regard to another small city: Stoke-on-Trent (also known as The Potteries) located in the English midlands, a city that is (perhaps ironically) best known in many parts of the world (historically, but arguably less so today) for its production of ceramics – inspired and enabled of course in no short measure through exploitation and replication of centuries of knowledges, technologies, inventions, techniques, expertise and designs pioneered in China. It was in Stoke-on-Trent, during my PhD research that I became more and more frustrated by the urban studies literature that I was reading which was overwhelmingly dominated by theoretical arguments, case-studies and empirical material generated in big cities throughout Europe and North America. The urban theory that I was reading can perhaps best be characterised as generalisable depictions of urban change proliferated through research undertaken in ‘big’ or global cities and ‘the great’ metropolises – so very different from my own case-study city.

London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Las Vegas were used as templates for considering epochal urban conditions relating to Fordism/post-Fordism, industrialisation/post-industrialisation, modernism/post-modernism, global cities/global regions and so on. These global metropolises, and the spaces and places within them were invariably depicted as archetypal or paradigmatic in order to support the theoretical arguments being championed (see for example, Veblen 1899; Simmel 1903; Christaller 1933; Adorno and Horkeheimer 1947; Benjamin 1999; Hall 1966; Zukin 1989; Knox 1987; Castells and Portes 1989; Harvey 1989a and b; Soja 1989; Davis 1990; Sassen 1994; Beaverstock et al. 1999; Storper 1997; Scott 1998, 2001 and so on). Moreover, even when studies focused on urbanism beyond ‘big cities’, looking at national capitals, or ‘regional’ and ‘provincial’ cities, researchers tended to judge them, at best, as of ‘secondary’ importance, or at worst by defining them as ‘failing’. Despite progress being made in rebalancing the woeful neglect of small cities by urban theorists through research which considers the urban world as not made up of a handful of global metropolises but characterised by heterogeneity, there is still much work to do to challenge urban studies orthodoxies that define small cities as of ‘lesser’ importance (Bell and Jayne 2006, 2009; Jayne et al. 2011; Jayne 2013).

Embedded in these theoretical concerns and arguments applied to championing the importance of studying small cities, my first steps towards critical intervention with Chinese urbanism emerged through inspiration and a mix of wonder and frustration engendered by my first visit to China. Excitement, confusion, bemusement, amusement, and at times fear, filled my senses. Bombarded by thrilling sights, sounds, tastes, smells and atmospheres – I found Chinese cities to be awe-inspiring! I really wanted to know more! I admit to my embarrassment however, that at that time I had read relatively little academic writing about Chinese cities. Indeed, seeking to make sense of the heady mix of my first exciting experiences of China’s urbanism coupled with attempts to address my limited knowledge of academic literature relating to China, in parallel with a lack of understanding of the orthodoxies of knowledge production in China turned out to be a challenging process. My confusion was keenly felt as I sat watching a keynote presentation at the conference that I had travelled to China to attend. The lecture (presented and translated by the speaker in both Mandarin and English) was based on research related to the redevelopment of a historic urban quarter in one of China’s largest cities and was a fascinating story, charismatically presented (including some brief pointers to comparative case-studies throughout the world); focused on aesthetics and design, government and ‘private sector’ partnership working, the displacement of long-established communities and emergence of new restaurant/bar based night-time consumption cultures. There was however, an absence of theoretical content throughout. In wishing to know more about the urban thinking that underpinned the presentation, during the question and answer session I quizzed the speaker by asking about the theoretical inspiration for the research and paper. While there may very well have been nuances to the answer I received that were lost in translation (from Mandarin to English), the response seemed to be that ‘the case-study spoke for itself’. My follow up question regarding the usefulness of theories generated in cities in Europe and North America (relating for example to writing on gentrification, class, purification of space, consumer culture and so) met with a more straightforward response that such ideas were not applicable to China.

Following my bemusement at this response I was pleased to find that such ontological and epistemological framing was generally not replicated throughout the remainder of the conference papers, nonetheless what Nigel Thrift (2000) describes as persistent myths about cities did spring to mind that day. First, Thrift argued against the idea that cities are becoming globally homogeneous, and that diversity of supposedly serial, homogeneous sites such as shopping malls, office blocks or in this case redevelopment of historic urban quarters is often assumed rather than critically explored. Thrift highlighted the importance of fully taking into account historical, political, economic, socio-spatial and cultural contexts in order to highlight how apparently similar urban spaces and places, institutions and everyday life vary across space and time. Second, Thrift pointed to long-standing myths of urban exceptionalism, which Pow later excellently elaborates with regard to Chinese urbanism. For example, Pow (2011: 47) characterises writing about urban China as often falling into a trap of assuming political, economic, social, cultural and spatial urban practices and processes ‘peculiar to China [which] have rendered the Chinese urbanization trajectory more different than similar from Anglo-American cities … [and accepted rather than critiqued that the] Chinese state in particular is seen to respond to and/or create conditions and institutions that render urban China’s experience as unique and exceptional’. Such insights also point to the importance of Nigel Thrift’s (2000) assertion that ‘one size does not fit all’ when it comes to thinking about urbanism, that cities (wherever they are in the world) are not homogenised entities. Not all cities are the same and no one story can tell of ‘the city’, no matter what its size, shape, location or national context. Such theoretical work insists on the imperative to fully account for heterogeneity and to challenge exceptionalist accounts of urban practices, identities and processes in order to critically re-imagine ‘the city’.

My interest in global academic knowledge production and disparities of theory building further flourished soon after my first trip to China. I began to read literature outlining the details of a growing recognition by urban theorists of the need to critically engage with the theoretical, empirical and methodological challenges bound up with accounting for the diversity of cities around the world. Indeed, at that time there was a growing amount of writing being published which focused on the ways in which urban theory has tended to remain stubbornly focused on a small number of ‘western’ cities that act as the template against which all other cities are judged (see for example, Chakrabarty 2000; Connell 2007; Robinson 2006; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Isoke 2013; Roy and Ong 2011; Edensor and Jayne 2012). It was also being acknowledged by numerous scholars that this weakness in urban studies literature was further exacerbated by a lack of exchange of ideas and theoretical dialogue with ‘non-western theory’ (see for example, Edensor and Jayne 2011; Jayne 2013).

For example, Amin and Graham (1997) and later Robinson (2002, 2006) argued that all cities should be theorised as ‘ordinary’ – including those left ‘off the map’ of international urban research agendas. This argument makes clear that all cities are important centres (some arguably more than others) of globalising political, economic, social, cultural and spatial dynamics and that there is a need to look at a broader range of practices, processes, identities and autonomies that constitute structural and everyday urban experiences. Moreover, theorists including Chakrabarty (2000), Robinson (2002) and Connell (2007) highlighted the ways in which colonial relationships and imaginations underpin persistent asymmetrical relationships across international scholarship. While ‘western’ theorists more often than not ignore ‘non-western’ thinking scholars throughout the world are nonetheless expected to frame their work within ‘an authorised western canonical literature’ in order to publish in English language journals and to secure contracts with international book publishers. Robinson (2002) reminded urban theorists to acknowledge their own cultural and academic situatedness, and in doing so challenged us all to contribute to ensuring that ‘western’ academic publishing is more accessible to scholars around the world in order to counter a ‘knowledge production complex’.

It is also important to note that work to de-centre urban theory from orthodoxies generated in Europe and North America and rallying calls to advance more heterogeneous, diverse and cosmopolitan urban studies have emerged and been acted on alongside proliferation of pluralistic theoretical approaches to understanding cities and urban life (see Jayne and Ward 2017). However, despite the growth of interest in Chinese urbanism there has been a relative lack of engagement with critical theoretical perspectives – including Marxist, feminist, post-structural, post-colonial, and ‘more-than-representational’ thinking – and the diverse theoretical debates and work that these voluminous bodies of literature have inspired and which has been vital in enlivening urban studies over the past few decades. Given the complexity of contemporary cities, it is not surprising that urban theory has become characterised by complex and heterogeneous thinking.

For example, as highlighted earlier in this chapter writing inspired by post-colonial theory has shown that researchers have only just scratched the surface of urban experiences around the world and there is need for a more diverse, inclusive and comparative urban theory (see for example, Bell and Jayne 2006, 2009; Robinson 2006; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Isoke 2013; Roy and Ong 2011; Edensor and Jayne 2012; Ward 2010; Jayne 2013). Directly emerging from this writing has been a return to comparative approaches (see Robinson 2006; Nijman 2007; Dear 2005; Legg and McFarlane 2008), such as Kevin Ward’s (2009: 406) call for theorists to take seriously a ‘relational comparative’ approach which stresses interconnected urban trajectories to identify:

how different cities are implicated in each other’s past, present and future which moves us away from searching for similarities and differences between two mutually exclusive contexts and instead towards relational comparisons that uses different cities to pose questions of one another

Other recent innovative work seeks to develop a better understanding of territorial urban spatial fixes of capitalism while attending to increasing understanding of relational comparative urbanism (see McCann and Ward 2010, 2012; Jayne et al. 2011, 2013).

Alongside (and at times intersecting with) post-colonial thinking, and theoretical work emerging from its critique are of course other foundational debates that have been at the heart of urban studies. Of particular importance is Marxist and post-structuralist theory. Key figures in advancing what is a long tradition of Marxist urban thought include theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and more recently David Harvey. The illustrious career of Henri Lefebvre, a French sociologist and philosopher, began to flourish with his ‘critique of everyday life’ written in the 1930s. Working on similar theoretical and empirical terrain to members of the historic Frankfurt and Chicago School’s of urban studies, Lefebvre considered topics such as alienation, boredom, consumption, and the promises of freedom that emerged with increasing leisure time across urban societies. Lefebvre suggested that work and leisure rhythms of capitalism were responsible for reducing self-expression and leading to a poorer quality of everyday life – in sum, that by colonising everyday life industrial capitalism was able to reproduce itself. Importantly, Lefebvre’s (1984) arguments advanced previous theoretical debate through his focus on everyday life. Lefebvre highlighted that it was by championing progressive conditions of human life, rather than seeking to gain control of capitalist production, that humans could work towards achieving a socially just world. Lefebvre’s (1968, 1991) influential later work from the 1960s onwards focused on the ‘social production of space’ and the ‘right to the city’, has also subsequently had a profound influence on urban theory. Of equal importance to the Marxist urban thinking of Lefebvre has of course been the work of David Harvey. Injecting critical perspectives initially into urban geography, and then proliferating influential thinking about cities across the social sciences David Harvey and those ‘metroMarxists’ inspired by his work have advanced our understanding of the profound influence of capitalism on urban experience (see Merrifield 2002).

In a similar vein, post-structural thinking inspired by theorists such as Foucault (1997a), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Haraway (1991) and Latour (2005) has also had a profound influence on urban studies. For example, one thread of post-structural theory has inspired assemblage thinking which has been argued to have ‘changed urban research’ through a focus on topics such as materialities, (non)human actors, networks, policy, practices, ideas, learning, atmospheres (see Farías and Bender 2009; Blok and Farías 2016; Farías 2016). Furthermore, following a ‘cultural turn’ across the social sciences a growing number of urban theorists have considered emotions, embodiment and affect, or ‘more-than representational’ ideas in order to address mundane everyday practices that shape our social lives in particular sites (Thrift 2004b).

These (and other) innovative theoretical approaches have nonetheless left critical urban thinking stubbornly dominated by writers in Europe and North America. Despite implicit and explicit intentions to address this imbalance, ‘it is the cities of the North which we have had in mind while writing the book’ but there is hope that ‘new perspectives’ can be subsequently ‘explored by others’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 3) – or that key arguments ‘are relevant to the study of non-western cities too’ (Hubbard 2006: 248). Indeed, despite the wealth of innovative, ground-breaking and rich theoretical resources now available, engagement with critical thinking nonetheless remains marginal in Chinese urbanism when compared to dominant economic and spatial analysis (although see the work of Kenworthy-Teather 2001; Gui et al. 2009; Kong 2011, Crang and Zhang 2012; He 2013; Wang et al. 2013; Pow 2012; Zhu and Wei 2016 – and of course the work of those who have contributed to this volume).

While it is clear that uptake of critical urban thinking has limited the ability of Chinese urban scholarship to make cutting-edge contributions to international research agendas we still need to ask how we can assess the growing amount of academic writing that is offering important insights and critical perspectives on the changing nature of cities and urban life in China. Empirically, attention has focused on urban and regional growth, land use and housing, the ‘urban – rural’ divide, physical and infrastructural restructuring, economic development, migration and social change (see for example; Logan 2001; Wu 2009; Lu 2011; Wu and Gaubatz 2012; Shaqiao 2014). A number of key texts have been at the vanguard of understanding Chinese urbanism with regard to a diverse range of urban practices and processes such as globalisation and economic reform, spatial and physical transformation (Xu 2000; Logan 2001; Wu 2009; Sit 2010; Wu and Gaubatz 2012; Ren 2013; Shaqiao 2014). Other volumes have considered topics such as urban design (Chen and Thwaites 2013); city and regional planning (Yu, L. 2014); housing inequality (Huang and Li 2014); modernity and space (Lu 2011); climate change and governance (Mai and Franchesh-Huidobro 2014); cinematic urbanism (Braester 2010); politics of community and social life (Heberer and Gobel 2013; Tang and Parish 2000); young people (Cockain 2011) and consumer culture (Yu, L.2014).

Important critical reflections on developments in Chinese urbanism are outlined by He and Qian (2017) in an insightful review of around 2500 articles published in international journals from 2003 – 2013 from across the disciplines that make up Chinese ‘urban studies’ – area studies, interdisciplinary social science, geography, sociology, planning development, demography, anthropology, political science, public administration, cultural studies and urban studies. Popular topics included the hukou system, sustainability and ecosystems, real estate development, divisions of labour, gated communities, migration, production networks, and wage inequality. Key themes discussed in these papers include globalisation, market transition and global cities, urban poverty and socio-spatial inequality, and rural migrants’ urban experience. He and Qian (2016) also point to emerging frontiers of research relating to urban enclaves and spatial fragmentation, public space, consumption, middle-class urban culture, social movements, activism and the ‘right to the city’ as well as arguing the need for more scholarship on topics such as transnationalism, mobilities, gender, sexuality and so on. In applying a critical perspective to Chinese urban literature over the past decade or so He and Qian (2017) celebrate the breadth and diversity of scholarship, and rightly foreground areas of theoretical innovation and fruitful new avenues of research. However, in reflecting on progress to date He and Qian (2017: 463) nonetheless lament that Chinese urban scholarship can overwhelmingly be characterised by ‘empirical studies and econometrical modelling’ and go on to argue that, ‘scholarship in urban China studies [has been] … dominated by a positive approach and generally lacked nuanced analysis and theoretical debates’.

While this critical interrogation of the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese urban literature is timely and pertinent, it also is worth noting that the weight of empirically focused and/or positivist ontologies and epistemologies is not however unique to Chinese scholarship and that around the world

for a significant proportion of academics who write about cities, advancing or contributing to the development of urban theory is a minor or at best secondary concern. For example, the emphasis of man...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction to critical perspectives on Chinese urbanism
• Part I Space and place
• Part II Identity, lifestyle and forms of sociability
• Part III Consumption and urban cultures
• Part IV (Im)mobilities and materialities
• Part V Bodies, emotions and atmospheres
• Bibliography
• Index