The Habitable City in China

Urban History in the Twentieth Century

Toby Lincoln, Xu Tao, Toby Lincoln, Xu Tao

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137554703
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137554710
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a new perspective on Chinese urban history by exploring cities as habitable spaces. China, the world's most populous nation, is now its newest urban society, and the pace of this unprecedented historical transformation has increased in recent decades. The contributors to this book conceptualise cities as first providing the necessities of life, and then becoming places in which the quality of life can be improved. They focus on how cities have been made secure during times of instability, how their inhabitants have consumed everything from the simplest of foods to the most expensive luxuries, and how they have been planned as ideal spaces. Drawing examples from across the country, this book offers comparisons between different cities, highlights continuities across time and space—and in doing so may provide solutions to some of the problems that continue to affect Chinese cities today.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1: Introduction: The Habitable City in Chinese History
• Chapter 2: The Chinese Corpsmen in the Shanghai Volunteer Corps
• Chapter 3: Kunming Dreaming: Hope, Change, and War in the Autobiographies of Youth in China’s Southwest
• Chapter 4: Securing the City, Securing the Nation: Militarization and Urban Police Work in Dalian, 1945–1953
• Chapter 5: To See and Be Seen: Horse Racing in Shanghai, 1848–1945
• Chapter 6: Second-Class Workers: Gender, Industry, and Locality in Workers’ Welfare Provision in Revolutionary China
• Chapter 7: A Utopian Garden City: Zhang Jingsheng’s ‘Beautiful Beijing’
• Chapter 8: Habitability in the Treaty Ports: Shanghai and Tianjin
• Chapter 9: Urbanization and Nature in China: The Example of Lake Tai
• Chapter 10: Conclusion: Are Chinese Cities Becoming More Habitable?
• Index