Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist who writes about urban governance, housing markets, cultural industries, and the built environment from a global perspective.
Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why... more Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, and the U.S. The analysis points to two major factors that have shaped the enforcement: tensions between national and local governments, and the strength of local territorial institutions.
South Asia Interdisciplinary Academic Journal, 2021
The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by... more The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, with a more diverse group of urban scholars who study the global South following. Challenging the city-centric view, as exemplified by the Chicago School’s concentric model of urban growth, these scholars train their lens on urban peripheries, such as suburbs, small towns, and the sprawling hinterlands outside metropolitan regions. This essay discusses what can be gained from shifting the analytical lens from the city center to the periphery, and from Western cities to cities in the global South. Drawing upon the new scholarship on urban peripheries in India, it also identifies three major avenues for further investigation—the comparative method, center-periphery relations, and ways of life.
Herbert Gans' classic book, The Levittowners, has inspired generations of urban sociologists stud... more Herbert Gans' classic book, The Levittowners, has inspired generations of urban sociologists studying American suburbs, but it has also confined the field's focus to studies of the local community. At the same time, however, outside the discipline of American urban sociology, an interdisciplinary field of global suburban studies has flourished. Global suburban studies address a wider range of topics that extends to infrastructural provision, governance, and popular resistance. By introducing the key debates in global suburban studies, this essay argues that it is time for American urban sociologists to broaden their analytical focus beyond community institutions and power relations, and that much can be gained by adopting an international and comparative perspective to learn about urban peripheries elsewhere in the world. A comparative vantage point can help U.S. sociologists better situate socio-spatial transformations in American suburbs among a world of cities (and suburbs), and mine new insights on topics involving poverty, segregation, and community life that have been at the center of suburban research in American sociology.
Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from the Northern, particularly Americ... more Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from the Northern, particularly American, cities on which much of urban sociology's conceptual apparatus has been based. Thus, depicting them in terms of a standard urban vocabulary risks imposing an inappropriate way of seeing. We need a vocabulary that is able to accommodate their different urban experience. This special issue contributes to the work of building that vocabulary. We select five keywords in urban sociology—eviction, segregation, suburbs, violence, and gentrification—and reconstruct them in light of the places we study (India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and South Africa). Our aim is to produce a set of keywords better equipped to travel South and, in the process, advance a truly global urban sociology.
Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why... more Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, and the U.S. The analysis points to two major factors that have shaped the enforcement: tensions between national and local governments, and the strength of local territorial institutions.
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2020
Drawing upon the scholarship in historical-comparative sociology, this article presents some guid... more Drawing upon the scholarship in historical-comparative sociology, this article presents some guidelines for theoretically structured urban comparison by spotlighting four methodological issues: case selection, causality, historical analyses and wider implications. This is demonstrated with a comparative analysis of air pollution control in Beijing and Delhi. The analysis finds that Beijing's clean air campaign features a territorial logic, centring on territorial institutions and authorities, while Delhi's clean air campaign features an associational logic, led by environmental NGOs in conjunction with the judiciary.
Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism, 2020
This article examines how China's rust-belt cities deploy historical preservation for urban revit... more This article examines how China's rust-belt cities deploy historical preservation for urban revitalization. Drawing upon fieldwork interviews and online debates, it investigates the preservation battle over Jihong Bridge in Harbin in northeast China. Built by Russian settlers in the early 20th century, Jihong Bridge symbolizes the birth of Harbin as a railway city, but a century later, it stood in the way of the local government's ambitious plan for building highspeed rail. The municipal government elevated the bridge, significantly modifying its structure to allow high-speed trains to pass underneath. The renovation was heavily criticized by local preservationists, who invoked the government's own preservation regulations to try to save the bridge. The study highlights the dilemma faced by local governments of rust-belt cities, as they are caught between the desire to deploy historical architecture for city branding and competing priorities of infrastructure investment.
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, cities in the Global South have seen extraordina... more Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, cities in the Global South have seen extraordinary growth, with China and India as the epicenters of urbanization. This essay critically assesses the state of the field of global urban studies and focuses particularly on the scholarship relating to urban China and India. The essay identifies three dominant paradigms in the scholarship: the global city thesis, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism. In contrast to US urban sociology, which is often preoccupied with the question of how neighborhood effects reproduce inequality, global urban studies account for a much wider array of urban processes, such as global urban networks, social polarization, and the transformation of the built environment. This essay points out the disconnect between US urban sociology and global urban studies and proposes a comparative approach as a way to bridge the divide.
The critical geography scholarship on mega-events mostly adopts the framework of accumulation by ... more The critical geography scholarship on mega-events mostly adopts the framework of accumulation by dispossession, highlighting the disruptive legacies such as displacement and gentrification wrought upon host cities. Though the critique is largely correct, it has failed to capture the complex layers of historical and institutional contexts that underlie urban social change in mega-event cities. This article makes a case for broadening our analytical perspective by introducing the concept of aspirational urbanism, which refers to the diverse practices and discourses launched by state and business elites in an attempt to remake their cities bourgeois and world-class. Aspirational urbanism underscores the gap between global aspirations and local realities and draws our attention to the ad hoc economic, political, and cultural strategies used by state and business elites to bridge the gap. The concept is particularly useful for studying transformations in mega-event cities in the Global South, because these are the places marked by sharp contrasts between global city ambitions and developing-country realities. By way of introducing this special issue on urban transformations and spectacles in Brazil, this article presents a comparative analysis of the Rio de Janeiro 2016 and Beijing 2008 Olympics to examine how aspirational urbanism unfolded differently in the 2 cities.
Informal settlements in cities in the global South have been increasingly targeted for redevelopm... more Informal settlements in cities in the global South have been increasingly targeted for redevelopment led by public–private coalitions, especially if they are in central locations. Previous scholarship often characterizes housing policies targeting informal settlements as examples of entrepreneurial governance geared toward recapturing land value by private and public elites. This understanding, however, glosses over the disparate policy choices that local governments use to address informal settlements. This article proposes an analytical framework to explain the variations in policy responses to informal settlements, and it argues that the various policy initiatives are largely shaped by four factors—intergovernmental relations, electoral politics, municipal finance, and the capacity of the civil society. With examples from China, India, and Brazil, this study comparatively examines how these forces have produced distinct informal housing policies, such as urban village removal in Guangzhou, slum rehabilitation in Mumbai, and favela upgrading in Rio de Janeiro.
As China and India urbanize, land acquisition by state and private actors has become highly conte... more As China and India urbanize, land acquisition by state and private actors has become highly contentious in both countries. This article compares two large-scale anti-land acquisition protests-the Wukan protest in China's Guangdong province and the Singur protest in the Indian State of West Bengal-to examine how the subnational state partakes in land acquisition and how rural protesters engage with different levels of the state in their resistance. The comparative analysis finds that the different involvement of the subnational state in land speculation has produced different spatiality and dynamics of protests. In China, rural protesters target the bottom-level authority such as village councils, often taking on a cellular form of mobilization geographically confined to their particular villages. By comparison, in India rural protesters target the regional state governments and they engage in associational forms of mobilization by building ad hoc alliances with political parties and NGOs beyond the affected villages. Although the larger context of political regimes should be taken into account, this article shows that the scales at which the subnational state partakes in land acquisition have largely shaped the spatiality and strategies of rural protests.
What's in a Name? Talking about Urban Peripheries, 2017
The train northbound from downtown Chicago snakes along the lakefront as it passes by one predomi... more The train northbound from downtown Chicago snakes along the lakefront as it passes by one predominantly white middle-class suburb after another-from Evanston and Wilmette to Glencoe and Lake Forest. Trains heading south pierce another stretch of residential suburbs-this one less well known and more racially mixed-Kensington, Riverdale, Harvey, and Matteson. The demographic landscape in America's suburbs has changed radically since the 1950s (Jackson, 1985; Keil, 2013), but the "suburban" label itself seems to be still useful, as both experts and non-experts routinely use it to describe low-density and automobile-dependent residential settlements developed outside the central city. The term, however, becomes confusing when used to denote the periphery of cities outside Great Britain and North America (Harris, 2010). In China, for example, the urban periphery exhibits landscape and socioeconomic features different from those of American suburbs. A passenger aboard a train departing a downtown area in a Chinese city lacks recourse to any single word to describe the landscape on the periphery-high-rise buildings, villages, small towns, shopping malls, development zones, industrial parks, and more high-rise buildings. If "suburb" refers to settlements with low density, new construction, and peripheral location (see the introduction to this volume), then the urban periphery of Chinese cities cannot be labelled "suburban" because, first, these places often have high density and, second, the buildings and infrastructure are not necessarily newer than those found in the central city, because of massive demolitions and new construction in many city centres. In spite of the differences between American suburbs and Chinese urban peripheries, however, "suburbanization" is routinely used in
China and India are epicenters of the world's urbanization. India's urbanization rate has been ri... more China and India are epicenters of the world's urbanization. India's urbanization rate has been rising steadily over the second half of the twentieth century, as people started moving from the countryside to the cities. In India, about one-third of the population lives in urban areas. The urban population growth in China is more recent-spurred in the 1980s by the relaxation of the hukou system that restricted country-to-urban migration. Driven mostly by migration, China's urban population spiked by more than 200 million in the single decade between 2001 and 2010. In 2011, China's urbanization rate tipped over 50 percent, and the central government wants to push the urbanization rate to 75 percent by 2020. The massive-scale urbanization in China and India presents daunting challenges for local governments in sectors such as housing, land-use planning, health care, education, and environmental protection. These challenges have proven intractable for both countries' urban governance systems. These systems take on different configurations in the two countries. Urban governance in China is characterized by powerful territorial actors such as city mayors and institutions such as the hukou system, which distributes rights, benefits, and resources unevenly across groups. By comparison, urban governance in India is characterized by weak municipal authorities and a high degree of fragmentation among different government bureaucracies, often in poor coordination with one another. The scale of urban growth and the associated social problems have made cities in China and India laboratories for research. For urban China studies, the empirical focus of the scholarship has evolved around the market reforms unleashed in the 1980s that accelerated major urban restructuring and changes in urban governance (Ren, 2013). Examples include housing reform that shuttered public housing held over from the socialist era and replaced it with privatized housing (Huang and Li, 2014); land reform that subjected urban land-use rights to market transactions (Lin and Ho, 2005; Lin 2009); hukou reform that spurred the largest-scale domestic migration in history, with close to 300 million migrant workers fleeing the countryside for opportunities in the cities (Fan, 2008; Chan, 2009); and reform of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) that resulted in mass layoffs of state-sector workers and the collapse of the socialist welfare system (Lee, 2007).
This essay comparatively examines the current urban fiscal crisis in US, Chinese, and Indian citi... more This essay comparatively examines the current urban fiscal crisis in US, Chinese, and Indian cities from the perspective of city power. The urban fiscal crisis in the USA is closely linked to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 as municipal governments largely depend on property tax as revenue sources. In China, municipal debt has increased sharply since 2008, not because of the recession, but because of the binge borrowing and overinvestment in infrastructure under the state stimulus programme, which was initiated by the central government to minimize the effects of the global recession on the Chinese economy. In India, cities have been in a perpetual state of fiscal crisis due to the stalled devolution of power from state to municipal governments. The comparison on authority, responsibility, and fiscal autonomy of city governments in the three countries demonstrates that the urban fiscal crisis has to be understood in plural terms, as the various assemblages of city power have given rise to a multitude of urban fiscal crises with different origins and consequences.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2014
This essay analyzes the political economy of the urban ruins captured in Greg Girard's photo albu... more This essay analyzes the political economy of the urban ruins captured in Greg Girard's photo album Phantom Shanghai. Rather than being marginal, irrelevant or merely objects for nostalgia, the ruins of buildings produced by real estate speculation offer crucial insights into the workings of the urban political economy and reflect wider trends of urban governance. Examining how building ruins come about in the first place and how they are represented in visual media can help us better understand the processes of urbanization and place making, and the central role of destruction in contemporary Chinese urbanism. This essay illustrates this point by analyzing the economic function, political legitimation and cultural significance of demolitions and ruins in urban China.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2012
The discourse of creative industries arrived in China in the early 2000s via the epistemic networ... more The discourse of creative industries arrived in China in the early 2000s via the epistemic network of international scholars and consultants. It has since garnered enthusiastic support on the domestic policy circuit, where it is viewed as the key to making the transition from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’. This article situates China's creative industry development in its urban context, examining the state spatial strategies of reconstituting control over cultural production by turning the formerly organic artist villages into official art districts. Drawing upon fieldwork on the visual and performing arts sectors in Beijing, we find that the local state has extended its creative control over artists by using interlocking directorates — a practice of appointing the same government officials to serve across the executive boards of multiple governing organizations in art districts. The districtification of artist villages has led to ‘artistic urbanization’, a process whereby rural villages quickly urbanize in the midst of art-led development endorsed and monitored by the local state. Artistic urbanization is a spatial strategy by the state to reconstitute its control over cultural production and to profit from real estate development, and it has led to renewed censorship of artists and widespread property speculation.
In recent years, environmental protection has increasingly been incorporated into municipal polic... more In recent years, environmental protection has increasingly been incorporated into municipal policy agendas in China. Although rising environmental awareness is an indicator of progress toward sustainable practices, a closer examination of recent policies reveals a tendency toward "spectacularization," i.e., municipal governments actively endorsing various green initiatives to stage "spectacles" that promote their cities. This article critiques green spectacles and urges a return to the "ordinary" in urban environmental policy making, in which urban spaces would be developed based on a city's unique needs rather than with a predetermined template. This would require abandoning costly flagship eco-city projects and top-down policy campaigns, as well as reflecting critically on what "green" means in everyday city life. A fter three decades of market reform, urban governance in China today is characterized by competitive decentralization, a process in which power, authority and resources are transferred from the central government to municipal governments. Municipal authorities engage in competitions of all sorts to position their cities ahead of others-from conventional practices of offering subsidies and tax cuts to businesses, to more creative ones such as commissioning iconic architectural projects for city branding, to more recent efforts of building eco-cities and endorsing sustainable development. 1 Unprecedented urban growth and decentralized urban governance present urgent challenges for Chinese cities, particularly with regard to housing, infrastructure, services and environmental protection. This article examines the recent environmental turn in urban policy making and addresses obstacles to and opportunities for achieving sustainable urban living in China. Until recently, local officials have tended to view economic growth and environmental protection as incompatible. With job promotion in mind, these officials focused largely on boosting GDP while environmental performance lan
This article examines the changing housing rights regimes amidst the urban renewal currently unde... more This article examines the changing housing rights regimes amidst the urban renewal currently underway in Shanghai and Mumbai. We examine the policies and regulations that govern residential security and housing tenure, the alteration of policy implementations by electoral and extra-electoral contestations, and the opportunities and strategies for housing activism in each context. We find that political contestations have enabled the construction of a more protective, although precarious, regime in Mumbai than in Shanghai. Despite striking differences, in both contexts housing rights regimes have produced fragmented urban citizenship rights by distributing protections unevenly and inconsistently to urban residents. Finally, although the forms of housing activism differ, residents and civil society groups in both Shanghai and Mumbai employ a variety of strategies in their resistance against demolitions and urban renewal. In the process, they become active urban citizens by articulating their rights to housing and by making new claims to the city.
Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why... more Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, and the U.S. The analysis points to two major factors that have shaped the enforcement: tensions between national and local governments, and the strength of local territorial institutions.
South Asia Interdisciplinary Academic Journal, 2021
The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by... more The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, with a more diverse group of urban scholars who study the global South following. Challenging the city-centric view, as exemplified by the Chicago School’s concentric model of urban growth, these scholars train their lens on urban peripheries, such as suburbs, small towns, and the sprawling hinterlands outside metropolitan regions. This essay discusses what can be gained from shifting the analytical lens from the city center to the periphery, and from Western cities to cities in the global South. Drawing upon the new scholarship on urban peripheries in India, it also identifies three major avenues for further investigation—the comparative method, center-periphery relations, and ways of life.
Herbert Gans' classic book, The Levittowners, has inspired generations of urban sociologists stud... more Herbert Gans' classic book, The Levittowners, has inspired generations of urban sociologists studying American suburbs, but it has also confined the field's focus to studies of the local community. At the same time, however, outside the discipline of American urban sociology, an interdisciplinary field of global suburban studies has flourished. Global suburban studies address a wider range of topics that extends to infrastructural provision, governance, and popular resistance. By introducing the key debates in global suburban studies, this essay argues that it is time for American urban sociologists to broaden their analytical focus beyond community institutions and power relations, and that much can be gained by adopting an international and comparative perspective to learn about urban peripheries elsewhere in the world. A comparative vantage point can help U.S. sociologists better situate socio-spatial transformations in American suburbs among a world of cities (and suburbs), and mine new insights on topics involving poverty, segregation, and community life that have been at the center of suburban research in American sociology.
Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from the Northern, particularly Americ... more Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from the Northern, particularly American, cities on which much of urban sociology's conceptual apparatus has been based. Thus, depicting them in terms of a standard urban vocabulary risks imposing an inappropriate way of seeing. We need a vocabulary that is able to accommodate their different urban experience. This special issue contributes to the work of building that vocabulary. We select five keywords in urban sociology—eviction, segregation, suburbs, violence, and gentrification—and reconstruct them in light of the places we study (India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and South Africa). Our aim is to produce a set of keywords better equipped to travel South and, in the process, advance a truly global urban sociology.
Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why... more Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, and the U.S. The analysis points to two major factors that have shaped the enforcement: tensions between national and local governments, and the strength of local territorial institutions.
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2020
Drawing upon the scholarship in historical-comparative sociology, this article presents some guid... more Drawing upon the scholarship in historical-comparative sociology, this article presents some guidelines for theoretically structured urban comparison by spotlighting four methodological issues: case selection, causality, historical analyses and wider implications. This is demonstrated with a comparative analysis of air pollution control in Beijing and Delhi. The analysis finds that Beijing's clean air campaign features a territorial logic, centring on territorial institutions and authorities, while Delhi's clean air campaign features an associational logic, led by environmental NGOs in conjunction with the judiciary.
Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism, 2020
This article examines how China's rust-belt cities deploy historical preservation for urban revit... more This article examines how China's rust-belt cities deploy historical preservation for urban revitalization. Drawing upon fieldwork interviews and online debates, it investigates the preservation battle over Jihong Bridge in Harbin in northeast China. Built by Russian settlers in the early 20th century, Jihong Bridge symbolizes the birth of Harbin as a railway city, but a century later, it stood in the way of the local government's ambitious plan for building highspeed rail. The municipal government elevated the bridge, significantly modifying its structure to allow high-speed trains to pass underneath. The renovation was heavily criticized by local preservationists, who invoked the government's own preservation regulations to try to save the bridge. The study highlights the dilemma faced by local governments of rust-belt cities, as they are caught between the desire to deploy historical architecture for city branding and competing priorities of infrastructure investment.
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, cities in the Global South have seen extraordina... more Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, cities in the Global South have seen extraordinary growth, with China and India as the epicenters of urbanization. This essay critically assesses the state of the field of global urban studies and focuses particularly on the scholarship relating to urban China and India. The essay identifies three dominant paradigms in the scholarship: the global city thesis, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism. In contrast to US urban sociology, which is often preoccupied with the question of how neighborhood effects reproduce inequality, global urban studies account for a much wider array of urban processes, such as global urban networks, social polarization, and the transformation of the built environment. This essay points out the disconnect between US urban sociology and global urban studies and proposes a comparative approach as a way to bridge the divide.
The critical geography scholarship on mega-events mostly adopts the framework of accumulation by ... more The critical geography scholarship on mega-events mostly adopts the framework of accumulation by dispossession, highlighting the disruptive legacies such as displacement and gentrification wrought upon host cities. Though the critique is largely correct, it has failed to capture the complex layers of historical and institutional contexts that underlie urban social change in mega-event cities. This article makes a case for broadening our analytical perspective by introducing the concept of aspirational urbanism, which refers to the diverse practices and discourses launched by state and business elites in an attempt to remake their cities bourgeois and world-class. Aspirational urbanism underscores the gap between global aspirations and local realities and draws our attention to the ad hoc economic, political, and cultural strategies used by state and business elites to bridge the gap. The concept is particularly useful for studying transformations in mega-event cities in the Global South, because these are the places marked by sharp contrasts between global city ambitions and developing-country realities. By way of introducing this special issue on urban transformations and spectacles in Brazil, this article presents a comparative analysis of the Rio de Janeiro 2016 and Beijing 2008 Olympics to examine how aspirational urbanism unfolded differently in the 2 cities.
Informal settlements in cities in the global South have been increasingly targeted for redevelopm... more Informal settlements in cities in the global South have been increasingly targeted for redevelopment led by public–private coalitions, especially if they are in central locations. Previous scholarship often characterizes housing policies targeting informal settlements as examples of entrepreneurial governance geared toward recapturing land value by private and public elites. This understanding, however, glosses over the disparate policy choices that local governments use to address informal settlements. This article proposes an analytical framework to explain the variations in policy responses to informal settlements, and it argues that the various policy initiatives are largely shaped by four factors—intergovernmental relations, electoral politics, municipal finance, and the capacity of the civil society. With examples from China, India, and Brazil, this study comparatively examines how these forces have produced distinct informal housing policies, such as urban village removal in Guangzhou, slum rehabilitation in Mumbai, and favela upgrading in Rio de Janeiro.
As China and India urbanize, land acquisition by state and private actors has become highly conte... more As China and India urbanize, land acquisition by state and private actors has become highly contentious in both countries. This article compares two large-scale anti-land acquisition protests-the Wukan protest in China's Guangdong province and the Singur protest in the Indian State of West Bengal-to examine how the subnational state partakes in land acquisition and how rural protesters engage with different levels of the state in their resistance. The comparative analysis finds that the different involvement of the subnational state in land speculation has produced different spatiality and dynamics of protests. In China, rural protesters target the bottom-level authority such as village councils, often taking on a cellular form of mobilization geographically confined to their particular villages. By comparison, in India rural protesters target the regional state governments and they engage in associational forms of mobilization by building ad hoc alliances with political parties and NGOs beyond the affected villages. Although the larger context of political regimes should be taken into account, this article shows that the scales at which the subnational state partakes in land acquisition have largely shaped the spatiality and strategies of rural protests.
What's in a Name? Talking about Urban Peripheries, 2017
The train northbound from downtown Chicago snakes along the lakefront as it passes by one predomi... more The train northbound from downtown Chicago snakes along the lakefront as it passes by one predominantly white middle-class suburb after another-from Evanston and Wilmette to Glencoe and Lake Forest. Trains heading south pierce another stretch of residential suburbs-this one less well known and more racially mixed-Kensington, Riverdale, Harvey, and Matteson. The demographic landscape in America's suburbs has changed radically since the 1950s (Jackson, 1985; Keil, 2013), but the "suburban" label itself seems to be still useful, as both experts and non-experts routinely use it to describe low-density and automobile-dependent residential settlements developed outside the central city. The term, however, becomes confusing when used to denote the periphery of cities outside Great Britain and North America (Harris, 2010). In China, for example, the urban periphery exhibits landscape and socioeconomic features different from those of American suburbs. A passenger aboard a train departing a downtown area in a Chinese city lacks recourse to any single word to describe the landscape on the periphery-high-rise buildings, villages, small towns, shopping malls, development zones, industrial parks, and more high-rise buildings. If "suburb" refers to settlements with low density, new construction, and peripheral location (see the introduction to this volume), then the urban periphery of Chinese cities cannot be labelled "suburban" because, first, these places often have high density and, second, the buildings and infrastructure are not necessarily newer than those found in the central city, because of massive demolitions and new construction in many city centres. In spite of the differences between American suburbs and Chinese urban peripheries, however, "suburbanization" is routinely used in
China and India are epicenters of the world's urbanization. India's urbanization rate has been ri... more China and India are epicenters of the world's urbanization. India's urbanization rate has been rising steadily over the second half of the twentieth century, as people started moving from the countryside to the cities. In India, about one-third of the population lives in urban areas. The urban population growth in China is more recent-spurred in the 1980s by the relaxation of the hukou system that restricted country-to-urban migration. Driven mostly by migration, China's urban population spiked by more than 200 million in the single decade between 2001 and 2010. In 2011, China's urbanization rate tipped over 50 percent, and the central government wants to push the urbanization rate to 75 percent by 2020. The massive-scale urbanization in China and India presents daunting challenges for local governments in sectors such as housing, land-use planning, health care, education, and environmental protection. These challenges have proven intractable for both countries' urban governance systems. These systems take on different configurations in the two countries. Urban governance in China is characterized by powerful territorial actors such as city mayors and institutions such as the hukou system, which distributes rights, benefits, and resources unevenly across groups. By comparison, urban governance in India is characterized by weak municipal authorities and a high degree of fragmentation among different government bureaucracies, often in poor coordination with one another. The scale of urban growth and the associated social problems have made cities in China and India laboratories for research. For urban China studies, the empirical focus of the scholarship has evolved around the market reforms unleashed in the 1980s that accelerated major urban restructuring and changes in urban governance (Ren, 2013). Examples include housing reform that shuttered public housing held over from the socialist era and replaced it with privatized housing (Huang and Li, 2014); land reform that subjected urban land-use rights to market transactions (Lin and Ho, 2005; Lin 2009); hukou reform that spurred the largest-scale domestic migration in history, with close to 300 million migrant workers fleeing the countryside for opportunities in the cities (Fan, 2008; Chan, 2009); and reform of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) that resulted in mass layoffs of state-sector workers and the collapse of the socialist welfare system (Lee, 2007).
This essay comparatively examines the current urban fiscal crisis in US, Chinese, and Indian citi... more This essay comparatively examines the current urban fiscal crisis in US, Chinese, and Indian cities from the perspective of city power. The urban fiscal crisis in the USA is closely linked to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 as municipal governments largely depend on property tax as revenue sources. In China, municipal debt has increased sharply since 2008, not because of the recession, but because of the binge borrowing and overinvestment in infrastructure under the state stimulus programme, which was initiated by the central government to minimize the effects of the global recession on the Chinese economy. In India, cities have been in a perpetual state of fiscal crisis due to the stalled devolution of power from state to municipal governments. The comparison on authority, responsibility, and fiscal autonomy of city governments in the three countries demonstrates that the urban fiscal crisis has to be understood in plural terms, as the various assemblages of city power have given rise to a multitude of urban fiscal crises with different origins and consequences.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2014
This essay analyzes the political economy of the urban ruins captured in Greg Girard's photo albu... more This essay analyzes the political economy of the urban ruins captured in Greg Girard's photo album Phantom Shanghai. Rather than being marginal, irrelevant or merely objects for nostalgia, the ruins of buildings produced by real estate speculation offer crucial insights into the workings of the urban political economy and reflect wider trends of urban governance. Examining how building ruins come about in the first place and how they are represented in visual media can help us better understand the processes of urbanization and place making, and the central role of destruction in contemporary Chinese urbanism. This essay illustrates this point by analyzing the economic function, political legitimation and cultural significance of demolitions and ruins in urban China.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2012
The discourse of creative industries arrived in China in the early 2000s via the epistemic networ... more The discourse of creative industries arrived in China in the early 2000s via the epistemic network of international scholars and consultants. It has since garnered enthusiastic support on the domestic policy circuit, where it is viewed as the key to making the transition from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’. This article situates China's creative industry development in its urban context, examining the state spatial strategies of reconstituting control over cultural production by turning the formerly organic artist villages into official art districts. Drawing upon fieldwork on the visual and performing arts sectors in Beijing, we find that the local state has extended its creative control over artists by using interlocking directorates — a practice of appointing the same government officials to serve across the executive boards of multiple governing organizations in art districts. The districtification of artist villages has led to ‘artistic urbanization’, a process whereby rural villages quickly urbanize in the midst of art-led development endorsed and monitored by the local state. Artistic urbanization is a spatial strategy by the state to reconstitute its control over cultural production and to profit from real estate development, and it has led to renewed censorship of artists and widespread property speculation.
In recent years, environmental protection has increasingly been incorporated into municipal polic... more In recent years, environmental protection has increasingly been incorporated into municipal policy agendas in China. Although rising environmental awareness is an indicator of progress toward sustainable practices, a closer examination of recent policies reveals a tendency toward "spectacularization," i.e., municipal governments actively endorsing various green initiatives to stage "spectacles" that promote their cities. This article critiques green spectacles and urges a return to the "ordinary" in urban environmental policy making, in which urban spaces would be developed based on a city's unique needs rather than with a predetermined template. This would require abandoning costly flagship eco-city projects and top-down policy campaigns, as well as reflecting critically on what "green" means in everyday city life. A fter three decades of market reform, urban governance in China today is characterized by competitive decentralization, a process in which power, authority and resources are transferred from the central government to municipal governments. Municipal authorities engage in competitions of all sorts to position their cities ahead of others-from conventional practices of offering subsidies and tax cuts to businesses, to more creative ones such as commissioning iconic architectural projects for city branding, to more recent efforts of building eco-cities and endorsing sustainable development. 1 Unprecedented urban growth and decentralized urban governance present urgent challenges for Chinese cities, particularly with regard to housing, infrastructure, services and environmental protection. This article examines the recent environmental turn in urban policy making and addresses obstacles to and opportunities for achieving sustainable urban living in China. Until recently, local officials have tended to view economic growth and environmental protection as incompatible. With job promotion in mind, these officials focused largely on boosting GDP while environmental performance lan
This article examines the changing housing rights regimes amidst the urban renewal currently unde... more This article examines the changing housing rights regimes amidst the urban renewal currently underway in Shanghai and Mumbai. We examine the policies and regulations that govern residential security and housing tenure, the alteration of policy implementations by electoral and extra-electoral contestations, and the opportunities and strategies for housing activism in each context. We find that political contestations have enabled the construction of a more protective, although precarious, regime in Mumbai than in Shanghai. Despite striking differences, in both contexts housing rights regimes have produced fragmented urban citizenship rights by distributing protections unevenly and inconsistently to urban residents. Finally, although the forms of housing activism differ, residents and civil society groups in both Shanghai and Mumbai employ a variety of strategies in their resistance against demolitions and urban renewal. In the process, they become active urban citizens by articulating their rights to housing and by making new claims to the city.
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