Renmin University of China
Urban Planning and Management
Great urban transformations are diffusing across the Global South, removing the original landscape of urban margins to make of them a new urban frontier. These processes raise questions of both validity and legitimacy for ethnographic... more
Great urban transformations are diffusing across the Global South, removing the original landscape of urban margins to make of them a new urban frontier. These processes raise questions of both validity and legitimacy for ethnographic practice, requiring critical reflection on both spatiality and method in fieldwork at the urban margins. This article draws on fieldwork experience in Beijing's green belts, which could also be labelled the city's urban margin or frontier, to reflect on the space-time of encounter in the field. I aim to demonstrate how space foregrounds not only our bodily experiences but also ethnographic investigations of the daily life, and hence becomes a method. Beijing's green belts symbolise a historical-geographical conjuncture (a moment) emerging in its urban metamorphosis. Traditional endeavours (immanent in various spatial metaphors) to identify field sites as reified entities are invalidated over the course of the space-time encounter, requiring a relational spatial ontology to register such dynamics. The use in fieldwork of DiDi Hitch, a mobile app for taxi-hailing and hitchhiking, reveals the spatiotemporal construction of self-other relations needing recognition via the dialectics of the encounter. In this relational framework, an encounter is never a priori but a negotiation of a here-and-now between different trajectories and stories as individuals are thrown together in socially constructed space and time.
Citation: Zhao, Yimin. 2017. “Space as method: Field sites and encounters in Beijing’s green belts.” City: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 21(2), 190-206
Citation: Zhao, Yimin. 2017. “Space as method: Field sites and encounters in Beijing’s green belts.” City: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 21(2), 190-206
通过塑造一种全新的空间和尺度想象，资本及其权力便可经过“二手空间”的中介而实现全球范围的流动，最终改变（甚至摧毁）各个地方每条街道的日常生活。为了避免这样的状况及其恶化，我们应当首先反思类似《宣言》这样的二手空间观，然后从我们的身边和脚下出发去构想自己的空间观念。只有当我们认识到地方本质上就是种种全球/全局性过程的交错所在（a global sense of... more
通过塑造一种全新的空间和尺度想象，资本及其权力便可经过“二手空间”的中介而实现全球范围的流动，最终改变（甚至摧毁）各个地方每条街道的日常生活。为了避免这样的状况及其恶化，我们应当首先反思类似《宣言》这样的二手空间观，然后从我们的身边和脚下出发去构想自己的空间观念。只有当我们认识到地方本质上就是种种全球/全局性过程的交错所在（a global sense of place），开始从本地出发去探索这些更广阔的、超越了本地尺度的空间属性，用比较的方法重新审视别人和自己，我们才可能真正把握空间和生活的密切关联，才可能发现和对抗萦绕四周的社会和空间不义，才可能重写多元且动态的城市宣言。
Citation: Zhao, Yimin. 2017. "Second-hand space: Unthinking the Quito Papers." Dushu Journal (读书杂志), 2017 (12): 3-12 (in Chinese)
Citation: Zhao, Yimin. 2017. "Second-hand space: Unthinking the Quito Papers." Dushu Journal (读书杂志), 2017 (12): 3-12 (in Chinese)
We often hear the frustrations of villagers whose lands are violently taken away against their will with no or poor compensations (e.g. Hoffman 2014; Johnson 2013; Pomfret 2013). Sargeson (2013) argues that violence is an integral element... more
We often hear the frustrations of villagers whose lands are violently taken away against their will with no or poor compensations (e.g. Hoffman 2014; Johnson 2013; Pomfret 2013). Sargeson (2013) argues that violence is an integral element of China’s urbanisation project, authorising urban development. In this chapter, we show that such use of state violence goes hand in hand with another dimension of state action, that is co-optation of villagers (cf. Gramsci 1971) by the imposition of what Henri Lefebvre (2003) refers to as ‘official urbanism’. Drawing on Lefebvre’s critiques of urbanism, this chapter aims to reflect upon the use of official urbanism to advance China’s ‘urban age’, and addresses two analytical objectives by dissecting green belt policy in Beijing. First, we demonstrate China’s urbanism as an institution and an ideology is a state project: it is integrated with both economic and political practices, and plays a critical role in sustaining the state strategy of land-based accumulation. Second, we also illustrate that official urbanism, as an ideology, has been successfully instilled into the national ethos, imposing it upon the population (especially villagers) as a new and desirable way of life, which in turn supports the state’s project of urbanism. We conclude that urbanism is one and the same expression of politics of urban space, with the Party-state’s ideological, economic and political ambitions put at the centre. For this reason, any meaningful approach to critiquing existing sets of urban knowledge and practice that produces urban inequalities and injustice in contemporary China should start from negation of the ‘official urbanism’.
- by Hyun Bang Shin and +1
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Compressed development experiences, especially in Asia, have translated into expectations for 'fast cities' where time and space are compressed to materialise 'real' Asia experiences. However, what does 'fast urbanism' mean for those who... more
Compressed development experiences, especially in Asia, have translated into expectations for 'fast cities' where time and space are compressed to materialise 'real' Asia experiences. However, what does 'fast urbanism' mean for those who see Asian cites as reference points? Moreover, what does 'fast urbanism' mean for those who have living memories of such fast-paced development, and how might this be different for their future generations? This intervention addresses these two questions by reflecting on the politics of temporality, calling for critical attention to the ideological imposition of 'fast' development in Asia and beyond. We argue that the 'Asian speed' of development was enabled in specific historical and geographical conjunctures, which entailed the appropriation of individual and collective aspirations through the invention of a certain kind of futurity and in so doing, consolidated of local politico-economic structures that displace both the present and the future.
A new trend is emerging in China that categorises cities according to economic conditions and political statuses and that formulates a new urban hierarchical system. This urban hierarchy has historical echoes from several decades ago,... more
A new trend is emerging in China that categorises cities according to economic conditions and political statuses and that formulates a new urban hierarchical system. This urban hierarchy has historical echoes from several decades ago, when the country was divided into three “fronts” for geopolitical concerns. Ironically, the Chinese character of “tiers” and “fronts” is identical: “线” (xian). By referring to Luzhou, a medium-sized city in Western China that bears the same label as “三线” (“third tier” / “third front”) in different periods, we explore the change of urban political economy and governing techniques that are underlying these two different (yet at the same time identical) labels of a city. It turns out that the two labels of Luzhou indicate dissimilar logics of the state. The “third front” in the Maoist era, with centrally-dominated redistribution of resources, rendered the local state a passive political subject. In contrast, the recent rise of “tiers” discourse has a lot of purchases from the local state. Situating in inter-city competitions, they are empowered yet also impelled to be more active in promoting the urbanisation process and boosting “urban-ness” in partnership with capital. Here, between the territorial logic of the planned economy half century ago and the ongoing entrepreneurial local governance at present, we are invited to further reflect on how the development trajectory of an ordinary (and even overlooked) city could contribute to more global urban studies.