Creating Chinese Urbanism

Fulong Wu is Bartlett Professor of Planning at UCL.

‘For its careful documentation of urban transformation this book has made a quite monumental contribution to urban studies and should find its place on he shelves of urban scholars no matter their regional emphasis.’
Eurasian Geography and Economics

‘Creating Chinese Urbanism is a genuinely compelling book. On the one hand, it embarks on a path of retheorising Chinese urbanisation as a process during which social orders and modes of associations are fundamentally altered, an inquiry that has hitherto been under-scrutinised in urban China studies. On the other hand, the empirical materials presented in the book are extremely rich, drawing upon the author’s three decades of research’
Urban Studies
 

In this pathbreaking study of the diversity and
heterogeneity of neighborhood life in urban China, Wu Fulong asks readers to
reflect on the seemingly simple question what distinguishes the rural from the
urban. But rather than foregrounding paired comparisons of the material conditions
and built environments, Wu focuses on comparing social relationships within
four types of urban residential areas: 
alleyway or courtyard neighborhoods built before 1949, socialist era
workplace apartment blocks, peri-urban villages now physically incorporated
within cities, and suburban gated communities. And rather than foregrounding
contemporary debates about agglomeration and capital accumulation, Wu asks
readers to concentrate on the degree to which grassroots sociality and social
relationships  have departed from Fei
Xiaotong’s concept of differential modes of association (差序格局chaxugeju) developed
during fieldwork in rural China during the 1930s. Thus, for Wu the “fading of
rurality is urbanization” (p.231) and the absence of a placed based moral order
marks entry to city life. A remarkable, original and bold interpretation of
China’s recent warp speed urbanization.
– Deborah Davis,
Professor Emerita of Sociology, Yale University, USA

As observers continue to grapple with the significance of
China’s urban revolution, this book offers an innovative conceptual framework
for thinking about the meanings of this revolution from the perspective of
urban neighborhoods with different housing forms. Richly illustrated, and
drawing upon decades of research and observations from one of the most
prominent and prolific scholars of the contemporary Chinese city, Creating
Chinese Urbanism locates the essence of China’s urban revolution in the
passing of longstanding modes of social relations and their replacement with
new institutions of governance in which the state led-urbanization remakes the
nature of state power itself. – Mark W. Frazier, New
School for Social Research

In this masterful study of residential neighborhoods across
regions, generations and classes in China today, Wu successfully convinces us
that China’s contemporary sociopolitical transformation is ultimately an urban
transformation.  This book is one of the
most illuminating reads in the last decade on Chinese urbanism.
-You-tien Hsing,
Professor of Geography and Director of Global Studies, UC Berkeley

This book provides a novel, insightful and
inspirational interpretation of the emerging state-society-space relationship
in China where an urban revolution is taking place at a scale and speed
unparalleled in the world. Theoretically informed and empirically grounded, the
book takes us to embark upon a fascinating journey travelling from Chinese
workplace (danwei) to neighborhoods,
urban communities, and urban villages so as to unveil a phenomenal and restless
landscape of greater urbanism and state-centred governance. A path-breaking
contribution to the burgeoning literature on global urbanism in general and
China’s new urban social geography in particular. 
– George C.S. Lin, Chair
Professor of Geography, University of Hong Kong

Fulong Wu grapples with the complexities and contradictions
of social change in urban China — state-centered but creating new
opportunities for individualism, disrupting traditional village and
neighborhood social relations but generating new forms of association.  He shows the relevance but also the limited
reach of general models like market transition, postcolonialism, and
neoliberalism.  Like an ethnographer, his
approach is to understand social relations at the ground level, working upwards
from that vantage point to understand the ongoing Chinese urban revolution on
its own terms. – John R. Logan, Professor
of Sociology, Brown University

The rapid redevelopment of Chinese cities, along with the
vast expansion of geographic and social mobility, have almost completely erased
the collectivist urban neighborhoods typical of the Mao era. In this deeply
researched book, Fulong Wu vividly documents the varieties of newly emergent
urban communities and provides a conceptual framework for understanding a new
and distinctive Chinese urbanism. – Andrew G. Walder,
author of ‘China Under Mao’

Format:
Open Access PDF

۳۰۲
Pages

۷۱ colour illustrations

Copyright:

©
۲۰۲۲

ISBN:
۹۷۸۱۸۰۰۰۸۳۳۳۲

Publication:
October 27, 2022