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Demystifying the Chinese local state: Planning and contesting urban growth at Hexi New Town, Nanjing
Abstract
Taking note of the limitations of previously dominant political economy perspectives on China’s urban transformation, and inspired by recent works calling for “beyond-growth” and “micro-level” studies of the Chinese state, as well as ethnographic approaches to the state, this paper aims to explore the often-untold everyday politics of decision-making processes in China’s state-led urban development. Using an urban design project at Hexi New Town in Nanjing, China, as an empirical lens, the article makes three main contributions. Firstly, it reveals how the Chinese local state is constitutive of and lived through intense negotiations and contestations over urban visions, subjectivities, and rules of practices in everyday life. Secondly, building upon existing ethnographic approaches to the state, which focus primarily on state-society dynamics, this paper develops a framework to re-conceptualize the power topology within the Chinese local state as a field of relational modalities (ruling power relations (re)enacted in everyday practices) and relational embeddedness (situated positionalities and subjectivities of state actors). Thirdly, it further shows how the power modalities (the interplay of political-economy power vs technical-power, territorial power vs trans-territorial power) of the Chinese local state are constantly reworked, sometimes re-enacted, sometimes challenged, through both formal and tacit rules in the state’s everyday life. As such, the article provides a new set of entry points to open the black-box of the Chinese local state and to explore the relational nature and an ethnographic perspective of the local state and urban politics in China and beyond.
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Instead of generating a grand theory from urban China, I have a rather modest aim – how we might use the political-economic perspective to better understand China's urban development politics. Rather than treating empirical materials and theoretical insights as discrete entities, describing China should itself be regarded as a process of theorisation, contributing to a more global Urban Studies. We illustrate how ‘state entrepreneurialism’, as a quite peculiar form of governance, is generated from the conjunctural development of global capitalism and its crises. Hence, the role of the state is not a starting point for theoretical enquiry but rather a historical and material development of China's political economy.
en Large-scale demolition has been ubiquitous in fast urbanising China. The politics of redevelopment is often seen as secondary, derived from and defined by local entrepreneurial governance. However, changing state politics, in particular national political mandates, has not been adequately addressed. Through examining variegated practices, this paper understands how the changing national political context affects or redefines local redevelopment projects. These cases reflect local responses to the national campaigns for rural vitalisation and “Beautiful China”, heritage preservation and “incremental regeneration” (weigaizao), and community participation in dilapidated neighbourhoods for a “harmonious society”. We find that these redevelopment projects are inherited from and associated with, but at the same time go beyond, growth machine politics. We argue that their motivations reflect a governance mode of “state entrepreneurialism” to achieve extra-economic objectives through market instruments, and that this illustrates geopolitics, especially the role of the national state in development politics.
Abstract
zh 本文通过分析不同类型城市更新项目, 探讨了国家政治环境的变化如何影响或重塑当前中国的城市更新。这些案例反映了地方如何回应全国性治理运动, 包括乡村振兴和“美丽中国”、遗迹保护和“微改造”、老旧小区改造和“构建和谐社会”。我们发现这些项目虽然沿袭但是超越了增长机器政治。我们认为这些项目背后的动机体现了国家通过市场工具实现经济以外的发展目标的“国家企业家主义”。
This commentary reflects on varieties of urban entrepreneurialism and rethinks its application to China. I argue that the state is proactively using market instruments for more strategic and developmental objectives in China. Characterized by ‘planning centrality, market instruments’, state entrepreneurialism manifests a different state–market relation: the state acts through the market rather than just being market friendly. In the post-crisis West, it is claimed that urban entrepreneurialism mutates into a financialized value extraction machine. Similarly, state entrepreneurialism reveals the usefulness but also the limits of the concept of urban entrepreneurialism. State entrepreneurialism adds a new narrative to the current description of governance changes associated with financialization and market operations.
China has seen a proliferation of monumental urban projects in recent years extending to lower tier cities. This paper examines the production of new urban landscapes in the Kangbashi New District of Ordos Municipality to assess the political economy and cultural logics of China’s current-day city-making programmes. The concept of ‘anticipatory urbanism’ is developed to interpret how monumentality in the built environment is aimed at foretelling new developmental futures promising to deliver power to the local state and prosperity to residents. The analysis assesses public responses to landscape transformations and discusses how speculation in the production of new city spaces generates conflict and crisis for the local state. Anticipatory urbanism is found to feed off government ambition and undermines sustainable urban growth.
The purpose of this scoping review is to examine the extent, range, and nature of the use of institutional ethnography (IE) as a method of inquiry in peer-reviewed journal publications. Fifteen databases were searched between the years of 2003 and 2013. Relevant data were extracted from 179 included articles. Findings relate to nine key areas including year of publication, authorship and geography, types of journals, format of resources, authors’ descriptions of how they used IE, approaches used in conjunction with IE, data collection methods, standpoint, and institutional relations. Institutional ethnography was diversely conceptualized as: a (sociological) method of inquiry, methodology, research approach, feminist sociology, theory and methodology, framework, lens, field, perspective, and form of analysis. Inevitably, authors applied IE differently across their research and writing, ranging from direct usage or close adherence to IE in a comprehensive manner; to indirect usage or loose adherence to IE by drawing on it as inspiration, guidance, or influence; or borrowing from a certain facet of IE such as a particular theory, concept, method, tool, or analytic strategy. Additionally, some authors adapted IE to suit a specific purpose, which entailed using modified versions of IE to fit a given context or objective, while others strived to extend existing understandings of IE through critique, explanation, review, elaboration, or reflection. The results from this study are useful to both beginning and experienced institutional ethnographers, as the insights gained provide clarity about the use of IE, identify trends in its application, and raise additional questions.
Shanghai, like other large Chinese cities, has multiple business districts. This paper examines the construction of one of its largest, at Hongqiao in the west of the city. Its specific focus lies in the central role played by one state-owned company, Shenhong, in the financing and construction first of the Hongqiao transport hub and then of the business district that jointly make up this new development pole. The paper examines in detail Shenhong as an organization as well as the tasks it has undertaken and the funding difficulties it has confronted. It argues that Shenhong is representative of the seldom discussed state-owned urban investment and development companies that have led the urbanization of China. Finally, it anchors these companies into theoretical debates, arguing that their ubiquitous involvement in China’s property-led process of urban transformation combined with their ambivalence as state companies operating along similar lines to private enterprises means that they can be seen as central players in a form of state corporatist urbanism.
Back cover text: Megaprojects and Risk provides the first detailed examination of the phenomenon of megaprojects. It is a fascinating account of how the promoters of multibillion-dollar megaprojects systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media in order to get projects approved and built. It shows, in unusual depth, how the formula for approval is an unhealthy cocktail of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effects. This results in projects that are extremely risky, but where the risk is concealed from MPs, taxpayers and investors. The authors not only explore the problems but also suggest practical solutions drawing on theory and hard, scientific evidence from the several hundred projects in twenty nations that illustrate the book. Accessibly written, it will be essential reading in its field for students, scholars, planners, economists, auditors, politicians, journalists and interested citizens.
In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on institutional ethnography, often called ‘IE’. Sociologist Dorothy Smith is widely credited with developing institutional ethnography as an ‘embodied’ feminist approach. Smith studies the experiences of women in daily life, and the complex social relations in which these are embedded. Institutional ethnography offers the possibility to study up to understand the differential effects of institutions within and beyond institutional spaces and associated productions of subjectivities and material inequalities. We suggest that geographical scholarship on institutions can be enhanced and, in turn, has much to contribute to the broader interdisciplinary field on institutional ethnography, such as understandings of institutions that account for spatial differentiation. We argue that IE holds potential to enrich geographical research not only about a multitude of kinds of institutions, but about the many structures, effects, and identities working through institutions as territorial forces. In spite of recent interest by geographers, the broader literature on institutional ethnography remains under-engaged and under-cited by human geographers. Critical of this lack of engagement, we suggest that it has left a gap in geographical research on institutions. Our aim is to analyze and advance existing scholarship and offer this article as a tool for geographers thinking about employing IE. We develop a typology, categorized by methodological approach, to highlight ethnographic approaches to institutions undertaken by geographers.
Ethnography is an underused methodology in geography. This neglect is especially injurious to the discipline because ethnography provides unreplicable insight into the processes and meanings that sustain and motivate social groups. These processes and meanings vary across space, and are central to the construction and transformation of landscapes; they are both place-bound and place-making. Ethnography's potential contribution to geography is thus profound. The aversion to ethnography may derive from three major criticisms frequently directed toward it: that it is unscientific; that it is too limited to enable generalization; and that it fails to consider its inherent representational practices. Considered responses to these critiques, however, restore ethnography's significance for geographic study.
This article aims to explore the mechanisms of the development zone fever in the Suzhou region, located in the fast-growing Yangtze River Delta, and investigates, from an institutional perspective, the practice of relevant intragovernmental governance in the context of rapid industrialisation since the 1990s. A specific mode of governance—the evaluative economic indicators scheme inherited from the earlier socialist planning system, combined with the party/state's promotion/evaluation system—plays an essential role in this transformation of farmland property rights. However, this model of development is not necessarily helpful for local financial conditions and it results in the disclacement of peasants and the loss of land resources. Based on the resulting `dilemmas of governance', it is argued that, in addition to the `economic paradigm', which focuses on consequences of fiscal reforms and devolution, scholars should pay more attention to factors such as the party/state's promotion/evaluation system and the stress between the evaluative indicators system maintained by the central/local sectoral command and the territorial jurisdictions. This could be helpful in gaining a fuller understanding of the dynamics and tensions of local developments in China.
This article presents Foucault's governmentality as an analytical framework that is useful for interpreting and using empirics toward critical theory. Although Foucault viewed the discipline of geography narrowly regarding spatial patterns, his geographic sensibilities connect with contemporary critical human geography, which examines processes relationally from a topological, non-Euclidean view of space. Further, Foucault's novel approach to multiscalar analysis offers critical insight into one debate: whether scale as an analytical concept unproductively reifies hierarchy and obscures the mobilization of power. Foucault's ascending analysis clarifies how scale-sensitive analysis can illuminate the mobilization of power regarding its targets (as per techniques of biopower and disciplinary power) and its diffuse sources, and how actors’ practices can become unchained from normalizing societal pressures. Foucault's early scholarship on governmentality represents actors as unconscious of the regulatory framework with which they implicitly are complicit, but his later work on resistance emphasizes reflexivity and the proactive constitution and transformation of the self. The earlier framework on the governance of populations suggests that mentalities and related discourses produce practices, whereas the later framework on the governance of the self suggests the reverse, therein holding important clues for critical theory and the proactive construction of transformation based on a critique of the past and present. The article “assembles” Foucault's scholarship on governance and ethics over the course of his career to present an overall framework that is useful for analyses concerning a variety of questions. Analytical points are exemplified with reference to urban, race-related issues, drawing in part from my own research.
Every day, people from different backgrounds mix together, whether by design or necessity, in our multicultural neighbourhoods and cities. This article explores how senses, sensibilities, habitus and affects influence quotidian intercultural encounters in culturally diverse cities. The article is based upon ethnographic research in an Australian suburb which has seen large-scale Chinese migration to the area in recent years and experienced the associated rapid changes to the shops along the local high street. Focusing on a range of sites or ‘contact zones’ along the suburban high street, the paper explores the notion of cross-cultural habitus, in particular the sensuous and affective dimensions of what I term the ‘haptic habitus’. It then examines the sensuous and embodied modes of being that mediate intercultural interactions between long-term Anglo-Celtic elderly residents in the area and newly arrived Chinese immigrants and their associated urban spaces. Ranging through the senses, from sight, smell, sound and the haptic system, the article reflects upon how the senses, affect, habitus, nostalgia and memory articulate with localised experiences of diversity. I develop the notion of ‘sensuous multiculturism’—which foregrounds embodied experience in this scenario of cultural difference—and go on to argue that the dis-synchronisation of senses, embodied place-memory and habitus contribute to some forms of intercultural anxiety and everyday racism.
As market reform has progressed in China, state bureaux have adapted and become entrepreneurial. This contradicts expectations that states will either simply retreat in the face of encroaching markets to play a minimal role in the economy, or obstruct market‐oriented change through bureaucratic conservatism or rent‐seeking. This paper describes the state entrepreneurialism that has appeared in the Chinese city of Tianjin in the early 1990s and explains its emergence as the consequence of both market‐induced structural transformation and the resultant changing incentives and demands on officials. It proposes the ‘entrepreneurial state’ as a model of state adaptation to marketization and assesses its implications for both our conception of the developmental state and for anticipation of rent‐seeking and resistance to market reform.
This paper focuses on the fifth dimension of social innovation—i.e. political governance. Although largely neglected in the mainstream 'innovation' literature, innovative governance arrangements are increasingly recognised as potentially significant terrains for fostering inclusive development processes. International organisations like the EU and the World Bank, as well as leading grass-roots movements, have pioneered new and more participatory governance arrangements as a pathway towards greater inclusiveness. Indeed, over the past two decades or so, a range of new and often innovative institutional arrangements has emerged, at a variety of geographical scales. These new institutional 'fixes' have begun to challenge traditional state-centred forms of policy-making and have generated new forms of governance-beyond-the-state. Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality, the paper argues that the emerging innovative horizontal and networked arrangements of governance-beyond-the-state are decidedly Janus-faced. While enabling new forms of participation and articulating the state – civil society relationships in potentially democratising ways, there is also a flip side to the process. To the extent that new governance arrangements rearticulate the state-civil society relationship, they also redefine and reposition the meaning of (political) citizenship and, consequently, the nature of democracy itself. The first part of the paper outlines the contours of governance-beyond-the-state. The second part addresses the thorny issues of the state –civil society relationship in the context of the emergence of the new governmentality associated with governance-beyond-the-state. The third part teases out the contradictory way in which new arrangements of governance have created new institutions and empowered new actors, while disempowering others. It is argued that this shift from 'government' to 'governance' is associated with the consolidation of new technologies of government, on the one hand, and with profound restructuring of the parameters of political democracy on the other, leading to a substantial democratic deficit. The paper concludes by suggesting that socially innovative arrangements of governance-beyond-the-state are fundamentally Janus-faced, particularly under conditions in which the democratic character of the political sphere is increasingly eroded by the encroaching imposition of market forces that set the 'rules of the game'.
Urban SpectaclesHyperbuilding: Exception, Spectacle, and SpeculationThe Hyperbuilding: The Hyperspace Moves EastConclusion
References
Although growth coalition theory is widely used to explain urban renewal in Western literature, it needs to be adjusted and adapted to suit China's complex and diverse urban village development processes, considering the different local political structures. By analyzing three village cases in Zhuhai, we found that growth coalition theory overemphasized the increasing alliance between political and business elites at the expense of other actors such as villagers and rural collectives. The Shanchang case indicated the close coalition between the developer and the villagers to appeal jointly for additional rights from the local government. The local government made concessions about acknowledging illegal property rights and increasing allowable floor space to facilitate the smooth implementation of demolition. By contrast, the Lixi and Fuxi case showed that the local government formed a coalition with the rural collective in the demolition and compensation stage and formed an alliance with the developer in the construction stage. The case indicated that the government pursued the long-term goal of improving urban livability and enhancing industrial development apart from advocating property-led growth. This paper disclosed the diversity and complexity of the growth coalition, which could enrich the existing framework.
The remarkable growth of new towns in China in the past two decades has amazed the world. How shall we make sense of these mushrooming megaprojects, which profoundly reshape the social and economic landscape not only within China but also globally? Successive reports of epic failures – with many projects evolving into ghost towns – further obscure the picture. Existing literature has been useful in highlighting the political-economic logic behind China’s new town frenzy, attributing the latter to China’s marketization, decentralization, and globalization. These accounts, however, focus mostly on the recent past. Lacking a truly longitudinal approach, they tend to lose sight of the underlying links between the socialist past and the postsocialist present. This paper offers a relatively holistic historical review of China’s three new town movements since 1949. While problematizing these historical processes, the paper draws insights from the theory of new state spaces, viewing new town development as a distinctive spatial strategy and project of the state to facilitate accumulation, social regulation, and state-building during specific historical periods. Based on such theoretical constructs, the paper reveals the historical trajectory and patterns of China’s new town movements in the past seven decades.
As the configuration of global environmental governance has become more complex over the past fifty years, numerous scholars have underscored the importance of understanding the transnational networks of public, private and nonprofit organizations that comprise it. Most methodologies for studying governance emphasize social structural elements or institutional design principles and focus less attention on the social interactions that generate diffuse, hybrid regimes. Yet capturing the dynamics of these networks requires a relational methodology that can account for a range of elements that constantly shift and change relative to overlapping institutional boundaries. Collaborative Event Ethnography draws on insights from multi-sited, team, and institutional ethnography to assemble teams of researchers to study major international conferences, which offer important political spaces where public, private, and nonprofit actors align around sanctioned logics and techniques of governance. Drawing on insights generated from these conferences and field sites across the globe, we trace the constitutive forces behind paradigm shifts in biodiversity conservation, specifically the interconnected rise of market-based approaches, global targets, and new conservation enclosures. We show how the iterative refining of the methodology over five events generated an increasingly robust understanding of global conservation governance as processual, dynamic, and contingent, constituted through constantly shifting assemblages of state and nonstate actors, devices and narratives that collectively configure fields of governance. Finally, we reflect on how our team, as an evolving combination of researchers, research interests, and data collection tools—itself an assemblage, —has informed the continual refinement of the methodology and generated novel understandings of global conservation governance.
The introduction argues that while the legitimacy of bureaucracy as an object of inquiry is well established, little is generally said on the methodologies mobilized by ethnographers to study the bureaucratic field. The special issue is a contribution to fill this gap. The authors characterize bureaucracy as a mode of control by way of four dimensions—service, rule, violence, and secrecy—and propose three methodological pathways through which ethnographers may immerse in the bureaucratic field. The first pathway, “stages,” is concerned with the methodological reflections on accessing the bureaucratic stage and of being led in by bureaucrats as they perform their stage work. The second focuses on “techniques” and considers the implications of immersing oneself in a distinct technical landscape. The third pathway concerns the ethnographer’s positionality, drawing attention to the deep reflexivity and unstable ethics of bureaucracy ethnography. The authors invite bureaucracy ethnographers to pursue these pathways and to engage in a critical reflection on their fieldwork practices.
The previous studies about Chinese policy process give predominant focus in the agenda setting or proposing policy issue stage. There is limited record and analysis on the policymaking process. Once agenda is set, it is government’s responsibility to formulate practical and applicable policy terms. Therefore, a close examination of how local government makes policies is needed. The purpose of this case study is to unveil the basic policymaking process practiced in local Chinese government and also to establish a starting point for further analysis. The question of how and how much citizen participation is involved in the formal and legal day-to-day policy process is answered in this particular case study. Hence, from the purpose, this paper is descriptive to infer the concept of citizen participation in Chinese local government agencies and, if possible, to develop theoretical implications to the formal Chinese local policy process.
In this paper, we examine two urban projects in Kunming, Southwest China, one a massive scheme to build a new city center on rural land outside the city, and the other, an act of urban restructuring involving the rebuilding of an old Hui (Muslim) neighborhood in the old city center. We analyze the coalition of forces configured to undertake these large-scale projects; we underline the role of specially formed city-building organizations and the support provided by the state-owned institutions that dominate the city’s political economy; and we draw attention to the caution with which the city government handled resistance to urban restructuring among Hui residents. We argue that urban growth projects in inland cities like Kunming are marked by certain features that distinguish them from similar projects in Eastern Chinese cities but maintain that nonetheless the drive for profit maximization at the expense of residents is unchanged.
en Inspired by Latour's aim to restore balance to the anthropological project by exoticizing the artefacts and procedures of so‐called ‘modern knowledge’, this essay gives an ethnographic description of emergent processes of knowledge production in the context of the planning and development of urban regeneration in London. Bureaucratic meetings are described as part of the organizational infrastructure that enables the crafting of new urban futures, and it is argued that, because the making of reality is always seen to be forward moving, there is a need, as in navigation, to plot a course. The essay focuses on the subversive potential of informal meetings, and argues, more generally, that meetings are the materially social, and affectively technical, manoeuvres that make possible direction‐finding and contestation about the way forward.
Procès‐verbaux, réunions et « modes d'existence » : tracer le processus bureaucratique de la régénération urbaine dans l'est de Londres
fr Résumé
Inspiré de la démarche de Latour visant à rétablir l’équilibre du projet anthropologique en exotisant les artefacts et procédures du savoir dit « moderne », le présent essai donne une description ethnographique des processus émergents de production de savoir dans le contexte de la planification et du développement de la régénération urbaine à Londres. Les réunions bureaucratiques y sont décrites comme une composante de l'infrastructure organisationnelle qui permet de créer de nouveaux futurs urbains. L'auteure avance que puisque la fabrique de la réalité est toujours décrite comme « en marche », il faut que l'on trace sa route, comme en navigation. L'essai se concentre sur le potentiel subversif des réunions informelles et fait valoir, plus généralement, que ces réunions sont des manœuvres sociales (concrètement) et techniques (affectivement) qui permettent de trouver un cap et aussi de contester la direction adoptée.
This introductory essay describes a novel approach to meetings in relation to broader literatures within and beyond anthropology. We suggest that notwithstanding many accounts in which meetings figure, little attention has been given to the mundane forms through which these work. Seeking to develop a distinctively ethnographic focus to these quotidian and ubiquitous procedures, we outline an approach that moves attention beyond a narrow concern with just their meaning and content. We highlight some of the innovative strands that develop from this approach, describing how the negotiation of relationships ‘within’ meetings is germane to the organization of ‘external’ contexts, including in relation to time, space, organizational structure, and society. The essay offers a set of provocations for rethinking approaches to bureaucracy, organizational process, and ethos through the ethnographic lens of meeting.
Engaging with theory and comparative research, the specific aim of this special issue is to contribute to scholarship engaging with state rescaling theory in non-Western societies as well as to on-going debates about the changing scalar dimensions of urban and regional development. It does so by examining scalar dynamics on the basis of empirical case studies in China and India, including fieldwork-based research. The starting point of the papers is the observation that subnational states assume distinctly more significant roles than in the past for regulating economic activities and shaping economic governance. Processes of state restructuring currently underway in each country are reconfiguring the spatial deployment of the state, or state territoriality, a development that has attracted considerably less academic attention than changing state-market relations. This introductory article sets out the special issue's theoretical and empirical objectives. It provides a review of existing literature, analysing the various modalities of scalar restructuring and situating them in relation to each national context. In particular, ‘rescaling’ and ‘decentralisation’ processes are carefully distinguished, in order to sharpen the focus of the debate and facilitate comparison between the Chinese and Indian cases. Finally, the specific aspects of state restructuring analysed in this set of papers are discussed with regard to the literature, to underscore their contribution. The papers cover a range of policy domains and instruments pertaining to both economic development and social welfare. Using scale-sensitive methods, they map changing geographies of both state space and socio-economic relations and discuss them in relation to each country's unique development trajectory.
Contemporary Chinese Politics: Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies considers how new and diverse sources and methods are changing the study of Chinese politics. Contributors spanning three generations in China studies place their distinct qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches in the framework of the discipline and point to challenges or opportunities (or both) of adapting new sources and methods to the study of contemporary China. How can we more effectively use new sources and methods of data collection? How can we better integrate the study of Chinese politics into the discipline of political science, to the betterment of both? This comprehensive methodological survey will be of immense interest to graduate students heading into the field for the first time and experienced scholars looking to keep abreast of the state of the art in the study of Chinese politics.
China has been growing at over ten per cent annually since 1978, but this has only come to very widespread notice in the past decade. This received wisdom about China has been largely of two types, both of which - more or less - understand China in the context of neoliberalism. The more business- or business studies-oriented literature seems to argue that if China does not adapt the rule of clear and distinct property and contract law - in short, of Western institutions - its economy will stall. The second set of voices is more clearly from the left, arguing that the Chinese economy, and city, is neo-liberal. For them, China does not diverge widely from the Anglo-American model that, from 2008, has brought the world economy to its knees.
Chinese cities are emerging in multiple senses: They have created new physical spaces to accommodate the fast urbanization of the country but have also developed new properties and characteristics along with urban transformation. The novelty created by emerging cities in China is not easily covered by Western urban theory. This article examines the dynamism of Chinese urban transformation, especially political economic changes vis-à-vis so-called neoliberalism, and spatial outcomes as diverse and contrasting spaces of formality and informality. Finally, this article speculates on implications for global urban studies.
Spatial vocabularies are stretched to their limits by the complexities of policy mobilities. Using the example of city-wide strategic policymaking in Johannesburg, this essay argues for an enrichment of our vocabularies for appreciating how wider circuits of urban policy shape localized policy outcomes. Rather than tracing policies until they arrive somewhere, a more nuanced spatiality of policy mobility emerges when considering how policies are 'arrived at'. Thus policy influences can, for example, be ephemeral and recursive, international but already present in localities, have many simultaneous origins, and be folded into a relatively amorphous but specific policy blend. Drawing on John Allen's account of topological space, the essay indicates how both a more subtle spatiality and a more open politics of policy formation would emerge from turning the analysis of policy mobilities on its head in this way.
This study examines the popular practices of Chinese urbanism in which commodification of urban land has been actively pursued by municipal governments as a means of revenue generation in the era of neoliberalisation. The research identifies a complex, diverse and self-conflicting internal dynamics that characterised the Chinese state, reveals the political and financial motives of local governments to engage in urbanism and maps out the emerging geography of neoliberal urbanism. Land commodification has become a main source of municipal finance accounting for over 30% of total municipal budgetary revenue and nearly 40% of the fund for urban maintenance and construction. An inverse U-shaped relationship is found between the importance of land commodification to municipal finance and the level of urban economic growth. A similar relationship is identified for land-based municipal finance and degree of openness.
In the introduction to this special issue, we discuss recent trends in anthropological research on and in theorizing the state. We show how these have given rise to an analytical gap between state images, on the one hand, and practices, on the other. Based on this analysis, we propose
a relational approach that we call 'stategraphy' as a way to tie together state practices and representations. This ethnographically grounded approach focuses on relational modalities, boundary work, and forms of embeddedness of actors as constitutive factors. These avenues of analyses enable
a nuanced understanding and comparative investigation of change and continuity as well as of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.
This study positions urban ethnography as a powerful methodology for the investigation of neoliberal regulation, urban governance (governmentality), and urban informality. State regulation theorists have assumed a prominent role in mapping the local exigencies of institutionally inherited landscapes as well as the uneven rescaling and activation tendencies of regulatory change. Governmentality theorists emphasize the ways in which urban policy knowledge forges links between fiscal austerity projects and the capillary systems of consent operating at the level of conduct and ethical subjectivity. Urban informality theorists focus on how contemporary urban restructuring operates increasingly within the realm of street-level poverty survival mechanisms, enacting sociospatial transformations negotiated through elaborate legal and extralegal systems of neoliberal regulation. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to consider how the theoretical insights of these three leading analytics can be mobilized for ethnographic analysis at the urban scale, and (2) to suggest at a cursory level the ways in which ethnographic analysis can be deployed, in turn, to problematize and recast each camp's prevailing arguments. Ultimately, I argue that ethnographic research can be positioned as part of a theory program by enabling an empirically driven strategy to make general claims about the state and fate of urban theory.
A UK-based geographer and specialist on China's urbanization reviews changes occuring in China during its market transition through the prism of neoliberalism. More specifically, by reviewing the recent literature on neoliberalism, the author searches for parallels between that approach and the political-economic, historical, and social developments associated with market transition in China (e.g., land and housing commodification, rural to urban migration, changes in access to education and health care). The question of to what extent (and in what ways) China's reforms- featuring an expanding role for the market-can be considered neoliberal is conditioned by the continuing importance and involvement of the state in all spheres of activity.
Using a model of "fragmented authoritarianism," this volume sharpens our view of the inner workings of the Chinese bureaucracy. The contributors' interviews with politically well-placed bureaucrats and scholars, along with documentary and field research, illuminate the bargaining and maneuvering among officials on the national, provincial, and local levels.
Emerging research on comparative neoliberalism at the urban scale seeks to trace its diffusions and document its contours and trajectories in regions beyond the trans-Atlantic corridor. Discovering geographical variation in neoliberal policy should produce more incisive understandings of neoliberalism's creative transformations, yet the emergent research on comparative urban policy may route uncomfortably close to the world of world and global cites. This brief discussion considers expanding places of inquiry to non-growth economic contexts and complex urban conditions in the world of cities. It introduces contemporary conditions of urban political economy in the People's Republic of China, where neoliberalization works in the interests of the party-state and resists critical analysis in association with debates over strains of neoconservatism (neoauthoritarism, neosocialism, and statism) in the Chinese academy and their mutual imbrication in an array of complex issues.
In July 1999, Canadian authorities intercepted four boats off the coast of British Columbia carrying nearly six hundred Chinese citizens who were being smuggled into Canada. Government officials held the migrants on a Canadian naval base, which it designated a port of entry. As one official later recounted to the author, the Chinese migrants entered a legal limbo, treated as though they were walking through a long tunnel of bureaucracy to reach Canadian soil. The “long tunnel thesis” is the basis of Alison Mountz’s wide-ranging investigation into the power of states to change the relationship between geography and law as they negotiate border crossings. Mountz draws from many sources to argue that refugee-receiving states capitalize on crises generated by high-profile human smuggling events to implement restrictive measures designed to regulate migration. Whether states view themselves as powerful actors who can successfully exclude outsiders or as vulnerable actors in need of stronger policies to repel potential threats, they end up subverting access to human rights, altering laws, and extending power beyond their own borders. Using examples from Canada, Australia, and the United States, Mountz demonstrates the centrality of space and place in efforts to control the fate of unwanted migrants.
This paper puts forward a new way of thinking about objects, worlds, and events. The philosophical contribution of the paper pivots around the idea that objects are force-full: smoldering furnaces of affects that are capable of creating, policing, and destroying the very contours of existence. The paper begins with a problem, which is how to account for objects, worlds, and events outside of human consciousness or ‘in-themselves’. It answers by constructing an ‘evental geography’ from the ontologies of Martin Heidegger, Alain Badiou, and Graham Harman. A ‘geo-event’ names the transformation of a world – from galaxies to nation states to ecosystems – by ‘inexistent’ objects and the forces they unleash. The paper is situated at the busy crossroads of (object-oriented) philosophy, non-representational theory, and actor-network theory.
With the shift of urban governance towards a more entrepreneurial mode in China, local governments and business interests have formed various coalitions of growth. These coalitions are widespread in China nowadays. The purpose of this article is to examine the nature of such growth coalitions through a case study of Nanjing's Olympic New Town. This growth coalition was built upon a mega-event, namely the Tenth National Sports Games in China. The marketing of this mega-event mobilised the interests of various governments, in particular the municipal government, and real-estate developers. However, when the mega-event was over and the property market faced a slowdown due to a tightening up of macro-economic policies by the central government, the coalition was quickly dismantled. The instability of the coalition has had some negative implications for urban development. This case study highlights the unstable nature of growth collations based on specific events.
The place of expertise in modern systems of government continues to be of concern to critical social scientists. Recent years have seen something of a shift away from conceptions of expertise that tended to see it as distant, overly technical and aligned with the needs of the state and capital. Expertise is increasingly recognised as having a more complex relation with the subjects of government than just as a means for shoring up authority, offering them a space for engagement, critique and counter-expertise. This paper argues that focusing on particular experts and their changing roles in governmental assemblages can flesh out one-dimensional conceptions of expertise and provide insights into governmental change. Drawing on a variety of literature, it is argued that expertise can usefully be conceived as; first, a social relation based on one party having access to knowledge which gives them authority over another; second, as distributed across a governmental assemblage in a particular way, with some expert relations being positioned to have more influence, understood here as expert power, across the assemblage; and third, as a matter of strategic engagement on the part of experts located in particular epistemic communities seeking to gain expert power. The potential of this perspective is explored through an analysis of an emergent expert system for the creative industries in the UK where a small community of actors have realigned their practices and cast themselves as creative industries experts. This has allowed then to reshape the governmental assemblage forming around this economic sector in a direction favourable to their own ideas. It is concluded that efforts to convert expertise into greater expert power is a key dynamic transforming governmental assemblages.
This paper offers a discussion of what assemblage thinking might offer critical urbanism. It seeks to connect with and build upon recent debates in City (2009) on critical urbanism by outlining three sets of contributions that assemblage offers for thinking politically and normatively of the city. First, assemblage thinking entails a descriptive orientation to the city as produced through relations of history and potential (or the actual and the possible), particularly in relation to the assembling of the urban commons and in the potential of ‘generative critique’. Second, assemblage as a concept functions to disrupt how we conceive agency and critique due to its focus on sociomaterial interaction and distribution. Third, assemblage, as collage, composition and gathering provides an imaginary of the cosmopolitan city, as the closest approximation in the social sciences to the assemblage idea. The paper is not an attempt to offer assemblage thinking as opposed, intellectually or politically, to the long and diverse traditions of critical urbanism, but is instead an examination of some of the connections and differences between assemblage thinking and strands of critical urbanism.
Economic geography has over the last decade become increasingly interested in the role of practice, conceptualised as the regularised or stabilised social actions through which economic agents organize or coordinate production, marketing, service provision, exchange and/or innovation activities. Interest in practice is most clearly manifest in a growing body of research concerned to conceptualise how the regularized social relations and interactions linking economic actors (e.g. entrepreneurs, firms) shape the nature of economies, industries, and regional development processes. However, an emphasis on social practice faces significant challenges in that it lacks conceptual coherence, a clear methodological approach, and relevance for public policy. This article critically assesses the idea that practice-oriented research might or should become a core conceptual or epistemological approach in economic geography. In doing so, we identify at least four distinct strands to economic geographical interest in practice: studies centred on institutions, social relations, governmentality and alternative economies respectively. We then argue however that this shift towards practice-oriented work is less a coherent turn than a development and diversification of longstanding strands of work within the sub-discipline.
In this exploratory article, we ask how states come to be understood as entities with particular spatial characteristics, and how changing relations between practices of government and national territories may be challenging long-established modes of state spatiality. In the first part of this article, we seek to identify two principles that are key to state spatialization: verticality (the state is "above" society) and encompassment (the state "encompasses" its localities). We use ethnographic evidence from a maternal health project in India to illustrate our argument that perceptions of verticality and encompassment are produced through routine bureaucratic practices. In the second part, we develop a concept of transnational governmentality as a way of grasping how new practices of government and new forms of "grassroots" politics may call into question the principles of verticality and encompassment that have long helped to legitimate and naturalize states' authority over "the local."