As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the ...rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined. The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199568048/toc.html
In this article we develop a novel analytical framework for situated studies of uneven peri‐urbanisation that resist further dividing Marxist and Situated (Urban) Political Ecology. We conceptualise ...uneven peri‐urbanisation as a process in which access to the resources mobilised for peri‐urban developments, such as water or land, is rendered uneven. In a three‐step approach we suggest, first, describing how peri‐urbanisation unfolds in the case being studied and distinguish it from other processes, such as suburbanisation. Second, we propose analysing the transformations of nature on which the peri‐urbanisation process is based; and third, examining the uneven power relations infusing inequalities into these transformations and consequently into the peri‐urbanisation process described. To allow for a situated analysis this approach regards the study of practices as crucial, but they have to be embedded in wider socio‐economic, political, and historical processes, since both contribute to transformations of nature and thus shape uneven peri‐urbanisation.
Zusammenfassung
In diesem Artikel entwickeln wir einen neuen Analyserahmen für situierte Studien ungleicher Peri‐Urbanisierung, der sich einer weiteren Trennung von marxistischer und situierter (urbaner) Politischer Ökologie widersetzt. Wir konzeptualisieren ungleiche Peri‐Urbanisierung als einen Prozess, in dem der Zugang zu Ressourcen wie Land und Wasser, die für peri‐urbane Entwicklungen mobilisiert werden, sich ungleich gestaltet. In einem dreistufigen Ansatz schlagen wir erstens vor zu beschreiben, wie sich Peri‐Urbanisierung im untersuchten Fall entfaltet. Dieser Schritt dient dazu, Peri‐Urbanisierung von anderen Prozessen, wie zum Beispiel dem der Suburbanisierung, zu unterscheiden. Es folgen zweitens eine Analyse der Transformationen der Natur, auf denen der beschriebene Peri‐Urbanisierungsprozess basiert, und drittens die Untersuchung ungleicher Machtverhältnisse, die Ungleichheiten in den Peri‐Urbanisierungsprozess einschreiben. Für eine situierte Analyse sieht dieser Ansatz die Erforschung von Praktiken als essentiell an, diese müssen jedoch in umfassendere sozio‐ökonomische, politische, und historische Prozesse eingebettet werden, da beide zu Transformationen der Natur beitragen und somit ungleiche Peri‐Urbanisierung gestalten.
Contemporary processes of urbanisation present major challenges for urban research and theory as urban areas expand and interweave. In this process, urban forms are constantly changing and new urban ...configurations are frequently evolving. An adequate understanding of urbanisation must derive its empirical and theoretical inspirations from the multitude of urban experiences across the various divides that shape the contemporary world. New concepts and terms are urgently required that would help, both analytically and cartographically, to decipher the differentiated and rapidly mutating landscapes of urbanisation that are being produced today. One of the key procedures to address these challenges is the application of comparative strategies. Based on postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanisation, this paper introduces and discusses the theoretical and methodological framework of a collaborative comparative study of urbanisation processes in eight large metropolitan territories across the world: Tokyo, Hong Kong/Shenzhen/Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles. In order to approach these large territories, a specific methodological design is applied mainly based on qualitative methods and a newly developed method of mapping. After the presentation of the main lines of our theoretical and methodological approach we discuss some of the new comparative concepts that we developed through this process: popular urbanisation, plotting urbanism, multilayered patchwork urbanisation and the incorporation of urban differences.
随着城市地区的扩大和相互交织，当代城市化进程给城市研宄和理论带来了重大挑战。在这个 过程中，城市形态不断变化，新的城市形态在不断演进。要充分理解城市化，我们必须从塑造 当代世界的大量纷纭歧出的城市经验中获得经验和理论层面的启发。如今正在产生的城市化格 局千差万别，并迅速变化，我们迫切需要新的概念和术语，在分析层面和图解层面帮助破译这 些格局。应对这些挑战的关键手段是应用比较策略。本文基于城市理论的后殖民批判和全域城 市化的认识论，介绍并讨论了对世界八大都市圈城市化进程进行协同比较研宄的理论和方法论 框架，这八大都市圈是：东京、香港/深圳/东莞、加尔各答、伊斯坦布尔、拉各斯、巴黎、墨 西哥城和洛杉矶。为着手探讨这些广大的都市圈，我们主要基于定性方法和新开发的测绘方法， 应用了一套特定的方法论设计。在介绍了我们主要的理论和方法论进路之后，我们讨论了在这 个过程中发展起来的一些新的比较概念：大众城市化、小块圈地式城市化、多层拼凑城市化以 及城市差异的纳入。
The question of urbanisation ‘beyond the city’ has generated a lively debate in the fields of urban studies and geography in recent years. This paper brings a key concept from this discussion ...–‘extended urbanisation’– in conversation with distinct yet related concepts from critical agrarian studies. We briefly review the ‘classic’ agrarian question in order to situate contemporary agrarian questions within the historical geographies of capitalist restructuring since the late-nineteenth century. We then examine a selection of contemporary agrarian scholarship attuned to the interconnectedness of agrarian and urban sociospatial relations to argue that the concept of extended urbanisation and urban studies more generally have much to gain from a closer engagement with this work. To this end, we identify three openings for further analysis: (1) ‘global depeasantisation’ and ‘deruralisation’ as the labour dimensions of extended urbanisation; (2) the co-existence of banal ‘operational landscapes’ with landscapes of high-intensity extraction and agro-industrialisation; and (3) relational periodisations of urbanisation that incorporate successive world-historical ‘food regimes’ and their associated commodity frontiers in order to unearth geohistories of extended urbanisation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. We conclude by rearticulating the ‘right to the city’ in terms of a broader ‘right to space’ as a means of re-centring ongoing struggles against capitalist urbanisation in spaces beyond the city.
A detailed examination of the “Korean development model” from its urban dimension, evaluating its sociopolitical contexts and implications for international development cooperation.There is an ...increasing tendency to use the development experience of Asian countries as a reference point for other countries in the Global South. Korea’s condensed urbanization and industrialization, accompanied by the expansion of new cities and industrial complexes across the country, have become one such model, even if the fruits of such development may not have been equitably shared across geographies and generations. The chapters in this book critically reassess the Korean urban development experience from regional policy to new town development, demonstrating how these policy experiences were deeply rooted in Korea’s socioeconomic environment and discussing what can be learned from them when applying them in other developmental contexts. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in the field of urban studies and developmental studies in general, and in Korea’s (urban) development experience in particular.
This article interrogates the role of local Chinese governors in government-driven urbanisation. This process often involves local governments converting rural land to urban land rather than local ...governments incentivising rural-to-urban migration. This study proposes a method to find a proxy variable of government-driven urbanisation and performs an exploratory study of its impact on economic growth. Its empirical analysis is based on provincial data from 1996 to 2015, a period of intense urbanisation in China. The results show that urbanisation has had various effects on growth across different provinces, and that some provinces exhibit a phenomenon called ‘urbanisation without growth’. This may be because local governors push urbanisation too heavy that it can hardly generate positive effects, such as external consumption, technology diffusion, and a larger pool of urban labour. This is similar to the phenomenon of over-urbanisation experienced in some developing countries. As a main driver of over-urbanisation, government-driven urbanisation has typical Chinese characteristics, but this paper's findings still have significant implications for other emerging economies.
•Government-driven urbanization happens when governors force farmers to migrate into urban areas.•Government-driven urbanization results in over-urbanisation in Chinese provinces.•Chinese governors are inclined to interrupt the process of market-based urbanisation to boost economic growth.•Government-driven urbanization would impede regional economic growth.
What can the generative processes of dynamic ownership reveal about how the urban is experienced, understood and made in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia? Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia provides an ...ethnography of actions, strategies and techniques that form part of how residents precede and underwrite the owning of real estate property – including apartments and land – in a rapidly changing city. In doing so, it charts the types of visions of the future and perceptions of the urban form that are emerging within Ulaanbaatar following a period of investment, urban growth and subsequent economic fluctuation in Mongolia's extractive economy since the late 2000s. Following emerging political subjectivities, the way that people discuss the ethics of urban change and the seeking of 'quality', Plueckhahn explores how conceptualisations of growth, multiplication, and the portioning of wholes influence residents' interactions with Ulaanbaatar's urban landscape. Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia combines a study of changing postsocialist forms of ownership with a study of the lived experience of recent investment-fuelled urban growth within the Asia region. Examining ownership in Mongolia's capital reveals how residents attempt to understand and make visible the hidden intricacies of this changing landscape. Praise for Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia 'The added value of this publication is inclusion analysis of the local world of ideas into the most up-to-date urbanization processes in a city-state. Above all, however, it presents a broader view of economic and administrative processes than spent recently and greatly received by anthropologists, Rebecca's Empson studies or Tomasz Rakowski.' Sprawy Mi?dzynarodowe 'Overall this is an excellent and admirably compact study of urban property. It will be an especially useful book for students of Inner Asia's ongoing and messy urbanization. I hope as well that it will find an audience outside of its area studies confines, as the travails of people in Ulaanbaatar seeking to turn the financialization of the city to some sort of private advantage says much about the contemporary city writ large.' Eurasian Geography and Economics
•Sustainable development remains a distant hope in urban Africa.•Rapid and unguided urbanisation are threatening sustainable development in Africa.•Managing rapid urbanisation is key to achieving ...sustainable development in urban Africa.
Sustainable development remains one of the most advocated development concepts worldwide, yet, there continues to be limited signs of progress towards its achievement in Africa. Recent studies identify rapid and unplanned urbanisation as a major threat. With Africa expected to become a home to nearly quarter (1.3billion) of the world’s urban population in 2050, research into the ramifications of urbanisation on the functionality of the region’s urban environment is urgent and tenable. This paper fleshes out and teases apart the implications of rapid urbanisation on sustainable development of Africa.
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