It’s with great pleasure that my colleagues and I have been awarded a British Academy grant for its Tackling the UK’s International Challenges programme. The project, titled “The Urban Spectre of Global China: Mechanisms, Consequences, and Alternatives for Urban Futures”, is to run until July 2020, examining four large-scale property development projects of Chinese capital, to question the ways in which the urban has been reconfigured by China’s global expansion.

Project Outline and Aims:

This project draws on methods of comparative urbanism and multi-sited ethnography, aiming to uncover the differentiated models of urban production in the Global China era and to generate new insights for inclusive approaches to urban space, nature and modernity. 

This international collaborative project critically examines the dynamics of urban political economy and contemporary urban living in a rapidly shifting geopolitical setting. By focusing on the local, national and global mechanisms and impacts of Chinese urban spectres, the project aims to deepen our understandings of interrelated urban future issues. 

Research will be conducted in London, Iskandar Malaysia, Beijing and Foshan.

Project team: Hyun Bang Shin (PI), Sin Yee Koh (Co-I, Monash University Malaysia) and Yimin Zhao (Co-I, Renmin University of China)

More information on the project can be found here.

COVID-19 Updates:

The project team is happy to welcome Dr Choon-Piew Pow (National University of Singapore) and Prof Ching Kwan Lee (UCLA) as project advisors.

Due to the disruption made by the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, the project period has been extended until the end of April 2021.