This collaborative project is based on a British Academy grant for its Tackling the UK’s International Challenges programme. The project ran from April 2019 to April 2022 and examined 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 drew 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 examined 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 aimed to deepen our understandings of interrelated urban future issues. Research was conducted in London, Iskandar Malaysia, Beijing, and Foshan.
Principal Investigator
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin, Professor of Geography and Urban Studies in the Department of Geography and Environment, LSE. Prof Shin was Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre (SEAC) from August 2018 – July 2023. Prof Shin’s research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of urbanisation with particular attention to cities in Asian countries such as Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea and China. His research themes include the politics of displacement; gentrification; real estate speculation; the right to the city; mega-events as urban spectacles. Personal website: http://urbancommune.net
Co-Investigators
Dr Sin Yee Koh, Senior Lecturer in Global Studies, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia
Dr Koh’s research, positioned in migration studies and urban studies, seeks to understand the causes, processes, and consequences of structural and urban inequalities, and how people cope individually and collectively under such conditions. She has recently published on cities and the super-rich, the globalisation of real estate, property tourism, and the role of intermediaries in elite transnational mobilities.
Dr Yimin Zhao, Assistant Professor in Urban Planning and Management, School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China
Dr Zhao’s research focuses on the socio-spatial processes of urban change, attending particularly to the role of the state in politico-economic dynamics of urban land and environment. Trained in Human Geography and Urban Studies at the LSE, he has successfully finished his previous project on Beijing’s green belts and is now further developing his research expertise on the urban and the state by investigating the nexus of urban infrastructure, land and the everyday life – both in and beyond East Asia.
Postdoctoral Research Assistants
Dr Murray Mckenzie, former Postdoctoral Research Assistant, LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. Dr Mckenzie holds a PhD in Geography and Urban Studies from UCL and an MA in Community and Regional Planning from the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the roles of the arts, culture, and their contestation in processes of urban growth and change. His doctoral thesis investigated how collaborative artistic practices have served as platforms for community-building in urban villages of outer Beijing. Prior to joining LSE, Dr Mckenzie taught as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant at UCL; resided as a Visiting Senior Scholar at Peking University; and performed as a touring musician in Europe, North America, and East and Southeast Asia. Profile: http://www.lse.ac.uk/seac/people/Dr-Murray-Mckenzie
Dr Yi Jin, former Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, LSE. Dr Jin recently finished his PhD in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science and now works in LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre as a research assistant. Yi’s research focus on the political, economic and social dimensions of urban change, particularly in China. Yi is now working on the changing logic of urban governance underlying Chinese urban policies and the issue of urban materiality. Profile: http://www.lse.ac.uk/geography-and-environment/people/phd-students/yi-jin
Project Advisors
Prof. Ching Kwan Lee, Professor of Sociology, UCLA. Prof. Lee’s research interests include labor, political sociology, globalization, development, China, Hong Kong, global south and comparative ethnography. She is the author of three award-winning monographs on China’s turn to capitalism through the lens of labor: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007), and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, New Left Review, the China Quarterly, and Journal of Asian Studies. Her most recent co-edited volumes include The Social Question in the 21st Century: a Global View (University of California Press, 2019) and Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Political Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell University Press, 2019). Profile: https://soc.ucla.edu/faculty/ching-kwan-lee
Dr Pow Choon-Piew, former Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. It was with profound sadness for the project team to have learnt that Dr Pow passed away in July 2021. Dr Pow obtained his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and his research interests included critical geographies of the urban built environment globalisation, and urban politics in Asia. He was an editor of the Urban Geography journal, a Corresponding Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and a trustee of Urban Studies Foundation. A full obituary from his home department can be found here. Dr Pow was a keen supporter of our project. He was a colleague who was generous with his time, possessed a witty sense of humour, and kindness. His wisdom and knowledge will continue to have their presence during our project life and beyond. Profile: http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/geopowcp/
Project Findings
The major findings from the project can be grouped around four main themes: (1) the politics of compressed development; (2) micropolitics of cross-border transplantation of urbanism; (3) multimodal and multiscalar nature of circulations; (4) limits to China’s business model and urbanism.
First, compressed development experiences, especially in China, have translated into expectations for ‘fast cities’ where time and space are compressed to materialise ‘actually existing’ experiences of urbanisation in China during the last few decades. We asked in the project what ‘fast urbanism’ means for destination cities as developers carry their experiences to overseas markets. Here, we have called for critical attention to the ideological imposition of ‘fast’ development in China and beyond. We argue that the ‘speed’ of development as experienced by China (and other parts of East and Southeast Asia) was enabled by 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 local politico- economic structures that displace both the present and the future. These discussions are captured in our CITY paper published in March 2020.
Second, the micropolitics of cross-border transplantation of urbanism. Here, we take the example of green urbanism advocated by the developer of Forest City in Iskandar Malaysia, one of this project’s four main case study sites. We analyze the different ways green urbanism has been deployed in speculative city-making. We find that the local state in Iskandar Malaysia seeks to position the region as greener than its global competitors, while the developer consolidates its brand image and marketing aesthetics with selective “green and smart” techniques, yet at the cost of local residents’ habitat. We contribute to critical reflections on the entanglement of green urbanism and speculative urbanisation by paying attention to the complex local power nexus and the micropolitics of speculative green urbanism, which are contextualised through different stakeholders’ rationales and practices. These discussions can be read in our Urban Geography paper published in November 2021.
Third, multimodal and multiscalar circulations. Noting that discussions of global China through disciplinary categories such as labour or urban studies have led to segmented understandings of this phenomenon, we highlight the multimodal and multiscalar nature of circulations of capital, aspirations, knowledge and networks, which are produced by and ultimately materialise global China. We draw from a multi-sited comparative project on two major mainland Chinese developers (based in Beijing and Shunde) developing large-scale urban development projects in London and Iskandar Malaysia and trace the myriad circulations that enable the making of global China in and across the interconnected sites. We find that focusing on circulations – rather than agents (e.g. developers, consultants, investor-buyers, the state) – shifts attention to the flows of abstract and material objects (human and non-human) rather than their locational origins. This shift enables us to get past the tendency of methodological nationalism in analysing global China, and to see the phenomenon as an instance of urban capitalism in a specific era.
Last but not least, we critically examine China’s popular business model of city-making, whereby certain urban imaginaries and aesthetics are imported, translated and then foregrounded, paving the way for property speculation. This business model of Chinese urbanism is not only a depoliticised one but also going through a process of internationalisation. Here, the mobilisation of such concepts as speed and scale of construction and mobilisation of resources and capital remain key to maximising returns on investment. However, there are limits to the direct translation and import of such a model, depending on the specific constellation of economic, socio-cultural and political factors in each destination city.
With regards to the lessons learnt from the project implementation, the team was able to collect valuable data owing to the success in recruiting and working closely with locally based research assistants. In addition to their research skills, their localised and in-depth knowledge of the field sites and relevant contacts were instrumental to the project’s success.
Project Outputs
Shin, H.B., Zhao, S. and Koh, S.Y. (eds.) (in press) The Urbanising Dynamics of Global China: Speculation, Articulation, and Translation in Global Capitalism. Routledge
- This is a republication edition of the special issue of the same title from Urban Geography 43(10): 1457-1571
Shin, H.B., Zhao, Y. and Koh, S.Y. (eds.) (2022) The urbanising dynamics of global China: Speculation, articulation and translation in global capitalism. Urban Geography 43(10): 1457-1571
Shin, H.B., Zhao, Y. and Koh, S.Y. (2022) The Urbanising Dynamics of Global China: Speculation, articulation, and translation in global capitalism – an introduction. Urban Geography 43(10): 1457-1468
Koh, S.Y., Zhao, Y. and Shin, H.B. (2022) Moving the Mountain and Greening the Sea for Whom? “Forest City”and the Transplantation of Green Urbanism in Iskandar Malaysia. Urban Geography. 43(10): 1469-1695 [View]
- Earlier work-in-progress draft is available as: Koh, S.Y., Zhao, Y. and Shin, H.B. (2021) The micropolitics of speculative green urbanism at Forest City, Iskandar Malaysia. Department of Geography and Environment Discussion Paper No.21, London School of Economics and Political Science
Zhao, Y., Koh, S.Y. and Shin, H.B. (2021) Green urbanism and speculative urbanisation at Forest City, Iskandar Malaysia. LSE Southeast Asia Blog, 22 February
Shin, H.B., Zhao, Y. and Koh, S.Y. (2020) Whither Progressive Urban Futures? Critical Reflections on the Politics of Temporality in Asia. CITY: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action 24(1-2): 244-254
Events
Two workshops were organised by the project team, once in person in June 2019 to mark the launch of the project and the second occasion as an online event to mark the conclusion of the project in January 2022. We have recorded the latter event for continued viewing by interested parties and for maximising the project’s impact on scholarly, policy, and business communities. The recordings can be accessed here and here.
A conference session, entitled The Urban Spectre of Global China and Critical Reflections on its Spatiality, was organised as part of RC21 Conference 2019, New Delhi, India, 18-21 September 2021. A selected set of papers from this session fed into our Urban Geography special issue above.
The project team also played a major role in a public event, Politics of City-making in Southeast Asia, which was organised by the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre as part of the Centre’s 2020 Southeast Asia Forum, targeting both policy and academic communities. The preliminary findings from the project were shared with participants at the event, which saw a large number of people (179) having initially registered for this online event.
Media
Chu, K. (2021) “Fishers struggle with land reclamation in Malaysia.” China Dialogue, 18 October. Features the project and project Co-I, Dr Sin Yee Koh