Urban China Abstract

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Urban China Seminar 2013 abstract

Forms of the Chinese New Town: Exploring models of community andneighbourhood in Shenzhen

Stephen Read, Qu Lei, Diego SepulvedaTU Delft, Department of Urbanism

The Chinese miracle has since the 1990s been made in its largest urbanregions and centres and on the back of strongly urban-centred and urbanfavouring policies. Nevertheless as many questions as answers have beenraised by the development path followed, with some warning other fast-developing nations against following the same course (Ren 2013) and othersdoubtful about the rightness of this course for China itself going into the future(Friedmann 2005). There are different lenses through which one can view

Chinas development, but while it is clear the Chinese leadership have notadopted the Washington consensus in formulating a development path, therehas been a tendency to see this development path and its outcomes andlogics in terms of a neoliberal world-view albeit with Chinese characteristics(Harvey 2005). But the neoliberal lens is not the only one that could havebeen or indeed has been used, and even when we consider a broadlyneoliberal path of development, this may be only a macro part of the whole ofcontemporary Chinese development and urbanisation. In fact Chinesedevelopment is complex and multi-layered and looking at it through differentlenses, one is confronted with different simultaneous and interactingtrajectories of development and urbanisation. While urban-centreddevelopment is the contemporary policy concern, other more local concernsand strategies focus on communities and social environments, contributing tothe totality of development and urbanisation and, in their relations with thistotality, these are an under-researched component of the larger developmentpicture. Lower levels of scale slip under the radar of the major policy agendas,while it is here that a considerable integration at the level of public sphere,urban amenity, public space and community governance takes place, withunder-researched consequences for the success and continuing viability ofthe development process itself.

While Feis fundamentally rural China (Fei 1948) has become todays urbanChina (Ren 2013), a foundation for much of that urbanisation is, even today,in local, urbanised but often originally rural places and processes. Arrighi(2007) and Huang (2008) find alternative foundations for the Chinese miraclenot in classic neoliberal policies of privatisation, marketisation and economicrestructuring, or in Special Economic Zones and massive infrastructureprojects, but in some basic human capital factors that are a legacy in the mainof the socialist period and some socialist and post-socialist institutionalarrangements like the Peoples Communes and Township and VillageEnterprises. These include good health and education levels founded insocialist programmes, and organisational and management skills founded in

relatively small-scale rural and small-town entrepreneurship. We could add tothese another human capital factor of the social, family and business


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networks that extend into the Chinese diaspora. Under the radar ofmacrolevel economic processes, and without being in necessary or determiningrelations with this level, the viability of more local communities and theirspaces depends to a considerable extent on local abilities to leverage politicalpower and funds for the provision of basic urban services. The state is for the

most part unwilling or unable to guarantee universal basic services so that theprovision of these and their standards can be a contingent and patchy affair.These services include, besides social welfare, health care and education, thehousing and other social and commercial infrastructure that make up viablelocal living environments.

Such an interpretation of contemporary Chinese urbanisation in terms of itsactual living environments, and out of a direct determining relation with macroeconomic processes or even a national space of governance, findscommonalities with a long and varied history of Chinese local community,social spaces and urban systems. We see for example how in the Qing era

local societies, along with local services and local economic productivity, weredependant on local conditions, and local social amenity, governance and apublic sphere were intimately tied up with local initiative and economicsuccess (Rankin 1990). Rural agricultural and craft production played a largepart in this till the socialist era with hierarchies of villages and small andmedium sized towns integrating regions into agricultural and craft marketstructures from the bottom up while imperial and national administrativestructures did or tried to dothe same from the top down (Jun 2013). Atthe same time, an imperial or national space in governance, economic andeven administrative terms was something that evolved through multipleprocesses and projects of integration and a national economic space was notachieved in any real measure till the arrival of the railways and governmentalmodernisation in the 19th century (Ren 2013). Modernisation continued inmultiple phases and projects through republican, socialist and reform periods.This fluidity and multiplicity of economic and political conditions generated ana-la-carte (Faludi) patchwork of opportunities and responses which is acontinuing factor of the Chinese urban landscape today. High levels ofintegration of services and institutional structure across the national state,regarded as a norm in the West at least in Europe was only achievedunder highly centralised socialist policies, and then only at the cost of thehukou system, in the much larger and more diverse national space of China

(see CCP policy paper).

Sub-national (founded in river basins, canals) and regional structure (foundedin urban systems though the hierarchies embedded in agricultural marketstructures have clearly changed) was and remains important, and high levelsof rural-urban integration were a feature of these regional spaces until, in thesocialist era, central planning, systematised industrial and agriculturalproduction and the hukou system (designed to control urbanisation) dividedthem. There are still two Chinas today (Huang 2008) and part of the legacytoday is the collateral effects and problems of the massive urbanisation of astill formally rural population. However the nature of these two Chinas is also

open to question: how rural were Peoples Communes after all? It is alsopossible to argue that the urbanisation of the Chinese countryside in terms


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of skills, human capital and networks of production in a national space is amajor legacy of the socialist era if not earlier.

Contemporary development is characterised by the use, reuse and adaptationof structures inherited from the past (both the formal and land-ownership

structures ofrural villages for example, or the spatial and governancestructures of socialist danwei, or regional urban systems as the foundation ofmetropolitan or megacity development) to frame possible solutions. From awestern perspective, our urban theory and models do not always help in thedifferent conditions and alternative civilisational background we find in China.Structures of governance for example, originating in the relatively recenthistory of the European nation state, and too often presented as if they werenatural in western originating urban theory, are different in the morevariegated conditions pertaining to the much larger nation state of China, sothat we often have to rethink and reassess not the Chinese cases, but ourpresumptions of the naturalness of the western models. The basis of

differences are the different historical, regional, social and political-economicconditions in which they have developed so that we are thrown back on thecases themselves and the specific conditions prevailing.

This factor of historical social and human legacies and capital has beenassociated with a first phase of Chinese reform in the 1980s in the form ofrural urbanisation. However we can see that urban development closer to theground is still bound into transitional dynamics in which what emerges is ofnecessity tied, by the path-dependencies of the process of transition itself, towhat it emerges from. The questions we ask are open-ended: questions ofcommunity and citizenship for example are asked and possible answerstested in the field. Forms of community and neighbourhood are tied to theforms they emerge out of and this concerns not just the major cities; also tensof thousands of villages and towns in China are experimenting with differentstrategies to find roles for themselves and a living for their populations. Therole of the village ordanwei, for example, in shaping and constraining thepossibilities of transition to other local spatial and governance forms isexpected to be considerable (Bray 2005). Also, new forms of citizenship arelikely to emerge out of the effects of rural-urban migration and theurbanisation of rural populations on the strict division of rural and urbanclasses in the hukou system (Ren 2013).

Meanwhile, the connection between macro-economic processes and morelocal manifestations of community or quality of life has been theorised eitherin terms ofcreative cultures or appropriate scenographies to attractfootloose capital. Local communities are thought to benefit from a trickledown of prosperity produced at higher, more abstract levels. We proposethat rather than a trickle down from the macro level, urban economies andcultures have always been characterised by different interacting levels, tied todifferent levels of the locality and translocality of societies and productivesystems. Urbanisation has cultural (Wirth 1938) as well as economic andspatial dimensions, and lives are changing from past and existing social and

cultural forms, into new forms at multiple levels of locality and translocality.The processes we are concerned with steering and planning to desirable


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outcomes are those involving the forms of local and translocal communities,the regions, cities and neighbourhoods and the political forms that go alongwith these. New Towns and regional development are an established strategyfor achieving these aims but the forms of New Towns in a contemporaryChinese context are a question still being answered. Our paper will review

and draw conclusions from an MSc project involving eight students and anumber of teachers at the TU Delft, exploring questions of urban development,community and neighbourhood in the context of rural-urban migration andissues of land rights, public space and social justice in Shenzhen. We willdraw a few generalisations, in particular regarding Chinese New Towns as amode of urbanisation and framing for issues of governance and citizenship,from these explorations. We locate these explorations theoretically against acall forlocally-based studies of the dynamics of urban socio-spatialdevelopment as a way past the abstractions of planning and planningthinking (Friedmann 2004). Ethically, and of necessity, cities are more thanprofit-making machines for local governments and private investors (Ren

2013) and need to be considered as practical places for living.

References:

Arrighi, G. (2007)Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-FirstCentury(London: Verso).

Bray, D. (2005) Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The DanweiSystem from Origins to Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Fei, X. (1948)Xiangtu Zhongguo (Shanghai: Guancha she).

Friedmann, J. (2004) Strategic spatial planning and the longer range.Planning Theory & Practice, 5(1) pp. 49-

Friedmann, J. (2005) Chinas Urban Transition (Minneapolis, MN: Universityof Minnesota Press).

Harvey, D. (2005)A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress).

Huang, Y. (2008) Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurshipand the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Jun, Y. (2013) The historical transformations of small towns and their roles inregional development: the case of the Yangtze Delta in China before 1949.Forthcoming in Geoforum.

Levy, Jack. Power Transition Theory and the Rise of China. In: Ross, RobertS, and Feng Zhu. Chinas ascent: power, security, and the future ofinternational politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.


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Rankin, M.B. (1990) The origins of a Chinese public sphere: local elites andcommunity affairs in the late-imperial period.Etudes Chinoises 9, 2 (Fall): pp.13-60.

Ren, X. (2013) Urban China (Cambridge: Polity Press).

Wirth, L. (1938) Urbanism as a Way of Life.American Journal of SociologyXLIV(1).

Shift in world hegemony? Uncertainty about a world centre is interpreted inGlobal Cities as a fundamental change in the world economy. What Arrighiwould say is this is a product of financialisation and a precursor to a change inworld hegemony (see Slater).

Industrialisation in the west is associated with a wide-ranging modernisation.

The industrial era was a time of new sensibilities and a new understanding ofthe way the world was ordered. It was a time of radically new ideas as in thearts and sciences and in philosophy new ground was broken. Economically,industrial innovation and colonisation worked hand in hand to create theconditions of the first globalisation from 1850 to 1914. The industrial cityexpanded massively in a wave of rural-urban migration and urbanisation thathas only been equalled recently in Latin America and today in Asia. This newcity became the engine of industrial output and the centre of the new networksof globalisation. But the industrial city became also the site of spiraling socialinequalities, and the resulting social unrest threatened to derail the modernproject in the late nineteenth century. It seemed to many that that the socialworld was in need of reform in line with the changes in ideas and a newscientific social science and social reform movements emerged in thenineteenth century. Then, initially from municipal bases throughout Europe,visions of a more social and equitable city were born. These were formalisedin concepts like town and country planning, planologie, Raumplanung, andCity Beautiful. New urban components like the social neighbourhood, theneighbourhood unit, the woonwijk, and the microrayon were born, and awide-ranging, rationally based form of spatial planning was emerging thatwould dictate western rebuilding after the devastations of the Second WorldWar (Boelens).

The city we deal with today is a product of these developments. Planning in itsdifferent forms has been central to its production. But the modern project ofindustrialisation and social reform has been overtaken by new developments.We sometimes see this as a failure of modern planning but some like DavidHarvey see it a little differently. What happened, according to him, was that anew set of conditions, practices and ideas in a sense a new modernityappeared that modern planning in its original form was not equipped to dealwith (Harvey 1989).A sea-change has occurred, bound up with theemergence of new dominant ways in which we experience space and time(Harvey 1989:vii). Harvey links these changes to a reorganisation and to a

new round of time-space compression at a global scale in capitalism.


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Things have changed again. According to some, technology and newbusiness and production practices, including a new global division of labour,have radically altered the organisational structure of the world so that we haveto think about it in radically new ways. Today we are encouraged to adoptnetwork approaches and to understand space and time in terms of the flows

which characterise a network society in a radically new information age(Castells). The network society is characterised by: 1. An increasingworldwide interdependence (Strange); 2. A blurring and redefining of borders(Ohmae), and; 3. A world of flows, alongside the world of geography andplaces (Castells). According to most, increasing interconnectedness meanson the on hand we can communicate across the world in seconds, but itmeans also increasing inequalities between rich and poor nations; it meansborders blur, shift and even disappear at all scales from those of globalregions to nation states and municipalities, and; it means a world of terminals,transfers and transport networks that dominates and secedes from (Reich;Spivak) the everyday world of places.

Others are more sceptical. While acknowledging that things are moreconnected and that some structures in global production and business haveshifted to take advantage of fast communication, they point out that theborderless nature of contemporary business and economic space isoverstated. National markets are still dominant precisely because of the legaland institutional clarity that trading within national borders brings (Hirst andThompson 1996). The ideas of a free flow of information and that socialand business organisation has freed itself from a structure of places is simplyimplausible. The world is organised around its knowledge structures, but asmany have argued before, the structures are revealed by knowledgecommunities (Haas) and knowledge cultures (Knorr Cetina) that are emplacedand networked in place structures. There is true global knowledge; forexample a global trader from London could, provided he adjusted hislanguage settings, start work immediately on a correctly configured terminal inTokyo. The community and culture of global trading is shared through thenetwork and at global dimensions. However his knowledge structures arelikely to start breaking down once he leaves the terminal and starts interactingwithin which he works is

It was not just sensibilities that changed, the structures of our territories

changed. We forget that the territorial units we regard almost as natural todaywere an invention of this period. Both the nation state and the neighbourhoodare products of the modern sensibilities and the processes of modernisationthat also made the industrial city.

Things have changed again but it is in the context of this colossal buildingboom that we still work in almost every region of the world.

In the recent past Chinese development policy has tended to overlook localconditions of community and site. Policy has tended to be rolled out as if the

existing conditions were a clean sheet. Much of the criticism of this policy andimplementation has seemed to regard this as an oversight as a


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consequence of nave and thoughtless modernisation and a over-hasty andover-enthusiastic implementation of over-simple ideas. However a case couldalso easily be made that the clean sheet is a considered and integral, if brutal,part of a policy whose aim is to transform territory as quickly as possible intoreal estate and to the calculative logics of the land market. The strategy has

been built into planning practice due to the way it serves to finance localplanning initiatives, locking local authorities and their development partnersinto its self-justifying practices. Implementation of the tabula rasa strategy canbe seen most clearly in the straightforward clearing of land of pre-existing builtfabric and communities. In addition however, much of recent infrastructurebuilding has been designed to make territories as uniformly accessible aspossible to ports, airports and central business districts, and as available aspossible to developers whose strategies are constrained by the logics of realestate and the land market, and the logistics of accessibility, and to whom thesocial and environmental conditions of locality are a unwanted complication.

Modernity in all its many manifestations has some of this character ofsubjugation of the logics of what exists to others which are more modern,efficient, calculable and profitable. However modernity has also never entirelyseceded from the ground on which it has been built and has always beenconnected back to it and relied on it for labour and other resources. It hasoften succeeded however in shifting its supply of these resources, or to newsupplies of these resources. Shifting the demand for labour to otherjurisdictions, where one no longer has to be accountable for the social costsof labour in terms of housing, education, health and welfare, is of course partof the strategy of the new global division of labour.

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Urban China Abstract