Spatial Culture in Contemporary China: The Nanjing Workshop

There is a problem with North American research that refers to their studies of the Global Urban South. This generalization bundles together the hutongs and new downtowns of Jinan with the beseiged blocks of Ramallah and the migrant barrios of Bogotá. In an attempt to overcome a selection bias toward cities most accessible to researchers on the East and West coasts of the United States, a new reification could easily result. This special issue focuses more specifically on urban changes in a set of Chinese cities. For over a decade, China has been at the center of a rapid urbanization of the largest population on earth. Although the media and more recently researchers on globalization, planning, and urban studies have turned their attention to this development, there is much more to be understood about this epochal change in the habitat of humanity. In June 2016, Prof. Zhou Xian, Dean of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanjing University, brought together Chinese and international scholars in a workshop on Spatial Culture in Contemporary China. This special issue presents a small selection of papers presented at the workshop to give a sense of the depth and vibrancy of urban research in China. The outstanding quality of the workshop was to engage urban political economic and sociological research (such as Hu Daping and Zhou Shangyi) with a broader field represented by analysts of urban form such as Tang Keyang, Yao Yifeng, and Tong Qiang or architects such as Lu Andong, with the translators of urban texts who are also deeply engaged in literary studies such as Yan Jian, and theorists reinterpreting European and North American urban theory such as Liu Huaiyu and Zhao Chen, and with students of visual culture such as Zhang Jie.

David Harvey offers an important overview of the implications of Chinese urbanization for global economies and also material cultures in the form of the consumption of concrete on an unprecedented scale to accomplish this construction. His article also presents a call to the analysis of the conditions of exchange amid a ‘realization crisis’ by which the profits from locally produced goods are realized overseas by distributors, marketers and brand enterprises (the example of the iPhone “Made in China Designed in California,” comes to mind). Harvey challenges both orthodox Marxist analysis of value and the managerialist culture of planning and municipal development. This article marks an important shift in Marxist analyses of value and inequality.

Despite being in such a dynamic period, this ambitious field struggles to attract global notice and to add its experience to international understandings. The process has created wealth, advantage and status as well as new forms of inequality, alienation, and loss of empathy. It has threatened not only individual identity but made community precarious. The landscape has changed so much that access to historical elements of cities and the continuity of community have been disrupted. In China, methodological debates around quantitative and qualitative, descriptive and critical research are being conducted behind the closed doors of research centers and workshops. They have the benefit of an almost immediate relationship to urban change, which has been undertaken with great rapidity and scope. This presents an unprecedented set of laboratories for different approaches to social, economic, cultural, infrastructural, and natural environmental change. However, research in China has been disconnected from global social science and cultural conversations by language and Eurocentric publication patterns. The result is a lag in social science research that we seek to bridge.

Zhou Xian offers a visual appraisal of Chinese cities that are cloaked in the haze of industrial and automobile pollution. Harvey commented that North America has not only outsourced its industry but the air pollution that went along with heavy industry. Zhou sees haze as a part of the current visual identity of Asian urbanism that contributes to the aura of these cities.

Yan Jian beautifully captures the emergence of the rural as a “residuum” transformed into an entertainment form and agricultural attraction for urban residents displaced from the traditional environment of China’s intensively farmed rural areas. Agritainment combines established formats for Chinese leisure walks and eating out with a nostalgic and aestheticized farm setting.

Keyang Tang looks to contemporary, metropolitan forms in the case of the new National Theatre. This building shows the paradox of globalized architectural form-making and the challenges urban cultures face in domesticating these forms. At the same time as presenting accomplished forms and innovative facades, like many other notable architectural commissions, the huge silvery, bubble-like building is inscrutable and offers little sense of the social activity and cultural performances it showcases. It remains to be claimed by locals and by the national populations as their space.

This issue extends the articles from the workshop with three complementary articles on the production of urban space by Benjamin Clavan, Sarah Tynen, and Thuy Van Nguyen. The repurposing of industrial sites as arts venues, of which the 798 Art District in Beijing is the best known internationally. Rapid urbanization has led to insecurity of housing tenure, a loss of a sense of a right to the city and challenged residents’ sense of social belonging both in neighborhoods under the threat of demolition and in new, anonymous apartments. However, attention to the maintenance of relationships in precarious urban conditions reveals alternatives to the dominant narratives of modernization and growth.Finally, Van Nguyen’s study of the diversity of users of bookstore-cafés offers a “third space” that is even open 24 hours a day in some cases. These stores that rival coffee chains as popular commercial spaces have become escapes from the city and into imagined and literary spaces.

With all the attention that China’s megacities have attracted in the media, it is a challenge to grasp the locatedness and locally specific qualities of both history, region and city cultures. In addition, it is a challenge for international media and researchers to capture more than a snapshot of developments. One area in which Chinese cities have come to notice has been the creation of unpopulated, so-called “ghost cities.” There is a need for critical and longitudinal research over longer periods of time will reveal the populating and filling in of new urban districts and the extent to which local culture is transplanted to new residential forms and spatial morphologies—from village and town to high-rise clusters. These articles all fill-in detail such as Tynen’s observation of the gender, age, and other demographic features of the traditional alley spaces in older neighborhoods and the uniquely Chinese sense of lively streets, renao. These contributions allow an appreciation of China’s rebuilt and sprawling cities as historically anchored, civic neighborhoods, and as a lived spatial culture.