Abstract
This book originated from a conference with the telling title “From Chicago to Shenzhen: the city at 100”. Much of urban scholarship starts from Robert Park’s 1915 paper on Chicago, which gave birth to the Chicago School. This has been much criticised – often for good reasons – and the uniqueness of Chicago as a city rather than an archetypal urban space has been written about extensively. However, Park’s (1915) essay does have an important position in the literature and it is from this starting point that the volume takes its focus. The premise of the work, which has a critical eye on the Chicago School is to cast the focus from the US towards China. The rationale for doing so is that Chinese urban development is now the focus of much academic investigation and it deserves the same attention that Chicago was afforded in the early part of the twentieth century.
The book is organised in 12 chapters, following a preface. The first seven chapters all reference the dual theme of Chicago and Shenzhen, starting in Chapter 1 with an explicit discussion of Robert Park’s influence and the connections from the Chicago School and Urban China Studies. The remaining five chapters of the book turn the focus more towards specific urban issues with which Park concerned himself. They deal with contemporary Chinese urbanism taking in subjects such as subjective well-being (Chapter 9), segregation of rural migrants (Chapter 10), the formation of the middle class (Chapter 11) as well as the concluding chapter which provides a summary around the theme of everyday cities as exceptional cases. Overall, this is useful book and has many insightful chapters; urban scholars who wish to broaden their knowledge of urban development in China as well as those wishing to explore the implications and relevance of Robert Park’s work in contemporary urban debates would benefit from reading it.
To my mind there are a couple of chapters that stand out. One of the most interesting chapters in the book is the opening “Robert Park in China”. In this chapter, Xuefei Ren investigates the arrival of Park’s ideas in China through a meticulous exploration of original sources, texts and communications between Park and Chinese Universities where he later taught his Chicago School ideals. The interest in this chapter comes from the comparisons between the Chinese city of Guangzhou with Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and, of course, Chicago. In particular the redevelopment of Guangzhou is charted and the depressing commonality of poor quality housing for precarious groups is listed across all locations: the drivers might be place specific, but the outcomes and consequences are not. Turning to Chapter 10 on socio-spatial segregation, it charts details on the amount of time migrants have lived in the city of Shenzhen and the social construction of the Elite, Native and Professional groups by a wide variety of variables. The segregation is largely investigated through the use of location quotients which are mapped, thus providing an effective visualisation of the city. Depth to the chapter is provided in the section which follows the maps by using primary qualitative interview data to explore the patterns observed and the lives of the migrants that have contributed to their formation. In using these dual data sources the authors identify that there are similar patterns and experiences when comparing the US and China. For instance, the process of suburbanisation is similar although the driver of this process – the migrants are stuck in the suburbs and unable to relocate to the central city even if they wished to – is clearly different. It is this latter aspect that is more unique to the Chinese experience and is, in this chapter at least, demonstrated to make the connection between large investments by multinational companies and their strategies of locating in the suburban areas of the city.
Elsewhere in the book, there is a wide range of empirical evidence. For instance, Chapter 9 on subjective well-being has a strong modelling core, with regression analysis to demonstrate the outcomes being discussed. Chapter 11 on the anxious middle class by contrast explores the ideas empirically by using information from informants and quotes from narrative interviews. Each chapter then uses an empirically driven approach which draws on the methods best suited to providing the information required to support the argument. In that sense, this is not a methodologically driven book, rather it is driven by the research questions and much the better for doing so.
What then are the key messages of the book? By starting with Park’s ideas the book allows the chapter authors to have a conversation with the foundations of urban studies and cities literatures. Rather than being stuck in traditional Western viewpoints the explicit use of the Chicago School, up front and central, allows the chapters to move beyond it, finding the elements of Chinese Urbanism that reflect as well as those which contradict and which are exceptional. The volume reminds us that whilst many themes in urbanism remain constant wherever the focus of the gaze falls, there are always contextual differences – sometimes small, sometimes vast, which render the processes and outcomes very different. For that alone this is a very worthwhile book.