Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Robert Park in China: From the Chicago School to Urban China Studies
- 2 “Bewitched by the History Behind the Walls”: Robert Park and the Arc of Urban Sociology from Chicago to China
- 3 Moral Order in the Post-Socialist Chinese City: Generating a Dialogue with Robert E. Park’s “The City”
- 4 Learning from Chicago (and LA)? The Contemporary Relevance of Western Urban Theory for China
- 5 From Chicago to Shenzhen, via Birmingham: Zones of Transition and Dreams of Homeownership
- 6 Urbanization and Economic Development: Comparing the Trajectories of China and the United States
- 7 The Handshake 302 Village Hack Residency: Chicago, Shenzhen, and the Experience of Assimilation
- 8 Beijing Ring Roads and the Poetics of Excess and Ordinariness
- 9 Pathways to Urban Residency and Subjective Well-Being in Beijing
- 10 A Study of Socio-spatial Segregation of Rural Migrants in Shenzhen: A Case of Foxconn
- 11 The Anxious Middle Class of Urban China: Its Emergence and Formation
- 12 Conclusion: Everyday Cities, Exceptional Cases
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Robert Park in China: From the Chicago School to Urban China Studies
- 2 “Bewitched by the History Behind the Walls”: Robert Park and the Arc of Urban Sociology from Chicago to China
- 3 Moral Order in the Post-Socialist Chinese City: Generating a Dialogue with Robert E. Park’s “The City”
- 4 Learning from Chicago (and LA)? The Contemporary Relevance of Western Urban Theory for China
- 5 From Chicago to Shenzhen, via Birmingham: Zones of Transition and Dreams of Homeownership
- 6 Urbanization and Economic Development: Comparing the Trajectories of China and the United States
- 7 The Handshake 302 Village Hack Residency: Chicago, Shenzhen, and the Experience of Assimilation
- 8 Beijing Ring Roads and the Poetics of Excess and Ordinariness
- 9 Pathways to Urban Residency and Subjective Well-Being in Beijing
- 10 A Study of Socio-spatial Segregation of Rural Migrants in Shenzhen: A Case of Foxconn
- 11 The Anxious Middle Class of Urban China: Its Emergence and Formation
- 12 Conclusion: Everyday Cities, Exceptional Cases
- Index
Summary
In 2015, one hundred years passed since Robert Park published his seminal article “The city: Suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the city environment” in The American Journal of Sociology. It provided an agenda for the nascent Chicago School of urban sociology, which came to shape urban research for decades to come. One hundred years later, much has changed, both in the urban world itself and in the urban research that reflects on those changes. Globalization and accelerated urbanization have involved a remarkable transformation in cities around the world, and nowhere as dramatically as in China. Chinese cities have undergone a transition marked by unprecedented scales and speeds, across economic, political, and social systems, and with extraordinary variations from ghost cities to urban villages and megacity regions. As a result, it is the Chinese city that is now under the spotlight—as was the American city a century ago.
In urban research much has also changed. The human ecology approach that Park and others initiated has lost most of its allure, and heated discussions on the parochialism of urban theory have dominated journal pages. Meanwhile, new urban forms, new urban economies, and new urban geographies have instigated new literatures and new research agendas. Enormous changes in China have resulted in a rapidly growing scholarship investigating the “great transformation” of cities in China, as well as the urban experience and the relevant policy responses to the challenges that cities face today. The emergence of this and related literatures on cities in a variety of social and cultural settings has resulted in pleas for a more worldly urban studies, encapsulating the experience of cities extending beyond the “West.”
Against this background, this book invites specialists on urban China to reflect on the relevance of Park's article on “The city” for today—for cities in China, for urban research, and for questions about studying the social life of the city. After all, China's cities, with their unprecedented growth and massive urban–rural migration, today display characteristics that in certain ways are remarkably similar to America's cities like Chicago one hundred years ago. Again, radical urban changes are supported by technological innovations for transport and communication: the Internet, the high-speed train, and global logistics systems.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The City in ChinaNew Perspectives on Contemporary Urbanism, pp. xiii - xviPublisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019