Fulong Wu & Fangzhu Zhang (2024). Governing Urban Development in China: Critical Urban Studies. Routledge.
Governing Urban Development in China: Critical Urban Studies investigates urban development and governance in China and introduces China perspectives to the understanding of governing urban development in the 21st century.
Building upon a rich and burgeoning literature on China, the book explains major changes in governance, offers a well synthesised account of state-centred governance, and provides in-depth discussions on urban governance, city and regional planning, financing and financialization, urban redevelopment, local economic development and innovation, and environmental governance. The book bridges theoretical concepts in critical urban studies and empirical research on China and thus depicts a fuller picture of changing and variegated urban governance in the contemporary world. The book theorizes Chinese urban governance from the ground up and derives a concept of state entrepreneurialism as a framework for narrating urban governance in China. Following this framework, each chapter begins with a brief introduction to key concepts in urban geography and then depicts the urban development process on the ground in China. Then, the chapters discuss these concepts and explanations because many are derived from a different context, often in Western economies. At the end of each chapter, the phenomenal urban changes are evaluated with their theoretical implications.
This book offers contextualised insights into critical geographical studies of urban governance and is the first essential complementary reading for both urban scholars and those exploring the geography of China. It will be of interest to students and researchers in Urban Geography, Urban Studies, Urban Planning, Sociology, Political Science and China Studies. The book can also be complementary reading in China Studies, especially in governance and politics.
Fangzhu Zhang & Fulong Wu (2023). Handbook on China’s Urban Environmental Governance. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Handbook on China’s Urban Environmental Governance addresses how Chinese cities govern environmental changes generated by fast economic growth and urbanisation. With in-depth case studies on governing waste management, climate change, and energy transition, it will illuminate the relationship between the state, market, and society in environmental governance.
This timely and comprehensive Handbook addresses how Chinese cities govern the environmental changes generated by fast economic growth and urbanisation. Outlining the relationship between the state, market, and society, this Handbook provides a systematic understanding of urban environmental governance in China.
Exploring the context of changing urban environmental policies in China, leading international scholars highlight the arts of governance and governmentality through experimentation and discourse. Chapters investigate the political ecologies of eco-cities and conservation, urban waste management, and governance and sustainability transitions, as well as focusing on low-carbon innovations and green buildings. With a territorial perspective grounded in Chinese cities, contributors interrogate changing and complex state–market–society dynamics in urbanisation and urban environmental governance.
With a thorough and systematic analysis of new environmental initiatives, practices, and impacts, this Handbook provides scholars, students, and policy researchers of environmental studies, politics, and East Asian studies with an exemplary selection of contemporary research on China’s urban environmental governance.
The book is free to download via UCL library (requiring UCL account loggin in)
Fulong Wu & Roger Keil (2023). Changing Asian Urban Geographies: Urbanism and Peripheral Areas. Routledge.
Changing Asian Urban Geographies investigates changing geographies of fast growing Asian metropolitan regions, in particular their peripheral areas.
Through examining the intersection of global suburbanisation and Asian urbanism, the book depicts a complex (sub)urban world in Asia. It explains how the forces of globalisation, the logic of capital accumulation, and the history of rural-urban divide and interaction, path-dependent local institutions, and government policies work together to reshape the geographies of Asian urbanism. Touching on social, environmental, governance and planning aspects of contemporary urban Asia, the chapters in this volume provide grounded studies of residential relocation and changing rural settlements, property development by a congregation of developers, political ecologies of water provision, middle-class consumers, and local state agencies, transit-oriented development and infrastructure finance in peri-urban areas. It demonstrates an assemblage of actors and coexistence of multiple urban governance regimes with everyday negotiations.
Changing Asian Urban Geographies will be interesting not only to those who wish to know more about Asian urban geographies but also to scholars and students wishing to see Asian metropolises in a comparative perspective of (sub)urban dynamics. The chapters in this book were originally published in Urban Geography.
Fulong Wu (2022). Creating Chinese Urbanism: Urban revolution and governance changes. UCLPress.
Creating Chinese Urbanism describes the landscape of urbanisation in China, revealing the profound impacts of marketisation on Chinese society and the consequential governance changes at the grassroots level.
During the imperial and socialist periods, state and society were embedded. However, as China has been becoming urban, the territorial foundation of ‘earth-bound’ society has been dismantled. This metaphorically started an urban revolution, which has transformed the social order derived from the ‘state in society’. The state has thus become more visible in Chinese urban life.
Besides witnessing the breaking down of socially integrated neighbourhoods, Fulong Wu explains the urban roots of a rising state in China. Instead of governing through autonomous stakeholders, state-sponsored strategic intentions remain. In the urban realm, the desire for greater residential privacy does not foster collectivism. State-led rebuilding of residential communities has sped up the demise of traditionalism and given birth to a new China with greater urbanism and state-centred governance.
Taking the vantage point of concrete residential neighbourhoods, Creating Chinese Urbanism offers a cutting-edge analysis of how China is becoming urban and grounds the changing state governance in the process of urbanization. Its original and material interpretation of the changing role of the state in China makes it suitable reading for researchers and students in the fields of urban studies, geography, planning and the built environment.
Roger Keil & Fulong Wu (2022). After Suburbia: Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century. University of Toronto Press.
After Suburbia presents a cross-section of state-of-the-art scholarship in critical global suburban research and provides an in-depth study of the planet’s urban peripheries to grasp the forms of urbanization in the twenty-first century.
Based on cutting-edge conceptual thought and steeped in richly detailed empirical work conducted over the past decade, After Suburbia draws on research from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas to showcase comprehensive global scholarship on the urban periphery. Contributors explicitly reject the traditional centre-periphery dichotomy and the prioritization of epistemologies that favour the Global North, especially North American cases, over other experiences. In doing so, the book strongly advances the notion of a post-suburban reality in which traditional dynamics of urban extension outward from the centre are replaced by a set of complex contradictory developments. After Suburbia examines multiple centralities and diverse peripheries which mesh to produce a surprisingly contradictory and diverse metropolitan landscape.
Fulong Wu (2015). Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China. Routledge.
Urban and Regional Planning in China provides an overview of the changes in China’s planning system, policy, and practices using concrete examples and informative details in language that is accessible enough for the undergraduate but thoroughly grounded in a wealth of research and academic experience to support academics. It is the first accessible text on changing urban and regional planning in China under the process of transition from a centrally planned socialist economy to an emerging market in the world.
Fulong Wu, a leading authority on Chinese cities and urban and regional planning, sets up the historical framework of planning in China including its foundation based on the proactive approach to economic growth, the new forms of planning, such as the ‘strategic spatial plan’ and ‘urban cluster plans’, that have emerged and stimulated rapid urban expansion and transformed compact Chinese cities into dispersed metropolises. And goes on to explain the new planning practices that began to pay attention to eco-cities, new towns and new development areas.
Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China demonstrates that planning is not necessarily an ‘enemy of growth’ and plays an important role in Chinese urbanization and economic growth. On the other hand, it also shows planning’s limitations in achieving a more sustainable and just urban future.
The link to the publisher site: here
Five articles in a special issue in Urban Planning International, a leading journal in the field of urban planning and studies in China, written by senior planners and researchers in China, discuss the significance and implication of this book. You can find their articles here (in Chinese).
Fulong Wu: 学术批评后的思考——基于对《为增长而规划 :中国城市与区域规划》的评述 [pdf]
Hongyang Wang: 整体主义与空间的政治经济学的本质—— 评《为增长而规划 :中国城市与区域规划》[pdf]
Xiangming Ma: 来自另外一面的审视——《为增长而规划 :中国城市与区域规划》读后 [pdf]
Hongsheng Chen and Zhigang Li: 一个关于中国规划的故事 —— 评《为增长而规划 :中国城市与区域规划》[pdf]
Xiaohui Chen: 适应时代发展需求的规划 ——《为增长而规划 :中国城市与区域规划》书评 [pdf]
Jingxiang Zhang and Hao Chen: 增长主义视角下的中国城市规划解读—— 评《为增长而规划 :中国城市与区域规划》[pdf]
Wu, F., Zhang, F., & Webster, C. (Eds.). (2013). Rural Migrants in Urban China. Routledge.
After millions of migrants moved from China’s countryside into its sprawling cities a unique kind of ‘informa’ urban enclave was born – ‘villages in the city’. Like the shanties and favelas before them elsewhere, there has been huge pressure to redevelop these blemishes to the urban face of China’s economic vision. Unlike most developing countries, however, these are not squatter settlements but owner-occupied settlements developed semi-formally by ex-farmers turned small-developers and landlords who rent shockingly high-density rooms to rural migrants, who can outnumber their landlord villagers. A strong state, matched with well-organised landlords collectively represented through joint-stock companies, has meant that it has been relatively easy to grow the city through demolition of these soft migrant enclaves. The lives of the displaced migrants then enter a transient phase from an informal to a formal urbanity. This book looks at migrants and their enclave ‘villages in the city’ and reveals the characteristics and changes in migrants livelihoods and living places. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book analyses how living in the city transforms and changes rural migrant households, and explores the social lives and micro economies of migrant neighbourhoods. It goes on to discuss changing housing and social conditions and spatial changes in the urban villages of major Chinese cities, as well as looking into transient urbanism and examining the consequences of redevelopment and upgrading of the ‘villages in the city’ in particular, the planning, regeneration, politics of development, and socio-economic implications of these immense social, economic and physical upheavals.
https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415534550
Wu, F., & Webster, C. (2010). Urban Poverty in China. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Urban poverty is an emerging problem. This book explores the household and neighbourhood factors that lead to both the generation and continuance of urban poverty in China. It is argued that the urban Chinese are not a homogenous social group, but combine laid-off workers and rural migrants, resulting in stark contrasts between migrant and workers’ neighbourhoods and villages.
http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/urban-poverty-in-china?___website=uk_warehouse
Wu, F. (Eds.). (2006).Globalization and the Chinese City, Routledge
Introducing readers to the far-reaching global orientation that is now taking place in urban China, an international team of contributors describe overarching globalization through a detailed examination of the transformation of the built environment.
A range of urban development processes are analyzed including urbanization, real estate development, changing landscapes, the industrial restructuring of the second-tier city, and the formation of the city-region in the context of global and local interactions. In examining city development and local practices as part of globalization processes, the global city is treated as a collection of microcosms and concrete places, overcoming the analytical tension of the dichotomy of the perceived ‘East versus West’ divide.
http://www.tandfebooks.com/isbn/9780203698716
Wu, F., Xu, J., & Gar-On Yeh, A. (2006).Urban Development in Post-Reform China: State, Market, and Space, Taylor and Francis
Radically reoriented under market reform, Chinese cities present both the landscapes of the First and Third World, and are increasingly playing a critical role in the country’s economic development. Yet, radical marketization co-exists with the ever-presence of state control. Exploring the interaction of China’s market development, state regulation and the resulting transformation and creation of new urban spaces, this innovative, key book provides the first integrated treatment of China’s urban development in the dynamic market transition.
Focusing on land and housing development, the authors, all renowned authorities in this field, show how the market has been ‘created’ under post-reform urban conditions, and examine ‘the state in action’, highlighting how changing urban governance towards local entrepreneurial state facilitates market formation. A significant, original contribution, they highlight the key actors and their institutional contexts.
China has been very successful in using urban land development as an economic growth engine, and here the authors investigate complex interactions between the market and state in creating this new urbanism. Taking a unique perspective, they marshal original ideas and empirical work based on field studies and collaborative work with colleagues in China.
http://www.tandfebooks.com/isbn/9780203962985
Ma, L.J.C. & Wu, F. (Eds.) (2004) Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space, Taylor and Francis.
A sea of change has occurred in China since the 1978 economic reforms. Bringing together the work of leading scholars specializing in urban China, this book examines what has happened to the Chinese city undergoing multiple transformations during the reform era, with an emphasis on new processes of urban formation and the consequent reconstituted urban spaces. With arguments against the convergence thesis that sees cities everywhere becoming more Western in form and suggestions that the Chinese city is best seen as a multiplex city, Restructuring the Chinese City is an indispensable text for Chinese specialists, urban scholars and advanced students in urban geography, urban planning and China studies.
http://www.tandfebooks.com/action/showBook?doi=10.4324/9780203414460