About the Book
The Sage Handbook of Urbanization in China is a pioneering handbook that reframes our understanding of China′s extraordinary urban transformation—a demographic shift of unprecedented scale and speed that has seen two-thirds of its population becoming urban dwellers. Moving beyond conventional narratives, editors Hoffman, Hubbert, and Liu develop an innovative conceptual approach that emphasizes distinctiveness without exceptionalism, global connections without universalism, and complex interrelationships beyond binary oppositions.
Through twenty-eight meticulously researched chapters of critical literature reviews, leading scholars explore China′s cities and urbanism not simply through top-down state directives but also through intricate negotiations among diverse actors, interests, and histories. Deploying the concept of "accompaniment," the editors argue the chapters reveal how state socialism and market mechanisms, rural traditions and urban aspirations coexist in dynamic tension rather than stark opposition.
From historic preservation to smart city technologies, from migrant experiences to environmental initiatives, from land use and architecture to housing and labor, this volume demonstrates how urbanization in China is simultaneously localized and worlded—connected to global currents while producing distinctive outcomes. By focusing on human experiences alongside institutional arrangements, the contributors illuminate how diverse actors actively shape urban spaces through their everyday decisions, creative adaptations, and sometimes resistance.
The Sage Handbook of Urbanization in China is essential reading for urban studies scholars, development practitioners, policy makers, and China specialists, this volume provides both literature reviews by scholarly experts and conceptual and analytical tools applicable far beyond China′s borders, contributing to global urban theory while respecting local specificity.
Part One: Setting the Stage
Part Two: Land Matters
Part Three: Configuring Belonging
Part Four: The Creative and the Disruptive
Part Five: Negotiating Identities
Part Six: Generating New Geographies
Table of Contents:
Introduction - Lisa M. Hoffman, Jennifer Hubbert, Zhilin Liu
Part One: Setting The Stage
Chapter 1: Chinese Imperial Cities - Toby Lincoln
Chapter 2: The Semi-Colonial Urban - Cole Roskam
Chapter 3: The Republican Urban Modern - Mark Baker
Chapter 4: Socialist (Anti-)Urbanism in China, 1949-1978 - Duanfang Lu
Part Two: Land Matters
Chapter 5: Land, Land Reform, and Land as a Means of Reform - Nick R. Smith
Chapter 6: Urban Governance - Fulong Wu, Fangzhu Zhang, Handuo Deng
Chapter 7: Financialization of Urban Development - Ran Tao & Jun Zhang
Chapter 8: China’s Economic Zones: Remaking Rural and Urban in the era of Reform - Jonathan Bach
Chapter 9: Infrastructure and Territory - Carolyn Cartier & Tim Oakes
Chapter 10: The Practice of Urban Planning - Sisi Liang & Dan Abramson
Part Three: Configuring Belonging
Chapter 11: China’s Hukou: Reforms, Mismatch, and Household Strategies - C. Cindy Fan
Chapter 12: Internal Migration in China - Sainan Lin & Zhigang Li
Chapter 13: Housing as an Engine for Urban Transformation in China:What do we know and what it means to urban and housing studies? - Zhilin Liu, Youqin Huang and Yiping Fang
Chapter 14: Spatialization of Class - Jie Shen
Chapter 15: Consuming the City - Laura Vermeeren & Jeroen de Kloet
Part Four: The Creative And The Disruptive
Chapter 16: Subcultures and the indigenisation of creative cities in China - Dr. Xin Gu
Chapter 17: Public Space in Contemporary China: Between Contestation and Socialization - Ryanne Flock
Chapter 18: Heritage-led Urbanization in China: Architecture and Design, Projecting the Past into the Future.* - Plácido González Martínez
Chapter 19: Citizen Mobilization and Activism: The Search for Civil Society in Urban China - Carolyn L. Hsu
Part Five: Negotiating Identities
Chapter 20: Urban Family Life in China - Jing Song & Lulu Li
Chapter 21: Work and Labor in Post-Socialist China - Xiaoshuo Hou Hou & Bowen Bao
Chapter 22: Gender and the Urban in China - Jie Yang, Hope St. John & Lisa Hoffman
Chapter 23: Diversification, Commercialization, and Politicization: Sexuality in China’s Cities since the 1990s - Penn Tsz Ting IP & Lucetta Y. L. KAM
Part Six: Generating New Geographies
Chapter 24: The Urban in China’s Environmental Governance: Policies, Practices, and Imaginaries - Alana Boland
Chapter 25: Technology and Chinese Cities: Ambivalent urbanism - Alan Smart & June Wang
Chapter 26: “Closely United Like Seeds of a Pomegranate”: Urbanization, ethnic expression and authoritarian governance in China’s ethnic minority communities - David R. Stroup
Chapter 27: Surveillance and Policing - Jeffrey T. Martin & Lingxiao Zhou
Chapter 28: China’s Urban Abroad: Mapping New City Spaces and Relations on a Changing Global Landscape - Monica DeHart
Conclusion: Future Research Directions - Lisa M. Hoffman, Jennifer Hubbert, Zhilin Liu
About the Author :
Lisa M. Hoffman is Professor in the School of Urban Studies at University of Washington Tacoma and faculty in China Studies at UW. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she describes her interdisciplinary work as anthropology of the urban. Her scholarship has focused on questions of power, governing and social change, with a particular interest in subjectivity and its intersections with spatiality. Research projects include studies of professionals/ism and volunteers/ism in urban China, anthropology of neoliberalism, and regimes of green urbanisms and rural urbanization in China. Her work has been published in journals such as Economy and Society; Territory, Politics, Governance; IJURR, Pacific Affairs, and Hau. Book publications include Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China (2010, Temple UP), Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday (2015, UGeorgia Press, co-edited with Heather Merrill), and Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma (2020, UW Press, co-authored with Mary Hanneman).
Jennifer Hubbert is Professor of Anthropology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She received her BA and MA from Stanford University and an MA and PhD from Cornell University. She is the author of China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization (Hawaii, 2019). Her research on public culture, nationalism, the nation-state, public diplomacy, and global relations in China has been published in American Ethnologist, The Asia Pacific Journal, Visual Anthropology, PoLAR, Modern China, positions, and City & Society, among others. Hubbert’s recent research, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, explores the cultural worlds of liberal gun owners and has been published in Social Science Quarterly.
Zhilin Liu is Professor in the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University. Her research interests include urban planning and governance, housing policy, rural-to-urban migration, and sustainable urbanization. She has published widely in English and Chinese peer-reviewed journals. She currently serves as a co-editor of Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, is Chair of the board of directors for the International Association for China Planning, and Vice Chair of the Asian-Pacific Network for Housing Research, and a board member for various journals or academic associations including the Urban China Research Network and the Behavioral Geography Committee of China Geographical Society. She received her bachelor and master degrees in urban geography from Peking University and PhD in city and regional planning from Cornell University.
Review :
This Sage Handbook disrupts the binary frameworks—state vs. market, urban vs. rural—that have long defined China scholarship. By compelling scholars to analyze China’s urban development through a comparative lens and situate its cities within a global context, the volume makes a vital contribution not only to China studies but also to global urban studies across the humanities and social sciences.
China’s dramatically increased urbanisation since the late 1970s has not surprisingly led to the growth of studies of its urban environment and development as a major sub-field of China Studies. This Handbook is more than an introduction to the literature and research on the topic. It challenges past dichotemies between socialism and the market, the state and society, the rural and the urban, and between tradition and modernity. Instead, it depicts a complex, diverse and constantly changing view of the processes of urbanisation and city life. Focussing on a largely social analysis of the city in China and urbanisation it provides both information and analysis that no one interested in social change can afford to ignore.
