The achievements of China’s urbanization should not be evaluated solely in terms of adequate infrastructures, but also in their ability to implement sound governance practices to ensure social, environmental and economic development. This book addresses several key challenges faced by Chinese cities, based on the most recent policies and experiments adopted by central and local governments. The contributors offer an interdisciplinary analysis of the urbanization process in China, and examine the following key topics: the institutional foundations of Chinese cities, the legal status of the land, the rural to urban migration, the preservation of the urban heritage and the creation of urban community, and the competitiveness of Chinese cities. They define the current issues and challenges emerging from China’s urbanization. Students and academics of urban studies and related subjects will find the strong theoretical backgrounds to be of use to their research. Policy-makers and other practitioners will benefit from the practical advice and recommendations.

In this accessible new study, Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urban society. Throughout their long history, Chinese cities have been shaped by interactions with those around the world, and the story of urban China is a crucial part of the history of how the world has become an urban society. Exploring the global connections of Chinese cities, the urban system, urban governance, and daily life alongside introductions to major historical debates and extracts from primary sources, this is essential reading for all those interested in China and in urban history.

Currently there are more than 125 Chinese cities with a population exceeding one million. The unprecedented urban growth in China presents a crucial development for studies on globalization and urban transformation. This concise and engaging book examines the past trajectories, present conditions, and future prospects of Chinese urbanization, by investigating five key themes - governance, migration, landscape, inequality, and cultural economy. Based on a comprehensive evaluation of the literature and original research materials, Ren offers a critical account of the Chinese urban condition after the first decade of the twenty-first century. She argues that the urban-rural dichotomy that was artificially constructed under socialism is no longer a meaningful lens for analyses and that Chinese cities have become strategic sites for reassembling citizenship rights for both urban residents and rural migrants. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of urban and development studies with a focus on China, and all interested in understanding the relationship between state, capitalism, and urbanization in the global context.

This book explores the process of urbanization and the profound challenges to China’s urban governance. Economic productivity continues to rise, with increasingly uneven distribution of prosperity and accumulation of wealth. The emergence of individual autonomy including demands for more freedom and participation in the governing process has asked for a change of the traditional top-down control system. The vertical devolution between the central and local states and horizontal competition among local governments produced an uneasy political dynamics in Chinese cities. Many existing publications analyze the urban transformation in China but few focuses on the governance challenges. It is critical to investigate China’s urbanization, paying special attention to its challenges to urban governance. This edited volume fills this gap by organizing ten chapters of distinctive urban development and governance issues.

This book offers a unique contribution to the burgeoning field of Chinese historical geography. Urban transformation in China constitutes both a domestic revolution and a world-historical event. Through the exploration of nine urban sites of momentous change, over an extended period of time, this book connects the past with the present, and provides much-needed literature on city growth and how they became complex laboratories of prosperity. The first part of this book puts Chinese urban changes into historical perspective, and probes the relationship between nation and city, focusing on Shanghai, Beijing and Changchun. Part two deals with the relationship between history and modernity, concentrating on Tunxi, a traditional trade center of tea, New Villages in Shanghai and street names in Taipei and Shanghai. Part three showcases the complexities of urban regeneration vis-à-vis heritage preservation in cities such as Datong, Tianjin and Qingdao. This book offers an innovative interdisciplinary and international perspective, which will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese urban studies, as well Chinese politics and society.

Unprecedented urbanization is taking place in China and will continue over the next decades. China's level of urbanization rose from 18 percent in 1978 to 30 percent in 1995 and to 39 percent in 2002. It is expected that China will quadruple its total GDP and reach 55 percent of urbanization by 2020. Urbanization in China is a comprehensive process involving transformations in many areas, including the management of spatial expansion via modern urban planning, the administration of land use changes via land policy reforms, the process of rural-to-urban migration, and the development of public finance systems. All of these changes are part of China's transition from a centrally planned economy to a socialist market economy.

Planning for Growth: 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.