Urbanizing china: a reflective dialogue

Class Sessions: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

No prerequisites

China urbanized 350 million people in the past 30 years and is poised to do it again in the next three decades. China's urbanization is immense and rapid but largely "out of sync." This subject poses three questions:

The subject treats China's urbanization as the joint result of natural socioeconomic processes and conscious actions by governments, markets and the public. One overarching theme is the intricate interaction between state and market in China's context, yielding a variety of state-market "cocktails" devised and experimented in different cities in response to local problems, each involving a multi-layered projection onto urban space.

Instead of covering the various topics individually (land, housing, transportation, energy, environment, migration, finance, urban inequality,…), this course is structured to three clusters that examine the connections between these multiple functional domains. The subject will evolve continually to keep pace with the dynamics of Chinese cities, engaging students and guest speakers to provide critical inputs.

Classes will be organized as a semi-structured dialogue in the form of NPR's On Point. Programming of each class session is as follows:

Students take this course for different reasons, and so there are correspondingly different levels of commitments by students. As such, there are three options for fulfilling course requirements.

Team project

Students are expected to deliver multiple presentations: on literature synthesis, on the team project idea, proposal and draft report. Presentations are not graded.

Listeners are welcome on the condition of attending at least 70% of the classes and submitting in-class idea notes.

Active class participation is the essential part of this course. Students are asked to complete the readings before each class, and to be a part of the dialogue during class. It is the hope that some part of each class will trigger the students to think, and that students will make the effort to capture this moment. Post-discussion, students are asked to do so through the submission of in-class idea notes.

While texts relevant to each of the class sessions are provided in the Readings section, below is a list of recommended books for this course:

Wu, Weiping, and Piper Gaubatz. The Chinese City. Routledge, 2012. ISBN: 9780415575751. [Preview with Google Books]

Wu, Fulong, Jiang Xu, and Anthony Gar-On Yeh. Urban Development in Post-Reform China: State, Market, and Space. Routledge, 2006. ISBN: 9780415393591. [Preview with Google Books]

Campanella, Thomas. The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World. Reprint ed. Princeton Architectural Press, 2011. ISBN: 9781568989686. [Preview with Google Books]

Logan, John R., ed. Urban China in Transition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. ISBN: 9781405161466. [Preview with Google Books]

Friedmann, John. China's Urban Transition. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780816646159. [Preview with Google Books]

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