Spatial restructuring, urban planning and politics

A working group of the Urban China Research Network

Contact information: Fulong Wu, Department of Geography, University of Southampton, F.Wu@soton.ac.uk.

Overview

This working group explores the transformation of Chinese urban space through multidisciplinary collaborations. More specifically, the group will aim to investigate profound urban spatial reconfigurations (suburbanization, redevelopment and residential relocation, internal migration and migrant enclaves, social segregation, sprawl and encroachment on rural land) and their social spatial implications (inequality, impacts on the urban poor, environmental sustainability, planning effectiveness and politics) under the transition towards a market economy, using demographic, socio-economic, and real estate data. Although the working group will be covering a wide range of issues, there is a common core of concern, that is, the space through which these phenomena take place and interact. The working group will shed light on the processes and forms of spatial restructuring on the basis of natural co-operations around the exploration of different aspects of the same city (for example, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, and Nanjing) and the comparison of the same topic across these cities. The working group will use the workshop to explore the knowledge gap and to identify the need for further data development. The workshop will also provide the means to exchange ad hoc data developed by individual group members on a voluntary basis. Two or three cities will be then chosen as the cases to explore better data infrastructure to be used by the collaborators for value-added work and in-depth investigation.

Working group objectives

The purpose of the working group is to:

1. make a collective assessment of proliferating urban China research regarding to urban spatial restructuring, i.e. urban development / redevelopment,
2. identify the gap of knowledge in relation to spatial restructuring and urban planning / politics,
3. address substantive concerns over social implications such as residential segregation and sprawled development, and planning implications such as conflicts over residential relocation, planning effectiveness and legitimacy.
4. benchmark spatial changes from temporal small-area demographic data and other proxy data such as real estate data,
5. collaborate the development of value-added research
6. provide a collaborative foundation toexplore datathat are neededto analyze spatial transformations
7. develop proposals for external funding to secure access to Census 2000 data.

At the core of the concerns are two interrelated questions that need to be substantiated with empirical data: whether the Chinese cities are becoming socially more segregated, and whether the population distribution is becoming more decentralized.

Founding members of the working group

Fulong Wu, University of Southampton.  Coordinator.

John Logan, University at Albany. Liaison with Steering Committee.

Lawrence Ma, University of Akron.

Ya-Ping Wang, Heriot-Watt University.

Weiping Wu, Virginia Commonwealth University.

Xiaopei Yan, Zhongshan University.

Anthony Yeh, University of Hong Kong.

Tingwei Zhang, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Chunshan Zhou, Zhongshan University.

Yixing Zhou, Beijing University.

Jieming Zhu, Singapore National University.