Urban China Zoom (sponsored by Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab)

This talk explores China’s National New Area experimental urban development zones as ‘infrastructure spaces’ of diffuse and fragmented urbanization. Such spaces typically feature a rapidly built, large scale infrastructure grid laid upon an existing though increasingly obsolete rural landscape. They also seem to suggest a new model of urban development that deliberately eschews agglomeration and existing urban nodes. While rural residents struggle to reinvent their lives in preparation for the promised city-to-come, the inherent incompleteness of the infrastructure space introduces a state of suspension that envelops everyday life in the New Area. The central role of transportation infrastructures, and the logics of suspension and circulation that obtain in these spaces, provide echoes of historical Chinese and Asian patterns of urbanization in which the neat and tidy distinctions between rural and urban that underlie conventional (Western) urban theory have never materialized.