课程内容

China’s urban transformation has been one of the fastest and most consequential remaking of space in modern history. “The urban” in China is not only where growth happens; it is how the state governs, how capital accumulates, and how social inequality and environmental risk are produced and managed. This course examines China’s urbanisation, urban development, and urban policy across national, regional, and global scales, discussing how they are planned, financed, built, and governed. Throughout the course, students engage debates on uneven development (city-regions, hierarchies, and spatial inequality), state entrepreneurialism and policy experimentation, land and local finance as infrastructures of accumulation, and the politics of mega-projects and urban risk. The course then turns to the contemporary shift from expansion to urban renewal and regeneration, and to the urban geographies of globalising China, including outward investment and policy mobility. It also broadens the perspective beyond major cities to examine rural futures and urban–rural integration and concludes by assessing the governance of sustainability and “smart” urbanism. The course is relational and comparative, tracing how China’s experiences can be interpreted against those of the global North and Asia and using China to rethink what “the urban” means today.

课程安排