Changing Chinese Cities

Changing Chinese Cities PDF Author: Renee Y. Chow
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9971698331
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Until the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese urban life revolved around courtyards. Whether for housing or retail, administration or religion, everyday activities took place in a field of pavilions and walls that shaped collective ways of living. Changing Chinese Cities explores the reciprocal relations between compounds and how they inform a distinct and legible urbanism. Following thirty years of economic and political containment, cities are now showcases whose every component street, park, or building is designed to express distinctiveness. This propensity for the singular is erasing the relational fields that once distinguished each city. In China's first tier cities, the result is a cacophony of events where the extraordinary is becoming a burden to the ordinary. Using a lens of urban fields, Renee Y. Chow describes life in neighborhoods of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and its canal environs. Detailed observations from courtyard to city are unlayered to reveal the relations that build extended environments. These attributes are then relayered to integrate the emergence of forms that are rooted to a place, providing a new paradigm for urban design and master planning. Essays, mappings and case studies demonstrate how the design of fields can be made as compelling as figures. Fully illustrated in colour with 82 maps and architectural drawings, and 33 photographs.

Changing Chinese Cities

Changing Chinese Cities PDF Author: Renee Y. Chow
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9971698331
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
Until the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese urban life revolved around courtyards. Whether for housing or retail, administration or religion, everyday activities took place in a field of pavilions and walls that shaped collective ways of living. Changing Chinese Cities explores the reciprocal relations between compounds and how they inform a distinct and legible urbanism. Following thirty years of economic and political containment, cities are now showcases whose every component street, park, or building is designed to express distinctiveness. This propensity for the singular is erasing the relational fields that once distinguished each city. In China's first tier cities, the result is a cacophony of events where the extraordinary is becoming a burden to the ordinary. Using a lens of urban fields, Renee Y. Chow describes life in neighborhoods of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and its canal environs. Detailed observations from courtyard to city are unlayered to reveal the relations that build extended environments. These attributes are then relayered to integrate the emergence of forms that are rooted to a place, providing a new paradigm for urban design and master planning. Essays, mappings and case studies demonstrate how the design of fields can be made as compelling as figures. Fully illustrated in colour with 82 maps and architectural drawings, and 33 photographs.

Restructuring the Chinese City

Restructuring the Chinese City PDF Author: Laurence J.C. Ma
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134316089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
A sea of change has occurred in China since the 1978 economic reforms. Bringing together the work of leading scholars specializing in urban China, this book examines what has happened to the Chinese city undergoing multiple transformations during the reform era, with an emphasis on new processes of urban formation and the consequent reconstituted urban spaces. With arguments against the convergence thesis that sees cities everywhere becoming more Western in form and suggestions that the Chinese city is best seen as a multiplex city, Restructuring the Chinese City is an indispensable text for Chinese specialists, urban scholars and advanced students in urban geography, urban planning and China studies.

The Chinese City

The Chinese City PDF Author: Weiping Wu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415575753
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This text is anchored in the spatial sciences to offer a comprehensive survey of the evolving urban landscape in China. It is divided into four parts with 13 chapters that can be read together or as stand alone material.

Chinese Urban Transformation

Chinese Urban Transformation PDF Author: Chen Yuanzhi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000706745
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Now an established global force, China has experienced a sustained period of staggering economic growth since policy reform in the 1970s. Chinese urbanisation is the most significant example of economic, environmental and social change both within China and globally. In recent years, central government has made a concerted effort to encourage city governments to realign their priorities and achieve a balance between economic efficiency, social justice and environmental protection. Chinese Urban Transformation: A Tale of Six Cities is a fascinating exploration of the dramatic development Chinese cities have undergone. Tracing this transformation through a comprehensive analysis of social and economic change in six cities, it unravels the complex relationship between policy, outlook and role that urban development plays in China’s view of itself, including the tensions resulting from rapid social and economic change.

Urban China

Urban China PDF Author: Xuefei Ren
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745665454
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
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.

Understanding the Chinese City

Understanding the Chinese City PDF Author: Li Shiqiao
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473905397
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This book teaches us to read the contemporary Chinese city. Li Shiqiao deftly crafts a new theory of the Chinese city and the dynamics of urbanization by: exploring the rise of stories of labour, finance and their hierarchies examining how the Chinese city has been shaped by the figuration of the writing system analyzing the continuing importance of the family and its barriers of protection against real and imagined dangers demonstrating how actual structures bring into visual being the networks of safety in personal and family networks. Understanding the Chinese City elegantly traces a thread between ancient Chinese city formations and current urban organizations, revealing hidden continuities that show how instrumental the past has been in forming the present. Rather than becoming obstacles to change, ancient practices have become effective strategies of adaptation under radically new terms.

Factory Girls

Factory Girls PDF Author: Leslie T. Chang
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0385520182
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China. China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta. As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation. A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

China’s Urban Revolution

China’s Urban Revolution PDF Author: Austin Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350003239
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
By 2025, China will have built fifteen new 'supercities' each with 25 million inhabitants. It will have created 250 'Eco-cities' as well: clean, green, car-free, people-friendly, high-tech urban centres. From the edge of an impending eco-catastrophe, we are arguably witnessing history's greatest environmental turnaround - an urban experiment that may provide valuable lessons for cities worldwide. Whether or not we choose to believe the hype – there is little doubt that this is an experiment that needs unpicking, understanding, and learning from. Austin Williams, The Architectural Review's China correspondent, explores the progress and perils of China's vast eco-city program, describing the complexities which emerge in the race to balance the environment with industrialisation, quality with quantity, and the liberty of the individual with the authority of the Chinese state. Lifting the lid on the economic and social realities of the Chinese blueprint for eco-modernisation, Williams tells the story of China's rise, and reveals the pragmatic, political and economic motives that lurk behind the successes and failures of its eco-cities. Will these new kinds of urban developments be good, humane, healthy places? Can China find a 'third way' in which humanity, nature, economic growth and sustainability are reconciled? And what lessons can we learn for our own vision of the urban future? This is a timely and readable account which explores a range of themes – environmental, political, cultural and architectural – to show how the eco-city program sheds fascinating light on contemporary Chinese society, and provides a lens through which to view the politics of sustainability closer to home.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong PDF Author: Stephen Chiu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134600631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Hong Kong is a small city with a big reputation. As mainland China has become an 'economic powerhouse' Hong Kong has taken a route of development of its own, flourishing as an entrepot and a centre of commerce and finance for Chinese business, then as an industrial city and subsequently a regional and international financial centre. This volume examines the developmental history of Hong Kong, focusing on its rise to the status of a Chinese global city in the world economy. Chiu and Lui's analysis is distinct in its perspective of the development as an integrated process involving economic, political and social dimensions, and as such this insightful and original book will be a core text on Hong Kong society for students.

Strangers in the City

Strangers in the City PDF Author: Li Zhang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804742065
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
With rapid commercialization, a booming urban economy, and the relaxation of state migratory policies, over 100 million peasants, known as China's "floating population," have streamed into large cities seeking employment and a better life. This book traces the profound transformation this massive flow of rural migrants has caused as it challenges Chinese socialist modes of state control.