This paper conceptualises limits on growth in Beijing, whose 2016–2035 master plan constructs a highly selective national capital for the central state by removing functions and populations deemed non-essential. Drawing on archival analysis of planning documents since 1949, extensive expert and ethnographic interviews, and multi-sited fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2023, it develops a Lefebvrian spatio-temporal framework with three relational dimensions for analysing urban future-making. Temporal entanglements show how a historically sedimented anti-metropolis disposition is reactivated amid contemporary state recentralisation. Performative governance examines how the diagnosis of ‘big city disease’ reframes demographic and functional pressures as urban pathology, legitimising relocation and greening as therapeutic intervention. Lived futurity reveals how officials, villagers and migrants negotiate these measures through procrastination, speculation and retreat. The article theorises limits on growth as an emergent mode of Chinese statecraft in which extra-economic priorities selectively guide the production of the urban future. Situating Beijing within a wider, politically heterogeneous turn that increasingly treats demographic and territorial growth as a crisis, it reconceives urban future-making as a politics of foreclosure: not only who profits from growth, but who is permitted to remain when growth is limited by design.
This article examines the vitality of social life at street level over time in the patrician elite area of Kensington, London. We consider how luxury amenities, prime homes and high-end stores intersect with the durable presence of an everyday, working city comprising diverse social infrastructures: budget hotels, rent-controlled housing and interstitial social spaces of cafes, parks and street benches. These layers of uses and users co-exist in complex time–space configurations despite the historical and contemporary designation of the neighbourhood as an elite space. Using a range of data sources, we show how the neighbourhood contains distinct features that enable the limited and partial social engagement and hypermobility of wealthy bodies with the social life of the area. However, we also find a diverse social history, culture and complex grounded experiences at street level involving a wide range of residents and other users. These observations demonstrate how, even in the most elite of urban neighbourhoods, spaces remain socially complex and diverse, despite ongoing tensions.
Why do investment-oriented municipal delegations begin with culture? This article develops cultural buffering to explain how municipal actors use cultural forms and assets when development-oriented diplomacy brings together organisations with different authority, timetables and commitments. The analysis draws on multi-sited ethnography of 5 Wuxi delegation circuits across Japan, the United Kingdom and continental Europe, followed by tracing of 21 initiatives to July 2026. It identifies two recurrent problems: municipal schedules can outrun partner learning and due diligence, while demands for visible outputs can exceed commitment and post-event ownership. Municipal actors respond to these temporal and accountability mismatches through naming, sequencing, coalition broadening and managed ambiguity. These moves can change who participates, what becomes discussable, which organisations enter the relationship and how provisional alignment is recorded. Subsequent project implementation depends on authority, resources, delivery capacity and an organisation willing to own the next step. Cultural buffering therefore identifies the encounter-level work through which an unsettled proposal becomes discussable and revisitable before its implementation is determined.
This commentary investigates the disciplinary blur that challenges the dual ontology of ruination as being both an urban/architectural transformation and an ecological phenomenon. It defies categorizations of objective knowledge and comes to terms with multispecies and interdisciplinary approaches, both historiographically and ethnographically, readjusting to the multiple temporalities of the nonhuman world-making projects that the human-made ruin becomes part of. Drawing on the urban ruin of 19 th -century Manchester (Cottonopolis), England, and the architectural ruins of contemporary Mogador, Morocco, it argues that the temporalities of the nonhuman, intersected respectively with periodicities of industrial contamination and human abandonment, transform the singular obsolete narrative of ruins into a plural transdisciplinary debate questioning the unyielding becoming of urban space. The text’s historiographical and ethnographical micronarratives, woven together through storytelling, theorize the transformative temporalities of urban nature and their capacity to provide the anthropogenic ruin with a collaborative ecological agency. This, the commentary argues, adds botanical and ornithological ontologies to urban and architectural taxonomies of ruination. By positioning oneself in the disciplinary blur, the commentary ideates on how architectural and urban studies can accommodate unfamiliar rhythms of nonhuman-constructed botanical and ornithological ruins.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in urban governance, infrastructure and design, yet urban theory still lacks a clear language for analysing the scale asymmetries through which these systems operate. This article develops Gulliver Urbanism as a conceptual framework for understanding how AI reshapes urban power when it processes information, acts, and coordinates across cognitive, temporal and spatial horizons that exceed ordinary human capacities and institutional rhythms. Moving beyond Frankenstein Urbanism’s emphasis on rebellion and loss of control, we argue that the central problem of contemporary AI urbanism is scale asymmetry within co-constituted human and machine assemblages. The framework comprises six dimensions: cognitive scale, temporal scale, spatial scale, governance asymmetry, autonomy and agency and human response. It synthesises scholarship on AI urbanism, urban political economy, infrastructural urbanism, posthumanism, law and scale, supported by AI governance frameworks and vignettes on Hangzhou City Brain, robotaxis and generative design. The article conceptualises the urban as a constitutive condition of AI scale asymmetry, where algorithmic systems encounter infrastructure, land, mobility, public services, municipal authority, social difference and collective life. Across these domains, the key challenge is how to govern systems whose capacities outpace human oversight while remaining embedded in corporate, legal and political arrangements. We argue that effective responses require mixed-intelligence governance and temporal dignity: arrangements that subject algorithmic operations to democratic oversight, contestation and human-paced deliberation. Gulliver Urbanism explains how AI reconstitutes urban life by reorganising infrastructures, municipal authority, spatial relations, design imaginaries, public services and everyday citizenship.
