Located within the world’s largest urban region, the Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin (GMH) is a new experimental and innovative governance space connected to China’s ‘one country, two systems’ policy. Located within the geographical boundaries of Zhuhai, the GMH is governed under a shared administrative jurisdiction between Macao, Zhuhai and Guangdong Province. Originally developed from researching African urban contexts, we mobilise and extend a ‘transcalarity’ framework to overcome perceived weaknesses inherent in the ‘state rescaling’ approach often deployed to explain subnational governance arrangements in China. The paper reveals how polycentric urban regions such as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area are actively governed through transcalar state strategies. It shows how transcalarity, as a concept, can reveal important new empirical and theoretical insights into urban China. Conceptually, it reframes Hengqin as a ‘buffer zone’ that stabilises yet simultaneously destabilises the ‘one country, two systems’ configuration, producing experimental governance dynamics. Empirically, the paper draws on 39 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, to provide a granular and multi-perspectival analysis of experimental governance practices in the GMH. We demonstrate that central government actors orchestrate polycentric urban development through selective delegation, embedded jurisdictional controls and strategic recalibration of intergovernmental relations. This produces distinctly asymmetrical outcomes: Macao gains institutional leverage, while Zhuhai’s formal administrative authority is constrained. Overall, our paper demonstrates how polycentricity is strategically constructed, rather than emergent, in contemporary state spatial projects.
China’s urban food system is increasingly governed through standards of formalisation, visual order and supply-chain integration. Yet small-scale, vendor-led food circulation continues to sustain everyday access to fresh produce across rural and urban geographies. This article examines Jinsheng, a busy fresh produce market in Sihong County, northern Jiangsu, which is located in the urban centre yet widely described as ‘rural-like’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I use this paradox to examine how vendors organise food flows through agricultural routines, embodied knowledge, rural social networks, multi-role labour and local spatial familiarity. I conceptualise these practices as ‘vernacular logistics’: locally embedded arrangements through which vendors sustain circulation between fragmented rural production and urban consumption. The article makes two arguments. First, vernacular logistics constitute a form of infrastructural agency, enabling vendors to work through partial regulation, uncertain recognition and uneven market governance. Second, these logistical practices produce the marketplace as a rural-urban interface, where rural temporalities, materialities and forms of exchange are continuously brought into the urban core. By foregrounding the everyday work of food circulation, the article challenges planning approaches that equate infrastructural improvement with standardisation alone, and points towards more differentiated licensing, spatial and temporal regulation, and market management practices that recognise vernacular forms of urban provisioning.
This paper examines the infrastructural configuration of urban nature in contemporary Chinese cities, approached through relocation of Chinese international students to Manchester, UK (2021–2022). Drawing on social practice theory and qualitative methods with fourteen students, the research traces how relocation disrupted nature engagement across three infrastructural registers: the social infrastructure of urban nature walking embedded in family routines and friendship networks; the material infrastructure of nighttime lighting enabling gendered evening mobility; and the digital infrastructure of platforms like Xiaohongshu, which produce landscapes of fear and desire and sustain platformised leisure culture across borders. The relocation reveals infrastructural configurations that Chinese eco-urbanism has normalised as markers of urban modernity and liveability. The paper’s central contribution is to demonstrate that nature practices do not travel intact across contexts: the materials and meanings that constitute them are anchored in place-specific infrastructures, while transferable platform-enabled competences tend to reproduce familiar, platform-mediated modes of nature engagement abroad. The paper reframes planning as the configuration of practice, with implications for lighting, platform visibility and support for mobile populations.
Neighbourhood social capital has long been regarded as protective for mental health through everyday face-to-face interaction. At the same time, rapid digitalization is reshaping patterns of social connection in ways that may reorganize the distribution of these place-based protections and contribute to urban mental health inequalities. This study examines the associations between multidimensional digital engagement, neighbourhood social capital, and depressive symptoms in China, and assesses whether these relationships differ by gender and marital status. The analysis draws on 13,443 adults from the 2016 and 2020 waves of the China Family Panel Studies. Pooled cross-sectional ordinary least squares models with wave controls are estimated, followed by subgroup analyses stratified by gender and marital status. Neighbourhood social capital is consistently associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms after adjustment for socioeconomic characteristics and multiple dimensions of internet use, indicating that local social environments remain relevant under conditions of widespread connectivity. In contrast, the associations between digital engagement and depression vary by activity type. Internet use oriented toward maintaining contact with family and friends is associated with fewer depressive symptoms, whereas longer online time and work-oriented, business-oriented, and entertainment-oriented uses are more often associated with higher depressive symptoms. These patterns differ across social groups. The protective association of neighbourhood social capital is strongest and most consistent among married men. In contrast, internet-use-related correlates of depressive symptoms are generally more pronounced among women, especially married women, although the specific forms of internet use associated with depressive symptoms vary by marital status and across survey waves. The findings indicate that digital participation and neighbourhood social capital are jointly associated with depressive symptoms, but their associations are socially differentiated by gender and marital status. Strengthening neighbourhood-based social infrastructure remains central to reducing mental health inequalities in the digital era.
This introductory article argues that China’s global urban significance lies in the ways decades of uneven infrastructuring have reorganised urban possibility within and beyond China. It reads this shift through the movement from ‘ubiquitous China’, which captured China’s earlier presence in the global architectural imagination as a spectacular horizon of experimentation, to infrastructural China: an urban condition in which China’s transformation shapes how contemporary futures are imagined and pursued. Drawing on the papers gathered in this special issue, the article develops infrastructuring as the production of an urban condition in which everyday need and collective futures are materially organised, unevenly supported and sometimes displaced. In doing so, it shows how urban China can generate concepts for wider urban scholarship, while moving beyond accounts that locate China’s infrastructurality primarily in formal regimes of transnational infrastructure.
This paper revisits the recent transformation of China’s urban governance through the lens of state entrepreneurialism. Its earlier model was characterized by the commodification of housing, export-oriented industrialization, and land-driven urban expansion. By examining new practices across cities and regions, we find that the model has entered a new stage of ‘strategic statization’. As a framework, state entrepreneurialism includes state mandates and governance techniques. Now, state mandates have become more ‘strategic’, shifting from a local growth mentality to one focused on political objectives and regime stability in a contested geopolitical environment. Governance techniques evolve towards ‘statization’ – a trend that fosters non-entrepreneurial subjects and adopts managerial forms of statecraft. Strategic statization means that the state dominates the definition of priorities and orchestrates diverse stakeholders to achieve them. As a historical material understanding of the political economy, state entrepreneurialism remains a powerful framework that explains the ‘origin’ of earlier neoliberal-like economic reforms in response to globalization and the current trend towards statization in the new polycrisis.
Contemporary urban environments are increasingly shaped by intertwined layers of infrastructure, data, and regulation that produce spatial patterns difficult to interpret through single-modality analyses or purely predictive models. While recent AI-driven urban studies have advanced large-scale measurement and forecasting, they often struggle to (i) integrate heterogeneous modalities such as imagery, geospatial networks, archives, and planning documents, (ii) relate spatial change to regulatory and institutional timelines, and (iii) generate traceable outputs that support architectural and planning reasoning. This study addresses these limitations by proposing an interpretable, multimodal framework for urban pattern interpretation. The paper introduces City Decoder , a spatiotemporal pattern-recognition framework designed to decode urban environments through evidence-linked interpretation rather than prediction or optimisation. Methodologically, the research conducts a structured comparative review of representative trajectories from major global city laboratories—including Beijing City Lab, MIT Senseable City Lab, ETH Future Cities Laboratory , and Stanford Urban Informatics Lab —coding their dominant data modalities, analytical tasks, and output types. Based on this synthesis, City Decoder is specified as an operational pipeline that aligns time-series urban imagery, vector geospatial data, and regulatory texts within a shared spatial–temporal reference. The framework performs recurrence detection, cross-layer coupling analysis, and discontinuity identification between policy intent and material outcomes. The framework is designed to produce a Pattern Atlas , relational mappings, and diagnostic reports intended to support architectural and urban analysis, policy evaluation, and scenario-based design inquiry. The primary contribution is a transferable methodological specification for interpretive, traceable pattern recognition in urban research—one that repositions multimodal AI from a predictive tool toward an instrument of spatial understanding.
Urban Growth Machine (UGM) theory has been widely used to explain land-driven urban development and growth-oriented urban politics. As China has undergone rapid urban transformation since the post-Mao reforms, UGM has increasingly been applied to interpret land commodification, property-led redevelopment, and local growth governance. However, China’s state-centric political–economic system—characterized by public land ownership, hierarchical governance, and strong state intervention—raises questions about the theory’s applicability beyond its original North American context. This article critically reviews how the UGM theory has been adopted, adapted, and contested in analyzing Chinese urbanization. Based on a systematic literature review, the article argues that Chinese urbanization has produced a state-centered growth machine in which local governments, state-owned enterprises, and hybrid public–private arrangements dominate land-based development. Further, even residents’ land-bound collectives (as with real estate companies by urban villagers) contribute to these uniquely Chinese-style growth machines. While UGM theory captures the centrality of land-based accumulation and growth incentives, it underestimates the role of state power, institutional specificity, and multi-level governance. The article proposes a revised, state-centered interpretation of growth machine theory and situates alternative frameworks as theoretical extensions rather than replacements. This contributes to broader debates on the global transformation of urban theories in non-liberal contexts.
Over the past two decades, rural areas within Chinese coastal megacities have been influenced by the rapid development of e-commerce platforms that capitalize on the social and physical advantages of local rural villages, turning them into clusters of entrepreneurship. These once-rural ensembles have embraced the opportunities offered by digital platforms, shifting their mode of production from agriculture to manufacturing and delivering their products directly to final customers in other parts of the world. Despite the magnitude of a phenomenon currently reshaping vast regions of China, the physical transformation of the rural landscape catalysed by platformization remains underinvestigated. Grounded in the notion of platform ruralism, this interpretive study focuses on the first generation of TaoBao Villages (TBVs) in the Greater Bay Area of China (GBA) and selects three for in-depth investigation, employing a mixed-methods approach. Morphological analysis is coupled with in-depth semi-structured interviews and field observations to provide a nuanced understanding of the ongoing multifaceted spatial materialization of platform capitalism. Findings show that, with the penetration of e-commerce, the rural landscape has undergone overwhelming spatial restructuring at both the village and building scales. The expansion of the industrial landscape, along with an expanded road network, was superimposed without regard for existing topography, historical context, morphological continuities and the inhabitants’ centuries-old agricultural traditions. By unveiling such rural landscape transformations, this article aims to contribute to the current critical debate on the power of platform capitalism to reshape rural areas within rising megalopoles, such as the GBA.
This paper examines the condition of partial development in which infrastructural provision in second-tier cities has become increasingly selective, creating new geographies of inequality for lower-middle-class migrants. The resulting precarity is not a by-product of growth but is state-engineered through a governing logic of infrastructural selectivity. The paper analyses the mechanisms that produce this condition. Findings reveal a bifurcated system where state investment in transport and subsidised housing is channelled towards prioritised New Town Initiatives (NTIs) at the expense of bottom-up self-urbanised peripheral entities. This institutionalised selectivity compels migrants into a range of everyday improvisations, navigating informal housing and transport markets to secure their livelihoods. By centring these bottom-up practices, the study offers a critical account of how partial development is governed and lived, contributing to debates on state entrepreneurialism, infrastructural governance and urban justice in China.
The paper explores some of the potential contributions of conjunctural analysis in urban studies and China studies, and in the dynamic crossover spaces between them. No methodological approach can accomplish everything, and none should claim monopoly status, but an argument can be made that conjunctural analysis has a distinctive and generative contribution to make in the overlapping field that includes but also exceeds “urban China studies,” in light of its defining concern with context-rich, multi-causal explanation; its commitments to exploratory, mid-level theorizing, extending cases and reconstructing flexible concepts; and its principled refusals of essentialism, reductionism, and foreclosure. More than this, as a relational and reflexive approach, conjunctural analysis navigates around the culs-de-sac of exceptionalist and introspective explanation, insisting on the animation and ongoing reconstruction of theory claims and emergent concepts, both through and across cases, against their deployment as rigid frameworks or inert foils. This is a rationale for working and indeed staying with awkward, multi-dimensional, and question-begging concepts, where they provide critical insights and demonstrable traction, as opposed to their disaggregation, dismissal, or disavowal. In this spirit, the paper explores the example of party-state capitalism, pursuant to the conjuncturalist mandate deliberatively to “stretch” and rework concepts, instead of rushing either to affirm them (as rigid templates) or to break them down (as mere foils).
This article introduces centripetal urbanism as an analytical framework for examining how state-building and ethnicity intersect with urbanisation in China’s ethnic periphery. I define centripetal urbanism as a mode of state-orchestrated administrative city-making in frontier regions oriented toward nation-building, statecraft and legitimacy-making, rather than primarily toward colonialisation or capital accumulation. Building on the ‘state turn’ in urban studies and anthropological work on state centripetalism and affective governance, the article shows how administrative upgrading, county-seat urban form and public-good provisioning can function as political technologies through which the state becomes materially legible and affectively credible in peripheral everyday life. Empirically, I trace the urban trajectory of Zhaojue in the Liangshan Yi region from the 1950s to 2020: from a semi-autonomous frontier enclave, to prefectural capital (1952–1978), to administrative downgrading and urban decay in the reform era (1978–2015) and to renewed state-led urban growth through the targeted poverty alleviation campaign (2015–2020). The argument complicates accounts that reduce urbanisation in ethnic/frontier regions either to neoliberal political economy or to a singular settler-colonial logic, by specifying an additional mechanism: long-run fiscal transfers and public provisioning that produce beneficiary positions, political indebtedness and governable expectations of gratitude and loyalty. The article contributes to urban studies by theorising heterogeneous urban trajectories shaped by extra-economic state rationalities and politico-ethnic relations.
China’s urban and rural development model has experienced a profound shift over the past decade as rapid urbanisation, land-driven growth and demolition-led redevelopment have become increasingly unviable. With the decline of land-lease revenues and the property sector crisis, cities have moved away from a modernist approach toward incremental, in-situ and micro-regeneration strategies that emphasise heritage conservation, environmental quality and improved livelihoods. These changing development modalities have reshaped the social impacts of redevelopment: while large-scale state-led resettlement persists in some mega-projects, rising compensation costs and reduced fiscal incentives have curtailed demolition, drawing attention to subtler forms of tenant displacement and in-situ marginalisation. At the same time, evolving governance practices have introduced limited forms of public participation and strengthened the managerial, territorially oriented role of the state. Collectively, these shifts mark a transition from entrepreneurial, growth-driven urbanism toward more hybrid and stability-focused forms of urban governance in post-growth China.
This paper investigates China’s ongoing urban sanitation transitions and how the related practices are codeveloped between local Residents’ Committees and residents on the ground. China’s recent state-initiated reforms to reconceptualise state-society relationships has led to the emerging significance of grassroots self-governing and participatory urban regimes. Within this framework, we use Shanghai as an atypical case to focus on its lilong neighbourhoods where dilapidated sanitation infrastructure, insufficient facilities and high population density and mobility render complexity to everyday sanitation governance. We conduct an in-depth study in three of inner Shanghai’s lilong communities to dissect two key practices that support the municipal-initiated sanitation strategy. These are the everyday facilitation of public sanitation rules, and communications with regard to sanitation expectations. Our findings suggest that the nuanced interplay between the state, grassroots organisations and residents revolving around the transitioning sanitation provision vary depending on the design and implementation of local urban programmes. Sustainable sanitation governance requires considerations of the intersecting challenges derived from policies as well as the residents’ diverse background.
Across urban China and other settings where property is tethered to marriageability, access to housing has become a key condition for union formation and family timing. We reconceptualise marriage–housing (hunfang) as intimate infrastructure organised through vital conjunctures, socially structured zones of possibility in which obligations, debt, hukou and gendered moralities are negotiated under uncertainty. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews and participant observation at Chongqing’s People’s Park matchmaking corner, we trace how futures are made and unmade under overlapping constraints. We identify four conjunctural mechanisms: conditional marriageability tied to homeownership; refusal of patrilocal co-residence and strategic delay by women seeking post-marital autonomy; intergenerational bargaining and asset reallocation across kin; and affective withdrawal and non-marriage as default under prolonged insecurity. These mechanisms re-pattern life-course timing and couple-level expectations through mortgage stretch and debt duration, peri-urban new-build purchase and commute trade-offs, and public rental housing (PRH) as a holding pattern. Conceptually, we integrate relational and moral geographies with the vital conjunctures lens to show how uncertainty, indecision and ‘absent possibilities’ shape housing–marriage trajectories. We move beyond framing marriage–housing as a single market driver and trace how intimate infrastructure and land–finance arrangements are linked in ways that vary by place, cohort and policy, outlining implications for secure rental, PRH design and support for intergenerationally entangled households.
The perspective of state entrepreneurialism provides a powerful analytical lens for understanding the pivotal role of the Chinese state in land-centered urbanization. While existing literature has extensively documented the macro-level features of this governance model, its internal mechanisms and potential dysfunctions in practice necessitate further investigation. This paper contributes to the state entrepreneurialism literature by highlighting its key mechanism: the state’s strategic devolution of land development and governance rights to market actors. Drawing on a case study of urban redevelopment in Guangzhou, we argue that when this devolution is not accompanied by robust regulatory oversight, it creates a governance failure and fosters market disorder. This process generates significant reflexive effects, where the market instruments deployed by the state paradoxically undermine its own planning prerogatives and lead to a dual failure of both state and market. Our findings reveal a key tension within the state entrepreneurialism model and highlight the importance of “planning centrality” in stabilizing crises arising from market-oriented and speculative urban development.
This brief article aims to extend what has become a vibrant debate within Chinese urban studies concerning the subfield’s relation to urban theory. This debate is tied to other, analogous discussions shaping urban studies more broadly in recent years and that address themselves to the global scale of urban change. The purpose of this essay is to make legible and accessible the question of theorizing about and from urban China and how recent interventions have contributed to these debates to create a growing and diversifying subfield. The analysis addresses problems of particularism and generalization in the subfield, questions pertaining to exceptionalism and the uniqueness of China as a site of study, burgeoning conceptual innovations derived from urban Chinese settings, and the prospects of Chinese cities generating theory salient elsewhere.
In the post-pandemic era, China's urban governance has exhibited a trend of transformation from an entrepreneurial orientation to a territorial logic of managerial statecraft. However, under the strict spatial control of the central state, it remains unclear whether local governments have abandoned their long-standing entrepreneurial means and are instead implementing management-oriented governance, oriented to cultural preservation, social stability and spatial order. This study examines two micro-regeneration projects, namely, Moshikou in Beijing and Pantang Wuyue in Guangzhou. It investigates how local governments balance the central-local tension in practice. We argue that the local governance model is characterised by the notion of strategic compliance, which is reflected in three key dimensions: protection-operation coupling, phased incrementalism and role and funding reallocation. This study refined the understanding of urban governance transformation from state entrepreneurialism to managerial statecraft in post-pandemic China. The finding of strategic compliance brings macro-level debates down to meso-level mechanisms.
Developmental state, relaxed control, and active market used to shape the trajectory of neo-liberalized urban renewal in China. However, over the last decade there has been a return of state power in the field of urban renewal, with strong intervention in the megacities of China. Despite the transition of the national strategy and incentives, local governments have exhibited varied urban renewal models. This paper revisits the government-market relationship in urban transformation from the lens of planning control in urban renewal. Taking Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen as examples, it reveals that the local context has created various urban renewal models, and these inter-urban variations have been attributed to natural endowment, economic incentives, and the strength of local society. However, urban renewal in megacities of China have all been inching towards more state control, which is characterized by more active participation of SOEs, and more limited space for private sectors and property owners, which has been implemented through more stringent planning control. Meanwhile, stringent planning control has made urban renewal financially challenging. Therefore, China faces the challenging task of striking the balance between market and state control in its urban renewal. Appropriate relaxation of planning control and local governments' discretion empowerment should be considered to stimulate urban renewal vitality.
'Culture-led' regeneration is a widely practised yet long-contested approach in China's urban redevelopment. Much of the existing work interprets these projects through Western frameworks of neoliberalism and growth machine politics, often portraying them as economically driven and culturally inauthentic, resulting in social displacement. While such critiques highlight important problems with culture-led cases, they risk oversimplifying the complexity of Chinese governance and overlooking how culture is redefined and mobilised within local contexts.This paper argues that Chinese culture-led regeneration must be understood through the state's evolving definition of culture and its intentional deployment across economic, political and social domains. Earlier approaches largely framed culture as a material asset, embedded in heritage sites and industrial reuse, used to attract investment and stimulate growth. More recent discourses and policies expand this definition by treating culture as a social and political resource, central to fostering cohesion, legitimacy and sustainability. This shift reflects the evolving urban governance logics driven by the limits of demolition-heavy redevelopment, growing land restrictions and national mandates on heritage preservation and social stability. Drawing on key examples of creative industry clusters, heritage-led tourism and micro-regeneration, the paper demonstrates how culture-led regeneration in China reveals a conjunctural logic in which culture operates simultaneously as an economic, political and social instrument.Rather than assessing Chinese culture-led regeneration through universalist frameworks, this paper advocates for theorising with China by employing localised frameworks such as state entrepreneurialism. Further reshaping the debates on commodification, authenticity and the future of regeneration. It calls out to future research to further investigate the evolving role of culture in regeneration based on emerging evidence of the state's gravitation towards extra-economic objectives.
