Governing Urban Development in China

Fulong Wu is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London. He received his BSc and MSc from Nanjing University, and his PhD from the University of Hong Kong. He has taught previously at Southampton and Cardiff universities. In 2016, he was conferred the award of Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences in the UK. His research interests include urban development in China and its social and sustainable challenges. He is the author of Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China (Routledge, 2015), Creating Chinese Urbanism: Urban Revolution and Governance Change (UCL Press, 2022), and co-editor (with Roger Keil) of After Suburbia: Urbanization in the 21st Century (2022). He is the principal investigator of a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant – Rethinking China’s Urban Governance. Fangzhu Zhang is Professor of China Planning and joint coordinator for the China Planning Research Group in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UCL), UK. Her main research interests focus on innovation and governance, environmental planning and eco-city development, urban financialization, and urban village redevelopment in China. She has been involved in several research projects funded by the British Academy, ESRC (UK), and the EU. She is a co-editor of Handbook on China’s Urban Environmental Governance. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Transactions in Planning and Urban Research. Currently, she is working on the ERC Advanced Grant research project—Rethinking China’s Urban Governance.

Introduction

1. Governance: theories and perspectives

2. State entrepreneurialism: historical formation and practices

3. Planning: state centrality and political mandates

4. Financialization: the long shadow of the state

5. Urban redevelopment: beyond the dynamics of the growth machine

6. Innovation: a hybrid ‘national indigenous’ model

7. Environment: the socio-ecological fix under ecological civilization

Conclusion