Negotiating Green Space with Landed Interests: The Urban Political Ecology of Greenway in the Pearl River Delta,China

Land‐centred urbanisation has precipitated shortage of green space in Chinese cities. However, in the Pearl River Delta, an ambitious greenway system has recently managed to flourish. It is intriguing to ask how this has become possible. Informed by the perspective of urban political ecology, this paper finds that the greenway project in the Pearl River Delta represents a set of politically realistic endeavours to alleviate urban green space shortage by adapting to, rather than challenging, powerful landed interests. Three interlocking dimensions about land—municipal land quota, rural land use claims, and real estate development—have influenced why, where and how greenways have been created. Based on these findings, we argue that research on China's politics of urban sustainability necessarily needs to understand the country's land politics.     

Challenges to Western Participation in Shaping the Urban Landscape of Post-Socialist St. Petersburg: The Failure of International Competitions for Iconic Architectural Projects

The paper, based on a series of interviews in St. Petersburg conducted in 2009 and 2010 by an American geographer, discusses the failure of major iconic architectural projects awarded to Western firms through international architectural competitions. The projects, sought by Russian government and business leaders to enhance the city's re-emerging global status, are viewed as likely examples of diminished Western participation in the shaping of St. Petersburg's iconic urban landscape. The author attributes the failure to financial setbacks, and primarily also to a recalcitrant bureaucracy, red tape, overly strict building codes and regulations, corruption as well as negative reaction by local residents and media outlets.     

Regionmaking and conceptual development in South China: Perceiving islands,the Pearl River Delta,and the Greater Bay Area

The Pearl River Delta in South China is today associated with one of the world's largest megaregions. Even though scholarship often treats the Pearl River Delta as a natural region and unit for analysis, this area has only recently been regionalised. This paper undertakes a critical rewriting and remapping of the Pearl River Delta's history, starting in precolonial times in which the Chinese population saw the area as composed of islands and waterways, moving through the period when colonial powers saw the area as a pathway up from the colonial island enclaves of Hong Kong and Macao and into China's interior, and ending in the Reform and Opening Up era when the modern Chinese state has implemented a succession of planning-oriented conceptions of the region. As the area has moved conceptually from a world of islands to a delta and now to the Greater Bay Area, perceptions about what the area means have changed as well. From a position in urban island studies and critical reflexivity, this paper troubles taken-for-granted colonial, technocratic, and governmental visions and regionalisations, focusing on how physical and cultural geographies develop in tandem. The notion of the interstitial island is used to help understand how the Pearl River Delta's island geography has influenced the area's conceptual development.     

Micro-narratives in Contemporary Chinese Art: A Case Study of Cao Fei's Pearl River Delta Anti-heroes

This paper investigates the representation of micro-narratives in contemporary Chinese art by examining the multi-layered narratives in Cao Fei's Pearl River Delta Anti-heroes performed at the opening of the 2^nd Guangzhou Triennial in 2005. I consider Cao's work as a hyper-realistic portrayal of the micro-narratives of the Pearl River Delta region in a mediated form highly influenced by the media, entertainment industry and popular culture of the region and Hong Kong. Theatricality, kitsch and the distinctive local essence of South China are revealed in the form of a TV soap opera and the use of colloquial Cantonese throughout the performance, along with occasional Putonghua or Mandarin. Language as a signifier of cultural politics has been deployed as an indispensable tool to empower the region within the broader body politic of the People's Republic of China.     

Overseas Chinese Investments in Transition: The Case of Dongguan

An economic geographer based in Hong Kong presents a study of overseas Chinese investment coming from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Dongguan, a rapidly developing manufacturing metropolis in China's Pearl River Delta, attempting to compare the transformation of these two major sources of investment during the past quarter century. Based on systematic field work and interviews at ca. 60 firms through mid-2006, the paper argues that Hong Kong and Taiwan investments have followed different transformation paths with regard to sectoral composition, investment motivations, market orientation, entry modes, and strategies in response to institutional changes. Most of the substantive differences are related to the distinctive comparative advantages of the two source regions and the specific character of their interactions with the host region. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F21, O16, R11. 4 figures, 4 tables, 60 references.     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

Urban research and child-friendly cities: a new Australian outline

Recent public debates about Australia's children and young people have begun to acknowledge the direct impact of urban development on their health and well-being. This paper reviews a broad range of trans-disciplinary literature addressing child-friendliness in contemporary Australian cities, drawing particular attention to the fact that even some of the most recognised texts on children and young people in Australia still make few references in their analysis to the issue of place and neighbourhood. More specifically, the paper points to two particular research challenges confronting the ongoing study of young people's well-being in urban areas, including (a) the need for a more thorough analysis, both conceptual and applied, about how children and young people's well-being is affected by different urban forms and by the social and ecological variations that occur throughout cities; and (b) the focus on younger children needs to be complemented by a focus on adolescents and young adults who in turn need to be actively involved in confronting these challenges.     

An empirical study on the modification of China's current urban social security system

This study challenges the conventional correlation between economic performance and the level of the development of social security systems. By focusing on China's urban areas, we provide an overview of the components and benefits, from a comparative perspective, of China's current social security system. We also create a comprehensive and generally applicable method using factors such as economics and population, among others, as standards to evaluate the efficacy of China's system. In order to demonstrate our primary hypothesis – that the Chinese Communist Party government has to modify its social security system to adapt to or bring about changes in the basis of its legitimacy – we analyse Chinese social security records and other related data after 1949 by statistical methods. The formula we provide in this study can be used to forecast China's expenditure on its urban social security system, and other scholars can apply our methods to countries in which conditions are broadly similar.     

In search of frameworks for productive comparison of cities in world history

In 2013, The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History, edited by Peter Clark, was published. Its 44 chapters (a total of 882 pages) aim to develop a framework for understanding urban history comparatively and over long spans of time. The authors of the four chronological chapters on Chinese cities attempt to achieve the following goals: to examine the diversity of Chinese cities over time, to analyze the characteristics of Chinese urban development in general, and to illuminate how changing Chinese cities and urban networks reflect and influence world trends. This essay discusses how the Oxford Handbook can serve as a guide and resource for meaningful urban comparisons and also highlights some of its limitations. It compares the Oxford Handbook to a similar volume, The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, published in 2014. The essay encourages scholars of Chinese cities to consider widening the scope of their comparisons and contribute to scholarship on the development of urban systems worldwide.     

Hail ambiguous St Patrick: sounds of Ireland on parade in Birmingham

Birmingham's St Patrick's Day parade claims to be the largest of such events in the UK and the third best attended in the world. Despite resorting to universal advertising proclamations that for one day ‘everyone is a little bit Irish’, this annual march continues to foster the unique musical character of the local diaspora; a metanarrative for the wider, fractious journey of the Irish community into the West Midlands over the past sixty years. This paper examines the primary event in Birmingham's calendar by way of the sounds of the spectacle, considering the musical display that is presented in the processional mode to a static audience sharing city-centre streets one Sunday morning every March. By engaging with the theories on performance of Domenico Pietropaolo, Mikhail Bakhtin and Stephen Greenblatt, this paper argues that it is in the audible space of the parade that Birmingham creates Breda Gray's Ireland ‘of global flows’.     

Die Frau Metta Catharina von Flensburg: a Danish brigantine wrecked in 1786 in Plymouth Sound,England

The Danish brigantine Die Frau Metta Catharina von Flensburg, outward bound from St Petersburg to Genoa, was wrecked in Plymouth Sound in 1786. With the consent of the wreck's owner, HRH The Prince of Wales, sports divers carried out a 30‐year‐long project to excavate and display material from the site. Aspects of shipboard life aboard this 18th‐century Baltic trader, together with an insight into her remarkable cargo of ‘Russia’ leather, have been presented to audiences in the UK and abroad. This paper presents a summary of the project upon its completion in 2006. © 2010 The Author     

The Russian navy as Chartmaker in the eighteenth century

Abstract

The modern period of chart making in Russia began in the reign of Peter the Great. Peter created the country's navy, which became the main focus for cartography in the eighteenth century. In this paper the multi‐faceted duties of naval officers in the charting and mapping of seas, rivers, forest resources and other features important for ship building and the development of navigation, and essential to Russia's geo‐political interests, are considered. The history of the early stages of specialized naval education and the training of surveyors at the Moscow Mathematical‐Navigational School (from 1701) and the St Petersburg Naval Academy (from 1715) are outlined, and the first surveys in the Baltic and Caspian seas are described. Finally, special attention is paid to the hydrographical surveys and charting of the Aegean Sea during the Russian‐Turkish war of 1768–1774, the sources and methods involved, and the little‐known Atlas of the Archipelago (1788) which was created from the surveys.     

Urban Governance Under Neoliberalism: New Labour and the Restructuring of State‐Space

Abstract: In the UK there has been a proliferation of agencies at differing regulatory scales as part of the rescaling and restructuring of the state by New Labour, following the neoliberal policies of previous Conservative governments. This raises questions concerning the extent to which New Labour's urban state restructuring is embedded within neoliberalism, and the local tensions and contradictions arising from emergent New Labour urban state restructuring. This paper examines these questions through the analysis of key policy features of New Labour, and the in‐depth exploration of two programmes that are reshaping urban governance arrangements, namely Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes. We conclude that New Labour's restructuring is best understood in terms of the extended reproduction (roll‐out) of neoliberalism. While these “new institutional fixes” are only weakly established and exhibit internal contradictions and tensions, these have not led to a broader contestation of neoliberalism.     

近代中国城市大众文化史研究笔谈

The studies of urban popular culture in modern China in recent years have attracted wide attention from scholars in China and abroad. The symposium, which is composed by Ma Min’s “Injecting vitality into the studies of urban cultural history,” Jiang Jin’s “Issues in the studies of urban popular culture in modern China,” Wang Di’s “The microcosm of Chinese cities: The perspective and methodology of studying urban popular culture from the case of teahouses in Chengdu,” Joseph W. Esherick’s “Remaking the Chinese city: Urban space and urban culture” and Lu Hanchao’s “From elites to common people: The downward trend in the studies of Chinese urban history in the United States,” provide valuable insights on the perspective, trend, and methodology of the studies. Four articles of the symposium are translated by Yang Kai-chien and Jin Xueqin from Shixue Yuekan 史学月刊 (Journal of Historical Science), 2008, (5): 5–19; Joseph W. Esherick provides the English version of his article.     

马来西亚城市华人移民就业情况研究——基于2005年在马来西亚实地调查的分析

基于2005年在马来西亚吉隆坡和新山实地调查获得的资料,从城市移民在行业分布、职位、就业或经营途径、收入和政府经济政策等各个方面的情况,探讨了华人与马来人城市移民的不同遭遇,比较了华人移民在吉隆坡和新山这两个不同类型城市中的不同境遇。得出结论:城市新移民中马来人比华人获得了更多的政策扶持和发展机会,但华人比马来人拥有更多的投资方式和自己的企业,在城市中华人比马来人受访者的月收入要略高一些;在不同的领域,华人新移民在新山和在吉隆坡的就业或商业机会不同。     

The Global Economic Crisis and Unemployment in China

Two noted academic specialists on labor economics and population statistics of China examine the impacts of the global economic crisis of 2008-2009 on the job security of urban workers, and the ensuing repercussions for the Chinese society and economy. More specifically, they probe and determine the magnitude of urban unemployment in China in 2008 and 2009 as it appears to be reported in different segments of the country's immense labor market. A particular focus of the paper is on differences in unemployment among two groups of workers (those with urban hukou vis-à-vis rural migrant workers) with significantly different sets of rights and privileges, as well as levels of job security. The authors also provide an estimate of the urban unemployment rate in 2009 that differs from the official rate. They argue that measures toward further integration of rural and urban labor markets and reducing natural unemployment are ultimately more beneficial than short-term interventions to adjust cyclical joblessness stemming from the global economic crisis and recession.     

Nordic Investments in the Former Soviet Baltic Frontier: A Survey of Firms and Selected Case Studies

Nordic companies have been leaders in the rapid expansion of Western business into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the St Petersburg area of Russia. While joint ventures were being developed prior to the demise of the USSR, investment rose sharply in early 1992. Our survey of companies from Nordic countries revealed a pattern of location and of adaptation to the conditions of former Soviet infrastructure, culture, politics and economy. Initial Nordic investment has renewed economic ties across the Baltic Sea, with inter‐country links stronger between specific countries. Frustrations with changing government rules, communications, work ethic, quality expectations and other conditions were expressed in interviews with managers of Nordic companies in the Baltic area. Optimism was tempered by continued uncertainty about Russian governmental policies and market potential.     

The Right to the City and Critical Reflections on China's Property Rights Activism

Wholesale clearance and eviction that typify China's urban development have often resulted in discontents among urban residents, giving rise to what critics refer to as property rights activism. This paper is an attempt to critically revisit the existing debates on the property rights activism in China. The paper refers to the perspective of the “right to the city” to examine whose rights count in China's urban development contexts and proposes a cross‐class alliance that engages both migrants and local citizens. The alliance itself will have substantial political implications, overcoming the limited level of rights awareness that mainly rests on distributional justice in China. The discussions are supported by an analysis of empirical data from the author's field research in Guangzhou, which examines how local and non‐local (migrant) residents view nail‐households resisting demolition and forced eviction.     

新自由主义的危机与都市治理——从全球到地方

自2008年的经济危机之后,新自由主义作为西方国家和城市治理的主要手段也受到根本性的挑战,这些政治经济的失败,最终表现在都市空间的治理当中。本文将以新自由主义的扩张案例入手,通过国内外都市空间治理的实践经验,剖析新自由主义所带来的短期和长期的政治经济危机后果,并讨论全球不同空间尺度当中撤退空间的治理与挑战。新自由主义的问题不仅存在于西方国家,在网络时代和全球化的趋势下,资本的累积是在全球范围内产生危机,亚洲国家以及中国也必须思考如何应对危机,以及探索后新自由主义的发展道路。最后,文章从全球到地方的撤退空间讨论当中,反思新自由主义作为一种全球性的都市治理政策在全球的流动,认为就后政治的城市来说,要超越新自由主义的局限还有待观察,中国城市走向后新自由主义的治理转型就必须勇于摆脱英美社会脉络所产生的都市治理论述,建构符合地方社会脉络的理论和实践。     

Current Literature

Two Canadian scholars, the former a specialist on St. Petersburg's evolution and urban fabric, explore linkages between population change, housing availability, and business development in central-city St. Petersburg during the late 1990s. These phenomena are viewed within the context of the St. Petersburg Strategic Plan, adopted in late 1997 as a guide to the city's post-Soviet development, and in light of the findings of a sample survey of central St. Petersburg's citizens designed to elicit information on social class structure and quality-of-life concerns. Results of the latter are compared with those from a similar survey in central Moscow. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 131, R14, R21. 3 figures, 5 tables, 15 references.