Abbreviations
1. A New Urban Era?
2. The Green Revolution
3. The Smart City Movement
4. The Great Innovation Leap Forward
5. The Xiong’an Experiment
6. Reorienting Hong Kong
7. Imagining 2035 and Beyond
8. The Nature of the Chinese City
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Richard Hu is a professor at the Canberra Business School, University of Canberra. He is the author of The Shenzhen Phenomenon: From Fishing Village to Global Knowledge City (2020) and Smart Design: Disruption, Crisis, and the Reshaping of Urban Spaces (2021), as well as the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Asian Cities (2023), among other books.
The path from small, poor villages dotting a vast desolate Asian
hinterland to the world's largest middle-class urbanity in four
decades is impressive and compelling. Richard Hu guides global
readers through China's metropolitan rise with analytical
sophistication that shows both promise and flaws of the Chinese
megacities. He presents China's new cities not as clones of the
West but as a new genre of city building and an authentic attempt
at reinventing urbanity. This is a timely text for policymakers,
environmentalists, urban planners, and architects as we try to
build cities of and for the future.
*Edward J. Blakely, Emeritus Professor of City Planning, University
of California, Berkeley, and former President of the Pacific Rim
Council on Urban Development*
Over the last decade, China has engaged a new, centrally led path
of urban transformation with the aim to achieve a new-type
urbanization connecting socialist principles with environmental
concepts. Yet, the thinking behind this shift, the planning tools,
and the national goals are difficult to grasp for scholars and
practitioners outside China. Richard Hu builds on his first-hand
knowledge of China and of international planning discussions to
explore the new urban era. Notably, he explores the historical
conditions that shape the present and influence future planning.
This important book provides unique, refreshing insights into
contemporary China for a global public.
*Carola Hein, Professor and Head of the History of Architecture and
Urban Planning, Delft University of Technology, and President of
the International Planning History Society*
Richard Hu provides a probing, well-informed, and cogently
organized account of how China is crafting its 'new normal' of
urbanization in its era of a green revolution, smart city
commitment, and post-industrialization.
*Peter G. Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban
Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor*
Richard Hu integrates both inside-out and outside-in perspectives
and offers a holistic, balanced, and insightful reading of the real
China. His analysis captures a particular kind of transversality,
jumps into the unknown, and explores possibilities that go beyond
the familiar. He unpacks an astounding array of complexities in
China's transformation that we in the West might have overlooked or
forgotten. Yes, this is a splendid text worth reading!
*Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia
University*
This book provides a compact, lucid, and timely account of Chinese
cities at the leading edge of urbanization. With China hitching its
socialist modernization to indigenous innovation, cities are being
charged with realizing the vision of a smart, livable, green
future. Richard Hu does an admirable job of showing both top-down
and bottom-up actions shaping cities into innovation hotbeds, the
emerging lessons for others, and the way forward being charted by
planners. It is a must-read for experts and those interested in the
urban facets of China's development.
*Shahid Yusuf, Chief Economist of the Growth Dialogue, George
Washington University*
Highly accessible not only to urban scholars and university
students, but also to laymen outside China who wish to know what is
going on in China’s recent urban development.
*China Quarterly*
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