Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Robert Park in China: From the Chicago School to Urban China Studies
- 2 “Bewitched by the History Behind the Walls”: Robert Park and the Arc of Urban Sociology from Chicago to China
- 3 Moral Order in the Post-Socialist Chinese City: Generating a Dialogue with Robert E. Park’s “The City”
- 4 Learning from Chicago (and LA)? The Contemporary Relevance of Western Urban Theory for China
- 5 From Chicago to Shenzhen, via Birmingham: Zones of Transition and Dreams of Homeownership
- 6 Urbanization and Economic Development: Comparing the Trajectories of China and the United States
- 7 The Handshake 302 Village Hack Residency: Chicago, Shenzhen, and the Experience of Assimilation
- 8 Beijing Ring Roads and the Poetics of Excess and Ordinariness
- 9 Pathways to Urban Residency and Subjective Well-Being in Beijing
- 10 A Study of Socio-spatial Segregation of Rural Migrants in Shenzhen: A Case of Foxconn
- 11 The Anxious Middle Class of Urban China: Its Emergence and Formation
- 12 Conclusion: Everyday Cities, Exceptional Cases
- Index
12 - Conclusion: Everyday Cities, Exceptional Cases
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Robert Park in China: From the Chicago School to Urban China Studies
- 2 “Bewitched by the History Behind the Walls”: Robert Park and the Arc of Urban Sociology from Chicago to China
- 3 Moral Order in the Post-Socialist Chinese City: Generating a Dialogue with Robert E. Park’s “The City”
- 4 Learning from Chicago (and LA)? The Contemporary Relevance of Western Urban Theory for China
- 5 From Chicago to Shenzhen, via Birmingham: Zones of Transition and Dreams of Homeownership
- 6 Urbanization and Economic Development: Comparing the Trajectories of China and the United States
- 7 The Handshake 302 Village Hack Residency: Chicago, Shenzhen, and the Experience of Assimilation
- 8 Beijing Ring Roads and the Poetics of Excess and Ordinariness
- 9 Pathways to Urban Residency and Subjective Well-Being in Beijing
- 10 A Study of Socio-spatial Segregation of Rural Migrants in Shenzhen: A Case of Foxconn
- 11 The Anxious Middle Class of Urban China: Its Emergence and Formation
- 12 Conclusion: Everyday Cities, Exceptional Cases
- Index
Summary
At first glance, revisiting Robert Park for urban China seems anachronistic, an unnecessarily limiting lens that ignores the vast body of research being produced. Yet, taking Park as a starting point does not dictate the rules about speaking in his terms, nor does it require a retreading of the Los Angeles School critiques of his work. Rather, this volume shows that it can be a valuable approach to reviewing the research on urban China in order to situate this work within greater theoretical debates.
This concluding chapter presents some of the general issues of exceptionalism and methodology haunting the research on urban China. It seeks out scholarship beyond urban studies to look at the way that the entwined issues of Chinese exceptionalism and methodological nationalism can restrict urban research, its interpretations, and broader applications. In short, to address the reasons why the flood of research on cities in China has not resulted in a corresponding deluge of theoretical developments for contemporary urbanism. Finally, in revisiting a critical approach centered on the everyday, it seems Park might in fact prove more relevant than ever, especially insofar as he shifts the focus of urban research away from morphology toward the social. Rather than a research agenda like the one Park outlines in his 1915 essay on “The city,” however, perhaps the future of research on urban China demands a reconsideration of approach.
Theoretical rupture
The current debates around the parochial nature of urban theory often rest on critiques based on who and where. It focuses on “Western academia” as the institutional source of “Western knowledge” and its attendant limitations (see, for example, Edensor and Jayne, 2012). These ideas about the city have traveled and disseminated, imposing canons of thought on places “elsewhere.” So entrenched is this process of knowledge production that a theoretical rupture is needed—the question is how (see, for instance, Jazeel, 2016; Robinson and Roy, 2016).
Rather than considering the sources and locations of urban theorybuilding, a reflection on this volume suggests the need for a consideration of unstated assumptions and a turn toward an analysis of implicit knowledge (Lawhon et al., 2016). For this, revisiting Niklas Luhmann can be helpful for his differentiation of the first- and second-order observer (1995).
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- The City in ChinaNew Perspectives on Contemporary Urbanism, pp. 231 - 246Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019