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Interpreting China’s new urban spaces: state, market, and society in action

Chinese urbanism has long historical roots and has profoundly influenced world civilizations. Yet, the Chinese city has not, until very recently, attracted sustained or intense global attention. In the post-reform era, especially after 1992, the scale and speed of China’s urbanization, and the intricacy of its dynamics and socio-spatial consequences have dwarfed those of other countries in the world. The latest reform era of urban China is characterized by a renewed and thriving urbanism, which manifests itself in the sheer scale of new urban space (re)production and the intricate interrelationships among the state, market, and society. The proliferation of new urban spaces signifies the emergence of new mechanisms of space (re)production, which have led to the rise of a new urban spatial order (He & Wu, 2009; Kong, Chia-ho, & TsuLung, 2015; Lin, 2009; Ma & Wu, 2005; Wu, 2005, 2007). Here, new urban spaces refer to emerging physical/virtual, social, and cultural spaces that are situated at the confluence of China’s recent economic and political liberalization, globalization, and market transition. The term also denotes a general condition of rapid socio-spatial transformation signaling the latest episode of China’s urbanization. In this era of market transition, existing geographical research is dominated by the political economy approach, examining state and market interactions and offering a frame for interpreting the production of China’s new urban spaces (e.g., Lim, 2014; Lin, Li, Yang, & Hu, 2015; Peck & Zhang, 2013; Wu & Phelps, 2011; Wu, Xu, & Yeh, 2007; Zhang & Peck, 2014). Yet, studies at a more micro scale, studies that focus on sociospatial practices such as contentious actions regarding issues of social integration and on the public sphere under the overarching framework of state–society relations, have not been fully explored in geographical research (some exceptions include He & Xue, 2014; Kong et al., 2015; Liu, Li, & Breitung, 2012; Qian, 2014). As a result, existing studies of China’s urban geography have tended to neglect the social aspects of new urban spaces. As a matter of fact, the production of new urban spaces in contemporary China has profoundly influenced the urban socio-economy and is related to a complex constellation of social processes and social relations. In addition to the unbalanced research perspectives, from a methodological perspective empirical analyses and