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Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China, by Ren Xuefei

In a recent paper on China’s ‘gated and packaged suburbia’, Wu Fulong commented that ‘... the symbolic side of gated community development is relatively under-researched’ (Wu, 2010, 385). Much the same could be said about the ‘symbolic side’ of China’s explosive urban geographies in general. This despite the fact that symbolic capital seems to be just about the only thing real estate developers, urban planners and municipal officials are thinking about as they redraw and rebuild China’s cities (see, e.g., Campanella, 2009; Kipnis, 2012; Woodworth, 2011). I exaggerate, of course, but the point is this: it is difficult to spend any time in China’s cities today and not feel compelled to decode the symbolic languages embedded in the landscape. For a cultural geographer like me, spending any amount of time in a Chinese city induces a feeling of giddy reverie. Semiotic playgrounds all of them, China’s urban landscapes seem to grab you by the shoulders and yell, ‘deconstruct me!’And yet, most of the urban geography scholarship in China, asWu’s comment suggests, has averted its eye, focusing instead on the political economy of urbanization. This is not necessarily a failing of urban geography scholarship on China, however, since hidden behind the spectacular cityscape of signs is a troubling politics of exclusion, forced eviction, corruption and a willingness to let consumption substitute for democracy (see, e.g., Hsing, 2010). Nevertheless, we should appreciate Ren Xuefei’s attention to symbolic capital in her book Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China. It strikes to me that this is precisely what we need more of to round out our understanding of China’s urban development and, in particular, the connections between that development and the global cultural economy. At the same time, given the continuing importance of a political economic perspective that would see China’s cities less as semiotic playgrounds and more as landscapes of inequality, Ren could have gone further to draw out and indeed realize the potential of some of the broader political implications of her work. Building Globalization is a rewarding book. It brings broader perspectives on the symbolic capital of transnational architecture and design into conversation with China’s exploding urban geographies. The book offers a sharp appraisal of the ‘new state spaces’ of transnational design emerging throughout urban China as municipal governments and developers stumble over themselves in competition for their own piece of ‘global city’ status. Ren’s attention to the ironies and contradictions inherent in urban China’s pursuit of ‘global’ status through the marshaling of symbolic capital is particularly astute and timely. These ironies capture well the odd and wonderful hybrids one finds in China’s cities today. In writing about Shanghai’s Xintiandi development, Ren comments that ‘To Chinese visitors, the place looks foreign and modern. To foreign visitors, Xintiandi looks Chinese and traditional. It is the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the Chinese and the foreign that has generated a hybrid diversity that constitutes cosmopolitanism’ (119). The book is full of such pithy observations. Ren is at her best in distilling complicated trends into observations that lodge themselves with clarity in the reader’s mind. Urban Geography, 2013 Vol. 34, No. 8, 1217–1220