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Special issue: China’s new urban realities and development policies

Rapid urbanization processes in China have created a series of new urban realities in cities, affecting their physical transformations, economic transitions, and sociodemographic dynamics. This special issue presents six articles that examine various dimensions of urban changes happening in Chinese cities, position their inquiries in China’s unique spatial, institutional, and political contexts and explicitly evaluate the role of state, provincial, and local development policies in shaping such outcomes. Topics include Coordinated Urban-Rural Development (CURD) in mega-city regions; fiscal decentralization and inter-governmental competition; rural-urban migration and migrants’ spatial access to jobs; local land use policy in industrial land expansion; housing investment and stimulus measures in housing supply; as well as temporal, sectoral, and spatial variations of capital investment in urban infrastructure. These articles use detailed case studies and rigorous research methods to demonstrate the uneven growth patterns across and within Chinese cities and among different population groups and inform how policies at different levels of government can potentially address these growth disparities to achieve more efficient and equitable urbanization.