Contesting Spatial Modernity in Late‐Socialist China

Abstract

A new master plan to restructure the city of Kunming in southwestern China in the context of Chinas transition to a progrowth, commercialized consumer society has led to massive destruction of centuryold innercity neighborhoods and the displacement of tens of thousands of families. The combination of a sense of lateness (lagging behind national and global development) and an emerging progrowth coalition between local governments and real estate developers is shaping postMao urban redevelopment. Several forms of civic opposition and popular discontent have been elicited by the restructuring. Although largely marginalized, these alternative views of urban forms and counterpractices help sustain a muchneeded critical point of view that questions and destabilizes the seemingly inescapable machine of development. The insights emerging from the Kunming example help deepen our understanding of latesocialist power dynamics and suggest a new way of understanding stateinitiated projects of modernity and development...