Mr Science and Mr Democracy

Abstract

The exhilarating technical innovation, speed of development and unashamed ambition of Chinese urban centres should be welcomed as a direct challenge to the painful negativity of Western planning. But a Maglev train and a Five‐Year Plan represent only a partial, and one‐sided, re‐engagement with China’s century‐long struggle to embrace and reconstitute the modern. For Shanghai, or any other Chinese city, to take a place alongside quattrocento Florence and the melting pot of Chicago, it needs more than just iconic buildings and a few hundred kilometres of metro. China is again grappling with the idea of the modern, and nowhere is this more manifest than in the changing nature and understanding of the city. China’s fractured experience of modernity combined with the peculiar social and economic development of the post‐1980s reforms may offer an exemplary case study of the relationship between social agency and technical innovation and expertise.