People and plans in urbanising China: Challenging the top-down orthodoxy

Abstract

Urban development in China is strongly influenced by state policy in a context where even the emerging market actors are closely tied to government. The state role is reinforced by the absence of formal mechanisms for community participation in urban decision making and the limited citizenship rights of the large minority of urban residents who migrated from rural areas. Increasingly, however, scholars are becoming aware of the complexities of a political system that involves many vertical layers of governance, competition between localities and an ever-changing balance between centralisation and decentralisation. In addition, scholars are looking more closely at how urban residents adapt to the constraints and opportunities of a situation that is imposed on them, and how they develop strategies for their own advancement within it. In these ways, research on urban China offers a reconceptualisation of state-centred theories of urbanism and urbanisation in the global South.