Posthuman policies for creative, smart, eco-cities? Case studies from China

Abstract

Policies promoting creative, smart, sustainable cities continue to dominate global urban policy scripts. This article explores how posthuman assumptions embedded in such scripts render the socially embodied human invisible and analyzes cases of their rationalization and enactment within China. The article concludes that understandings of creativity in Chinese urban aesthetics expose premises of globally promoted urban policy scripts more transparently than those informed by European aesthetic traditions. The Chinese city is understood to manifest the creative obsessions of humans rather than to actualize a transcendent, idealized vision separate from that of its human creators. This resembles Guy Debord’s idea that what we see in the world—how the world is architected—is a materialization of triumphant ideologies. The contemporary Chinese city, incentivized by the entrepreneurial state, makes visible Debord’s globally dominant “integrated spectacular.” Once creativity and intelligence are rationalized, the autonomous “creative,” “smart,” “eco” city is branded in a global supply chain of city production. Consequently, the posthuman city need not account for the conditions under which embodied humans are actually inspired to create and adequately compensated for their creations. Rather than attributing the failure of posthuman policies in Chinese cities to Chinese exceptionalism, these cases expose universal fault lines in the policies themselves.