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British Academy, Tackling the UK’s International Challenges 2018
Hyun Bang Shin (PI), Yimin Zhao (Co-I)
Co-Investigator (Co-I)
January 2019 - January 2022
The overseas expansion of China’s economic influences has been foregrounded in media reports and policy debates in recent years. The term “Global China” has been widely adopted to depict the geopolitical dimension of this immense flow of capital. However, there is a lack of attention to the urban dimension of Global China, especially regarding its impacts on the (re)imaginings and manifestations of urban futures – within and beyond China.
This project examines four large-scale property development projects of Chinese capital to question the ways in which the urban has been reconfigured by China’s global expansion. Drawing on methods of comparative urbanism and multi-sited ethnography, we will conduct interviews and observations in London, Beijing, Foshan and Iskandar Malaysia, aiming to uncover the differentiated modes of speculative and spectacular urban production in the Global China era and generate new insights for inclusive approaches to urban space, nature and modernity.
The key research question is:
How and to what extent does Global China produce the urban in a relational way that reconciles China’s urban transformation with local and geo-political conditions at the destination cities?
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