Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
117
‘quarantine’ low-end globalization on an
international scale will prove as the weight
of the global South in world capitalist
accumulation continues to increase. But
the subtle analyses offered here take us
beyond polarized visions of the world as a
slum or corporate sweatshop, on the one
hand, and neoliberal fantasies of the poor
lifting themselves up by the bootstraps of
heroic entrepreneurialism, on the other,
towards deeper, more critically nuanced,
and
ethnographically
grounded
understandings of the articulations of
globalization from above and below.
References
Duffield, M. (2010). The Liberal Way of
Development and the Development-
Security Impasse: Exploring the Global
Life-Chance Divide,
Security Dialogue
41(1): 53-76.
Galemba, R. B. (2009).
Cultures of
Contraband: Contesting Illegality at the
Mexico-Guatemala Border
. PhD Thesis.
Rhode Island: Brown University.
John Gledhill
University of Manchester
Xuefei Ren (2013),
Urban China (China
Today
).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Impressively, shortly after publishing her
first book
Building Globalization:
Transnational Architecture Production in
Urban China
(University of Chicago
Press,
2011)
which
focused
on
transnational architecture and its profound
effect on the development of urban space,
Xuefei Ren offers us another new
perspective on urban spaces and urban
society in a broader sense. She does so in
her
Urban China (China Today)
. Among
the great number of geographers,
anthropologists, sociologists and political
scientists who are working on urban
China, Ren is a pioneer who writes
comprehensively about the history, present
and development of China’s urbanization
in governance, landscape, migration,
inequality and cultural economy.
Drawing on the astonishing fact
that in 2010 about 50 percent of the
national population lived in urban areas —
129 Chinese cities had over 1 million
residents, and another 110 cities had a
population of between half a million and a
million (p. xiii) — Ren tries to understand
how China has become urbanized over a
short period of time and what an urbanized
China means for its citizens and for rest of
the world. She urges that that a thorough
understanding of urban transition in China
can open paths for developing new urban
theory and vocabularies (p. xvi). This
useful book consists of 6 chapters covering
the general urbanization of china cities.
Each chapter presents an important
analytical dimension on urbanization.
