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Constructing Utopias: China's New Town Movement in the 21st Century

Autor Zhongjie Lin
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 17 sep 2025
Amid its groundbreaking political reforms and "largest mass migration ever seen in human history," China created over 3,800 new towns to accommodate its burgeoning urban population and sustain economic growth. Economic marketization, global trade, inter-city competition, and the exponentially growing real estate industry have driven tremendous investment in infrastructure and large-scale developments, stimulating continuous urban expansion. Surpassing any urbanization initiatives in history, contemporary Chinese new towns emerged as the national campaign to reimagine Chinese cities while reshaping the global geo-economic landscape. Constructing Utopias examines four decades of Chinese urbanization through the lens of urbanism and utopianism. After exploring the theoretical foundations and historical precedents of new town development, the book delves into a series of "model new towns" that showcase innovative planning, design, technologies, policies, and China's broader vision for a modern urban nation. Case studies of the Suzhou Industrial Park, One City and Nine Towns in Shanghai, prototypical eco-cities, and the notorious "ghost towns" form the core of this book, highlighting fundamental issues in urbanization including economic vitality, cultural identity, environmental sustainability, and socio-spatial dynamics. The author scrutinizes these new towns not only as grand visions of governments, planners, and developers but also as physical spaces embodying the struggles and aspirations of residents and migrant workers. By examining both the successes and failures of Chinese new town planning and development, this book illuminates the complex interplay between space production and social transformation within the context of neoliberalism and globalization.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780197793299
ISBN-10: 0197793290
Pagini: 360
Dimensiuni: 156 x 23 x 235 mm
Greutate: 0.62 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States

Recenzii

Drawing on a good selection of the vast quantity of publications on these developments, Lin gives a useful bird's-eye overview, while occasionally offering the perspectives of people who have settled in these spaces. He argues that China's relatively late and rapid industrialization, combined with particular aspects of its political economy, has led to this surge in city building, and he expresses appreciation for the urban designers who have created remarkable spaces in very challenging conditions. Constructing Utopias is well illustrated with urban plans, artists' renderings of future urban spaces, and many photographs of completed cityscapes. ..Recommended.
Zhongjie Lin's Constructing Utopias: China's New Town Movement in the 21st Century is a monumental work of scholarship which illuminates the successes-and the failures-of the new communities created by the Chinese government on formerly agricultural land, an initiative which Professor Lin rightly characterizes as utopian social engineering. Each of the case studies in this book is fascinating, and together they make up an important chapter in the history of planning, design, and development.
China's new town movement represents one of the most ambitious urban experiments of the 21st century. In Building Utopias, Zhongjie Lin provides a compelling and richly documented account of how these projects embody both the aspirations and tensions of China's rapid urbanization. This book offers valuable insights for anyone seeking to understand the future of cities in China and beyond.
Constructing Utopias: China's New Town Movement in the 21st Century explores the audacious effort to build ideal futures from the ground up-cities imagined as engines and harmony, order, and progress. Yet embedded in the word "utopia" is its own paradox: from the Greek ou-topos, "no place," it names both an aspiration and an impossibility. Zhongjie Lin's study captures this tension between visionary idealism and the stubborn realities that render every constructed paradise provisional, fragile, and profoundly human.
Professor Lin's Constructing Utopias is a deeply insightful and elegantly rendered account of China's new town movement and its central role in urban transformation. With rich historical grounding and impressive analytical clarity, the book shows how new towns have become a powerful lens for understanding state-led development, migration, land politics, and the urban imaginaries shaping China's future. It makes an important contribution not only to the study of China's urbanization, but also to comparative urbanism and planning scholarship around the world.

Notă biografică

Zhongjie Lin is the Benjamin Z. Lin Presidential Professor of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, where he serves as Head of the Urban Design program and directs the Future Cities Initiative. He is a co-founder of Futurepolis, an award-winning interdisciplinary practice of planning and architecture. An internationally renowned expert in urbanism, Dr. Lin has published numerous books on the theory and practice of urban design, sustainable urbanism, planning history, and Asian architecture and cities. His work has been recognized by prestigious awards including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.