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《城市政治学》

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by Yimin in Academic, Teaching

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Tags

politics, syllabus, urban

最近大家开始反思中文信息检索的封闭性问题,我对此也深有体会。于是决心积极响应号召,以后要经常把值得讨论的想法放上来,放在有 URL 的地方,以便更好地进行交流讨论和信息检索。

今天我想分享的是秋季学期开设的《城市政治学》的授课提纲。其实刚接到这个教学任务时我是有一些抗拒的,因为在以往的训练中我深知城市政治学那些主流理论是多么地狭隘和美国中心主义,比如增长机器以及城市政体。但是转念一想,我又觉得这也许是一个契机,也许通过这门课程可以把我关心和感兴趣的问题聚拢在一起,带着学生们一起加深对城市、空间和政治的认识——于是我就带着这样一种关切开始设计课程中要讲授的主题。

在进一步构思的过程中,我越发觉得对城市动态的理解离不开对历史和地理语境的理解,因为政治从来都不是(不应该是)抽象名词的聚合,而是人们在日常生活中经历、感受、表演、聚合的对象和产物。正是因为这种在地性,政治动态无法被聚拢在概念或理论之下,更好的讨论办法应该是把活历的政治和它的时空性结合在一起考察。

既然时间和空间都是关键词,那么也许不妨就按照两个关键词来聚合课程打算涵盖的话题。最后的结果就是,这门课被分为两个部分,其一聚焦城市政治的谱系,其二关心(当代)城市政治的核心议题。更详细的编排如下所示,还请大方之家多多批评指正。

 

一、教学目标

 

本课程聚焦城市发展的政治动态及其时空演变脉络。通过仔细梳理古今中外城市空间与政治的联结及其多样性,力图使学生初步掌握城市研究的政治学视角,并夯实政治学讨论的城市知识基础。通过课程讲授,同时辅之以文献阅读、经验观察和论文写作等方面的任务,课程预期实现的核心目标是提高学生在面对城市问题时的批判性思考和分析能力。

 

二、课程简介

 

随着发展中国家城市化进程的迅速推进,全球城市人口占比已经超过50%,并因此进入“城市时代”。在这一过程中,城市空间与社会关系和政治机制交错演进,构成了一幅错综复杂又充满异质性的城市政治图景。为了更好地把握全球城市进程、理解城市发展的核心问题,我们需要聚焦于空间与政治的交错地带,探索城市空间变迁的政治与政治经济机制,从而更好地诊断问题,提出新的思路,帮助构建更加健康和公平的城市社会。

本课程不拘泥于狭义的城市政治学学科范畴,而是将焦点放置在城市政治动态的重大议题,并充分关照这些议题在历史-地理维度的多元性。具体来说,课程将由两个板块构成:第一,课程前半段聚焦于城市政治演化的谱系学,以中西比较的视角仔细梳理从古代城邦到现代性城市这一历史脉络中的城市空间与政治,帮助学生提起对城市政治动态之时间性的注意;第二,课程后半段将借助当前城市研究主流文献讨论城市政治动态的若干关键词,包括比较城市主义、非正规性、投机性城市化、城市空间生产、“城市权”、士绅化、城市美学等内容,其目的在于提醒学生城市政治动态在空间上的异质性和多元格局,以及这些异质性交错和联结的核心机制。

 

三、课程安排

 

第1周:导论——城市、空间与政治

第一部分:城市政治的谱系

第2周:城市政治与谱系学方法

第3周:城邦与国家

第4周:国庆放假

第5周:中世纪的城市与政治

第6周:现代性与城市(上)——巴黎

第7周:现代性与城市(下)——上海与北京

第8周:全球化的城市政治

第二部分:城市政治关键词

第9周:城市政治学及其后殖民批判

第10周:正规与非正规:“寻常城市”的政治学

第11周:城市空间的生产与政治

第12周:投机性城市化的政治经济

第13周:“士绅化”及其不满

第14周:流动、住房与“城市权”

第15周:城市规划的政治学

第16周:城市文化:美学与政治

第17周:期末复习

 

四、考核方式

 

本课程的考核包括平时考核(50%)和期末考试(50%)两个部分。其中,平时成绩由课堂表现(10%)、读书报告(20%)和期中论文(20%)组成;期末闭卷考试为论述题,要求从十个问题中选择两道作答,答案需要严格遵循学术规范,并按照学术论文的格式组织结构、引用文献。

· 课堂表现:10%

· 读书报告:20%

· 期中论文:20%

· 期末考试:50%

 

五、核心阅读材料

 

本课程不指定教材,各讲会布置相应的阅读材料。下面所列文献为贯穿整个课程的核心阅读材料,供同学们了解课程的整体思路和主要学习领域:

  1. 亨利皮雷纳,《中世纪城市》, 北京:商务印书馆,2006
  2. 大卫 哈维,《巴黎城记:现代性之都的诞生》, 桂林:广西师范大学出版社,2009
  3. 亨利列斐伏尔,《都市革命》, 北京:首都师范大学出版社,2018【有条件者建议直接阅读英文版:Lefebvre, H. (2003). The urban revolution. University of Minnesota Press.】
  4. 多琳马西,《空间、地方与性别》, 北京:首都师范大学出版社,2017
  5. Robinson, J. (2006). Ordinary cities: between modernity and development. London and New York: Routledge.
  6. Roy, A., & Ong, A. (Eds.). (2011). Worlding cities: Asian experiments and the art of being global.Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.
  7. Lees, L., Shin, H. B., & López-Morales, E. (2016). Planetary gentrification. Cambridge: Polity.
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CfP RC21: The Urban Spectre of ‘Global China’ and Critical Reflections on its Spatiality

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by Yimin in Academic, Events

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CfP RC21: S6 – The Urban Spectre of ‘Global China’ and Critical Reflections on its Spatiality

18-21 September 2019, Delhi, India (https://rc21delhi2019.com)

Convenors

Professor Hyun Bang Shin, London School of Economics and Political Science (UK)
Dr Yimin Zhao, Renmin University of China (China)
Dr Sin Yee Koh, Monash University Malaysia (Malaysia)

Stream synopsis

The overseas expansion of China’s economic influence has recently been foregrounded in media reports and policy debates. The term ‘Global China’ has been widely adopted to depict the geopolitical dimension of this immense flow of capital. However, there is still a lack of attention to the urban dimension of ‘Global China’, especially regarding its impacts on the (re)imaginings and manifestations of urban futures – both within and beyond China.

In extant literature on Global China, two main features stand out. The first is the tendency to bound discussions of China’s role in global capital flows within Africa, and to theorise this role in terms of neo-colonialism. The second feature is the overt focus on the role of Chinese capital in industrial sectors – for example through investigations of labour conflicts (Giese 2013), labour regimes (Lee 2009, 2018), and workplace regimes (Fei et al. 2018). While there are increasing discussions on the spatiality of ‘Global China’, especially in relation to the ’Belt and Road’ (BRI) discourse, they are still closely linked to industrial sectors.

In this stream, we seek to address the existing gaps identified above through a focus on the urban spectre of ‘Global China’. We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that address the interconnections and intersections between the rise of ‘Global China’ and ‘the urban’ (broadly defined). We aim to bring together papers that (1) critically examine the differentiated modes of speculative and spectacular urban production; (2) discuss the ways in which ‘the urban’ has been reconfigured by ‘Global China’; and (3) identify the theoretical and empirical implications for urban futures.

Submit your abstract

Please send your abstract of not more than 300 words to Hyun (h.b.shin@lse.ac.uk), Yimin (zhao.y@ruc.edu.cn) and Sin Yee (koh.sinyee@monash.edu) and CC’d to rc21delhi@gmail.com before January 20th, 2019. Please indicate the stream number (S6), the session title, and your last name in the subject line. For more details, please see the official instruction at: https://rc21delhi2019.com/index.php/call-for-abstracts/

Inquiries: If you have any questions regarding this stream, please email Hyun (h.b.shin@lse.ac.uk), Yimin (zhao.y@ruc.edu.cn) and Sin Yee (koh.sinyee@monash.edu).

RGS-IBG 2018: Is the present a “foreign country”?

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by Yimin in Academic, Events

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

modernity, politics, space, urban

RGS-IBG 2018 Annual Conference: Cardiff, UK, 28 to 31 August 2018

 

Session title: Is the present a “foreign country”? Modernity and urban space in comparative perspective

Organisers: Yimin Zhao (Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science); Boya Guo (Graduate School of Design, Harvard University)

 

Session introduction

The hegemony of modernity has been rooted in a teleological temporality for centuries, where a linear time is upheld, exhausting the possibilities of our living experience as well as our envisioning of the future (Sewell 1996). Postcolonial critiques of historicism have been inviting us to “provincialise Europe” and its universal history (Chakrabarty 2000), aiming to unlearn the taken-for-granted privileges of Eurocentric traditions and at the same time learn from the “historical others” (Scott 2012). This dialectical process of learning and unlearning questions the nature of modernity and requires us to conceive different ways to acknowledge co-existing multiplicities.

Space matters here because our re-imagination of it might put forward a new perspective, through which we could “dislocate” modernity, recognise multiplicities, and drop such dichotomies as West/Non-West, modern/ traditional, and innovation/imitation (Massey 1999, Robinson 2006). But there are still challenges, empirically, to follow this call for spatialising the history of modernity with “ordinary cities.” For, the living experience and space (of the “historical others” in particular) are yet deeply inflected by the teleological temporality, which could be evidenced by Thames Town in Shanghai (Wu 2010), Norman Foster-facilitated utopian landscapes in Astana (Koch 2012), and the archaising reconstruction of the whole city in Datong, China (Zhou 2015), to name just a few.

Instead of labelling these stories as false/deviated/incomplete modernity, here we want to gather together critical interrogations of stories as such to advance our reflections on the present. After recognising these stories as symptoms of the hegemony of modernity, it is more critical to explore how the experiences of modernity are being shaped by local-historical conditions and politico-economic relations. Lowenthal (1985) once illustrates that “the past is a foreign country” since “they do things differently there.” We want to move a step further and interrogate if the present is a “foreign country” as well, where different conducts of “historical others” could be conceptualised as co-existing spatial differences rather than temporal sequences, and where the questioning of historical time could be contextualised in multiple and dynamic spatial practices.

The key question we want to put forward in this session is: how and how far has modernity been performed and enacted through diverse spatial practices in daily life, and how can we learn to be “modern” from the perspectives of “historical others”? All contributions related to the two keywords (modernity and urban space) are welcome; and we are especially looking forward to empirical illustrations on how to inhabit the hegemony of modernity spatially – and hence differently.

 

Session 1: Debating authenticity

Session chair: Yimin Zhao (The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)

Session authors, presenters and titles:

1. Learning from Chinese copying culture: Borrowed or reinvented modernity?, Boya Guo (Harvard University, USA) (presenter)
2. ‘Urban utopia’ in modern China: from Haussmann’s Paris to Southern Song imperial town — A case study of Hangzhou, Yang Song (King’s College London, UK) (presenter)
3. 1933 Millfun Shanghai: from slaughterhouse to creative park, Shu-Yi Chiu (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) (presenter), Wen-I Lin (National Taipei University, Taiwan), Justin Spinney (Cardiff University, UK)
4. Entanglements of ‘heritageisation’ and ‘modernisation’ in urban space, Chiara Valli (Gothenburg University, Sweden) (presenter)

 

Session 2: Interrogating modernity

Session chair: Boya Guo (Harvard University, USA)

Session authors, presenters and titles:

1. The Myth of the Communist Mansion, Wanli Mo (Tongji University, PR China) (presenter)
2. Peddling modernity: Territorial stigmatisation and land business in Beijing’s green belts, Yimin Zhao (The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK) (presenter)
3. Shuttling Between Heterogeneous Spaces: Two (Art) Projects in China, Xiaoyi Nie (Royal College of Art, UK) (presenter)
4. Conservation and Democracy: The aspirations and politics of the built environment, Javier Ors Ausin (World Monuments Fund) (presenter)
5. Discussion

 

References

  • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Koch, Natalie. 2012. “Urban ‘utopias’: the Disney stigma and discourses of ‘false modernity’.” Environment and Planning A 44 (10):2445-2462.
  • Lowenthal, David. 1985. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Massey, Doreen. 1999. “Spaces of politics.” In Human Geography today, edited by Doreen Massey, John Allen and Philip Sarre, 279-294. Cambridge: Polity Press.
  • Robinson, Jennifer. 2006. Ordinary cities: Between modernity and development. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Scott, David. 2012. “The Traditions of Historical Others.” Symposia on Gender, Race, and Philosophy 8 (1):1-8.
  • Sewell Jr, William H. 1996. “Three temporalities: Toward an eventful sociology” in The historic turn in the human sciences, edited by Terrence McDonald, 245-80. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
  • Wu, Fulong. 2010. “Gated and packaged suburbia: Packaging and branding Chinese suburban residential development.” Cities no. 27 (5):385-396.
  • Zhou, Hao. (Director). 2015. The Chinese mayor [Documentary Film]. London: BBC.

 

CFP RGS-IBG 2018: Is the present a “foreign country”?

26 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by Yimin in Academic, Events

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Geography, modernity, space, urban

Is the present a “foreign country”? Modernity and urban space in comparative perspective

RGS-IBG 2018 Annual Conference: Cardiff, UK, 28 to 31 August 2018

Organisers: Yimin Zhao (Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science); Boya Guo (Graduate School of Design, Harvard University)

Discussants: TBC

 

The hegemony of modernity has been rooted in a teleological temporality for centuries, where a linear time is upheld, exhausting the possibilities of our living experience as well as our envisioning of the future (Sewell 1996). Postcolonial critiques of historicism have been inviting us to “provincialise Europe” and its universal history (Chakrabarty 2000), aiming to unlearn the taken-for-granted privileges of Eurocentric traditions and at the same time learn from the “historical others” (Scott 2012). This dialectical process of learning and unlearning questions the nature of modernity and requires us to conceive different ways to acknowledge co-existing multiplicities.

Space matters here because our re-imaginations of it might put forward a new perspective, through which we could “dislocate” modernity, recognise multiplicities, and drop such dichotomies as West/Non-West, modern/ traditional, and innovation/imitation (Massey 1999, Robinson 2006). But there are still challenges, empirically, to follow this call for spatialising the history of modernity with “ordinary cities.” For, the living experience and space (of the “historical others” in particular) are yet deeply inflected by the teleological temporality, which could be evidenced by Thames Town in Shanghai (Wu 2010), Norman Foster-facilitated utopian landscapes in Astana (Koch 2012), and the archaising reconstruction of the whole city in Datong, China (Zhou 2015), to name just a few.

Instead of labelling these stories as false/deviated/incomplete modernity, here we want to gather together critical interrogations of stories as such to advance our reflections on the present. After recognising these stories as symptoms of the hegemony of modernity, it is more critical to explore how the experiences of modernity are being shaped by local-historical conditions and politico-economic relations. Lowenthal (1985) once illustrates that “the past is a foreign country” since “they do things differently there.” We want to move a step further and interrogate if the present is a “foreign country” as well, where different conducts of “historical others” could be conceptualised as co-existing spatial differences rather than temporal sequences, and where the questioning of historical time could be contextualised in multiple and dynamic spatial practices.

The key question we want to put forward in this session is: how and how far has modernity been performed and enacted through diverse spatial practices in daily life, and how can we learn to be “modern” from the perspectives of “historical others”? All contributions related to the two keywords (modernity and urban space) are welcome; and we are especially looking forward to empirical illustrations on how to inhabit the hegemony of modernity spatially – and hence differently.

If you are interested in participating in this session, please send an abstract of 200-250 words to Yimin Zhao (y.zhao25@lse.ac.uk) and Boya Guo (bguo@gsd.harvard.edu) by 9 February 2018.

 

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Koch, Natalie. 2012. “Urban ‘utopias’: the Disney stigma and discourses of ‘false modernity’.” Environment and Planning A no. 44 (10):2445-2462.

Lowenthal, David. 1985. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Massey, Doreen. 1999. “Spaces of politics.” In Human geography today, edited by Doreen Massey, John Allen and Philip Sarre, 279-294. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Robinson, Jennifer. 2006. Ordinary cities: Between modernity and development. London and New York: Routledge.

Scott, David. 2012. “The Traditions of Historical Others.” Symposia on Gender, Race, and Philosophy no. 8 (1):1-8.

Sewell Jr, William H. 1996. “Three temporalities: Toward an eventful sociology” in The historic turn in the human sciences, edited by Terrence McDonald, 245-80. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Wu, Fulong. 2010. “Gated and packaged suburbia: Packaging and branding Chinese suburban residential development.” Cities no. 27 (5):385-396.

Zhou, Hao. (Director). 2015. The Chinese mayor [Documentary Film]. London: BBC.

 

Space as method

22 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by Yimin in Academic, Publication

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ethnography, Geography, Greenbelt, method, space

My first “academic” article, one that reflects upon my own field experience in Beijing’s green belts, has recently been published in the City journal.

This paper has plenty of meanings for me. It is the very first chapter that was finished all through my thesis. I can still remember the readings I did for this paper, and the drafts I wrote and then scratched – all happened at the moment when the deadline of my thesis was approaching yet I was still in the middle of nowhere. It was also a revised version of the paper that won the third place in the student paper competition of China Geography Specialty Group at this year’s (2017) AAG Annual Meeting.

But most importantly, it shows the reflections I had after doing two spells of fieldwork by myself. Its starting point is a puzzle I had when in the field and its concluding remarks are at best an invitation for further discussions and debates on how to do fieldwork on the urban frontier with our bodily space-time. These works should be further developed, and I hope this paper could contribute some empirical observations that have not been registered in the literature before.

Below is the abstract of this paper, and the full access can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2017.1353342. Please feel free to contact me at y.zhao25#lse.ac.uk (replace # by @); all comments and suggestions are warmly welcome.

 

Abstract

Great urban transformations are diffusing across the global South, removing the original landscape of urban margins to make of them a new urban frontier. These processes raise questions of both validity and legitimacy for ethnographic practice, requiring critical reflection on both spatiality and method in fieldwork at the urban margins. This paper draws on fieldwork experience in Beijing’s green belts, which could also be labelled the city’s urban margin or frontier, to reflect on the space-time of encounter in the field. I aim to demonstrate how space foregrounds not only our bodily experiences but also ethnographic investigations of the daily life, and hence becomes a method. Beijing’s green belts symbolise a historical–geographical conjuncture (a moment) emerging in its urban metamorphosis. Traditional endeavours (immanent in various spatial metaphors) to identify field sites as reified entities are invalidated over the course of the space-time encounter, requiring a relational spatial ontology to register such dynamics. The use in fieldwork of DiDi Hitch, a mobile app for taxi-hailing and hitchhiking, reveals the spatiotemporal construction of self–other relations needing recognition via the dialectics of the encounter. In this relational framework, an encounter is never a priori but a negotiation of a here and now between different trajectories and stories as individuals are thrown together in socially constructed space and time.

 

Keywords

urban ethnography, spatial ontology, spatial metaphors, the dialectics of the encounter, DiDi Hitch, Beijing

 

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