UKNA Seminar

This seminar will feature presentations from Stephen Read and Yawei Chen (TU Delft), Rohit Negi (Ambedkar University, India) and Shrawan Kumar Acharya (CEPT University, also in India), and Chen Rui (China Academy of Urban Planning and Design) and Zhou Yu (Tianjin University, China).

Programme

The Artistic Achievements of the East Imperial Tombs of the Qing Dynasty, and the Feng Shui Theory Behind Them
Zhou Yu

Antelopes, Jackals, and Hunting Parties: A Situated Political Ecology of the Delhi Ridge
Rohit Negi

Urban Revitalization, Strategies, and Consequences: Experiences from Amdavad, India
Shrawan Acharya

Coffee break

Exploring Chinese Urban Planning Reform in a Market-Oriented Environment
Chen Rui

Paths of Development in the Pearl River Delta: Framing Emerging Forms of Polity, Community, and Economy
Stephen Read

From Economic Power House to City of Innovation: Shanghai’s Changing Urban Strategies and the Implementation of Large-scale Urban Development Projects
Yawei Chen

Reception

Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA)

The Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) is a European Union funded research project. Part of Marie Curie Actions, this International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES) was awarded in 2011 and began in April 2012. It consists of more than 100 researchers from institutes in Europe, the United States, India, and China, all of whom are researching the Asian urban environment. More information can be found at the UKNA website: www.ukna.asia

Abstracts

The Artistic Achievements of the East Imperial Tombs of the Qing Dynasty, and the Feng Shui Theory Behind Them
Zhou Yu

The East Imperial Tombs of the Qing Dynasty is a famous ‘World Heritage’ site located near Beijing. It was evaluated a ‘creative masterpiece of humanity’ by the experts from UNESCO. The artistic achievements include the perfect combination of natural and artificial beauty, with a fascinating organization of sequences of spaces with precise scale control and organic spatial switching. It was designed under the guiding principles of feng shui, a traditional theory, and technology, in design related to almost every aspects of dwelling in ancient China. But now feng shui is regarded merely as superstition, and is officially forbidden in China, as a result of the continuous revolutions and the impact of modern science. As there are so many things that we can learn from feng shui, maybe trying to explain this ancient Chinese cultural heritage in a scientific way is a practical approach. While fundamentally speaking, as feng shui is located in a different paradigm from modern science, Confucius’ tolerant attitude may be a more far-sighted approach.

Antelopes, Jackals, and Hunting Parties: A Situated Political Ecology of the Delhi Ridge
Rohit Negi

It is common, in the available scholarship of the Global South, to ascribe environmental and ecological concerns – including air and water pollution, waste, and shrinking habitats – to a rather undifferentiated process of urbanization. In the Indian case, the perceived lack of political will or capacity of the state to effectively deal with these concerns is also typically highlighted. In turn, initiatives emanating from non-state actors have been either celebrated rather uncritically as ‘democracy-in-practice’ or been the subject of trenchant criticism on account of their tendencies of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’. The aim of this project, then, is to examine dynamic political ecologies in the context of urban growth and associated land-cover change. This is specifically attempted through the political ecological analysis of the Sanjay Van, one of a handful of green ‘patches’ in the so-called Delhi Ridge, part of the once contiguous semi-arid Aravali Range, which has been fragmented into several smaller habitats due to rapid urbanization. In accordance with trends in the vibrant politics of space in Delhi, such ‘urban greens’ are expected to either undergo what can be called ‘parkification’ (as a result of overlapping middle-class and beautification goals) or become managed forests (in keeping with the bureaucratic forestry agenda). This research suggests that whilst these are powerful though contested discourses, they do not exhaust the field of the empirical. Indeed, ecological and social field research reveals users and uses beyond those imagined in the park or forest agenda. In Sanjay Van, a fragile ecosystem – including antelopes, jackals, and several species of exotic and native flora – ‘lives on’ and, together with the urban subalterns’ views and spatial practices, challenges the hegemony of any single logic through continued unincorporated presence.

Urban Revitalization, Strategies, and Consequences: Experiences from Amdavad, India.
Shrawan Acharya

The urban has captured the imagination of the aspiring Indians who want the world to see them as ‘modern’ and ‘global’.  Urbanization and urban development reflects this changing aspiration as it is the key factor contributing to India’s growth story in recent decades. No longer is the Nehruvian Socialist paradigm the main discourse for development. It is the Neoliberal market-based development model which dictates the development discourse in emerging India. Urban areas are important Neoliberal change agents in the growth and diversification of India due to the opening up of the economy to global market forces and processes since the early 1990s. Modernization of cities modelled on Western prototypes are being promoted and emulated to get international recognition and achieve global aspirations. Many cities in India are embarking on urban revitalization initiatives to be competitive and attract investments. Some strategies include large-scale capital-intensive infrastructures, city beautification and more recently urban heritage projects. The growth impulses generated by such global processes are, however, not in conformity with the entrenched structural inequalities of Indian cities which creates contradictions and conflicts in urban area. Though the development-planning discourse and planning policies discuss ‘inclusive development’, in reality the processes are more exclusionary, often threatening citizenship and the rights of the marginalized in the city. This paper will present and highlight the interplay of these dichotomies in Amdavad, taking the city-beautification and heritage projects currently under implementation and reflect on the issues that result from these contradictory developments in emerging India, as well as the need to engage in evolving more inclusive, bottom-up and incremental approaches to city-development strategies.

Exploring Chinese Urban Planning Reform in a Market-Oriented Environment
Chen Rui

Urban planning has become one of the most important instruments for Chinese local governments to lead city expansion as well as attract exterior investment and increase economic growth over the past twenty years. But because the city plan is always an ultimate blueprint after twenty years or an even longer period, and the developing conditions in the transforming market economy environment are always changing and unpredictable, although the plan has been institutionalized according to the Town and Country Planning Act (2008), modifications or indeed actual ignoring of these plans frequently happens, which make local governments tend to use urban plans as short-term profit tools instead of long-term visions. The voice of Chinese urban planning reform has been raised along with the deepening of market economic reform, claiming that the planning system and methods should adapt to the market-oriented environment and rebuild the relationship between market and government in the procedures of urban planning. This presentation will give some thinking on the direction of Chinese urban planning reform, using the case of Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, known for its highly developed free-market economy. The relationship between the market and local government in Wenzhou is quite different from other cities in China, which could be called ‘informal development’, making the government-led and blueprint style of urban plan very hard to meet demands of markets or individuals. Emphasis will be placed on the regional scale for strategic visions, flexibility of land-use, and project-oriented views for the better implementation and spatial integration of sustainable landscape environments, which shall be shown to be some of the most important principles for future urban planning in China.

Paths of Development in the Pearl River Delta: Framing Emerging Forms of Polity, Community, and Economy
Stephen Read

China is not a tabula rasa. Rather it has specific historically produced forms in which towns and villages and local forms of community as well as internationally oriented cities and global players play important roles. The aim is first to identify paths of urban and territorial development and connect these to polity-forming potentials at local, urban, and regional scales, then to attempt to match these to existing and innovative forms of governance and economy in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) with particular attention to Hong Kong-Shenzhen. These forms may both derive from historically constructed territorial, governance, and economic forms, and suggest future innovative polities and economies. The work is exploratory and towards practical solutions, but attempts to go beyond an over-reliance on Western models of cities, territories, and government, and find potentials through starting with a concern for endogenous processes and forms. It aims to connect with tendencies and innovative work at the urban structure and governance levels in the PRD and elsewhere in China.

From Economic Power House to City of Innovation: Shanghai’s Changing Urban Strategies and the Implementation of Large-scale Urban Development Projects
Yawei Chen

Shanghai’s historical development as well as its transformation in the last four decades has been seen as an example of a city that embraced globalization as a quick way of bringing itself into prominence as a World City. The development of large-scale urban development projects, such as the Pudong development and the Huangpu Riverbank Redevelopment, as well as the recently established China (Shanghai) Free Trade Zone, have played a key role in transforming Shanghai’s socio-economico-spatial environment and accommodate its increasingly globalized economy as well as establish the city’s status as an international metropolis. While these large-scale urban projects contribute to Shanghai’s becoming an economic powerhouse in China in the last two decades, it has yet to be seen whether these large-scale urban development projects will help Shanghai become a city of innovation in future decades. This research examines how Shanghai has made use of large-scale urban development projects to become a globally recognised, entrepreneurial, and competitive city. At the same time, this research also raises the question of to what extent can large-scale urban development projects help Shanghai develop its potential competitive advantages? For example, is knowledge-based economy and the production of high-value-added goods and services embodying a high-level of knowledge?