Contesting speculative urbanisation and strategising discontents

Hyun Bang Shin

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper explains what the production of speculative urbanisation in mainland China means for strategising emergent discontents therein. It is argued that China's urbanisation is a political and ideological project by the Party State, producing urban-oriented accumulation through the commingling of the labour-intensive industrial production with heavy investment in the built environment. Therefore, for any progressive movements to be formed, it becomes imperative to imagine and establish cross-class alliances to claim the right to the city (or the right to the urban, given the limitations of the city as an analytical unit). Because of the nature of urbanisation, the alliances would need to involve not only industrial workers and urban inhabitants but also village farmers whose lands are expropriated to accommodate investments to produce the urban as well as ethnic minorities in autonomous regions whose cities are appropriated and restructured to produce Han-dominated cities. Education emerges as an important strategy for the discontented who need to understand how the fate of urban inhabitants is knitted tightly with the fate of workers, villagers and others who are subject to the exploitation of the urban-oriented accumulation.

Keywords: speculative urbanisation; discontents; accumulation; the right to the urban; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2014-09-24
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published in City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 24, September, 2014, 18(4-5), pp. 509 - 516. ISSN: 1470-3629

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/59608/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:59608

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().