Urban Labs: From Chicago to China and India

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Urban Labs: From Chicago to China and India

Urban China and India are among the most exciting places to theorize about urban processes.

Ren Xuefei, From Chicago to China and India: Studying the City in the Twenty-First Century, Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2018. 44:497–513.

Source: 

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-soc-073117-041131

Picture source:

 https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, cities in the Global South have seen extraordinary growth, with China and India as the epicenters of urbanization. This essay critically assesses the state of the field of global urban studies and focuses particularly on the scholarship relating to urban China and India. The essay identifies three dominant paradigms in the scholarship: the global city thesis, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism. In contrast to US urban sociology, which is often preoccupied with the question of how neighborhood effects reproduce inequality, global urban studies account for a much wider array of urban processes, such as global urban networks, social polarization, and the transformation of the built environment. This essay points out the disconnect between US urban sociology and global urban studies and proposes a comparative approach as a way to bridge the divide.

Ren Xuefei, professor at Department of Sociology and Global Urban Studies Program, Michigan State University, published a review paper on the paradigm shift in global urban studies in 2018, which overviews the three dominant paradigms in the scholarship: the global city thesis, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism. Ren points out that US urban sociology is preoccupied with the question of how neighborhood effects reproduce inequality and is disconnected with the global urban studies. Based on the massive urban transformation in China and India, Ren proposes a comparative approach as a way to bridge the divide.

Robert Park’s unfinished endeavor of comparative urban studies

In 1933, after his retirement from the University of Chicago, Robert E. Park, one of the founding fathers of the Chicago School of urban sociology, accepted an invitation to teach a semester in China at Yenching University (today’s Peking University). He offered two classes: Collective Behavior and Sociological Research Methods. The class in research methods was especially popular among his Chinese students. As he did in Chicago, Park encouraged his students to use the city as a social laboratory, and he took his class to various corners of Beijing that were unfamiliar to the elite students at Yenching University, including the red-light district, the Thieves’ Market, and prisons. Some of Park’s students, such as Fei Xiaotong, later became leading scholars in the new field of sociology, a Western discipline that was taking root in China in the first half of the twentieth century.

After leaving Beijing, Park embarked on a worldwide tour with his wife, visiting more than a dozen cities and countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. In his correspondence with colleagues, Park expressed great enthusiasm for the opportunity to extend the research he had done in Chicago to these foreign cities and to engage in comparative studies on race and ethnic relations, religion, and immigrant integration. For example, after spending a brief time in Calcutta (Kolkata) and visiting several other Indian cities such as Banares (Varanasi), Agra, Delhi, Jaipur, Udaipur, Lucknow, and Bombay (Mumbai), Park marveled at the cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity of the Indian subcontinent, and he remarked that India is perhaps “one of the most fascinating places to study human nature and race relations”. He admired the “old cities of old Moguls,” showed great interest in the caste system, and opined on the stark gender inequality: India is “a male civilization, and it fell.. .because it tried to carry the whole load. They could not even trust their women”. Park noted the racial dynamics in different countries, such as the interactions of Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in China, the caste system in India, and race relations in South Africa and Brazil, and he believed that these could all be studied within the same comparative framework. In 1943 he wrote to his granddaughter, who was then preparing to travel to China, that he wished he had more time to return to Beijing, “one of the most marvelous cities in the world”, to study the human geography of the city and the customs of the people, in order to understand the history of China as a whole. Park envisioned applying human ecology as a universal framework to study urban processes; it did not occur to him that human ecology had to be reinvented for studying Beijing, or that cities such as Beijing would require entirely different analytical frameworks.

Park did not live to undertake any comparative studies. Five months after writing his grand- daughter, at age 79, he died in Nashville, Tennessee. Had he lived another decade, he probably would have extended the Chicago School’s ecological model of studying urban life to the non- US cities he visited. If he were alive today, in the early twenty-first century, he surely would be fascinated by the massive scale of urbanization, especially among cities in the Global South—a phenomenon he undoubtedly would have compared with the urban transformations experienced in Chicago a century earlier.

Since the heyday of the Chicago School in the 1920s and 1930s, US urban sociology has shifted away from the ecological model of studying urban life. Today an impressive body of literature, often from a political economy perspective, addresses socio-spatial restructuring in inner cities and suburbs in US metropolitan areas, spotlighting issues such as uneven development, race- and class-based segregation, neighborhood effects on inequality, gentrification and suburbanization. At the same time, however, the scholarship has also become increasingly narrow and specialized. In contrast to Park’s broad vision for comparative work, many US urban sociologists today turn their sights inward, confining their research to the study of US cities, with little regard for the social transformations that are underway in other cities of the world. The best scholarship in urban sociology in the United States centers almost exclusively on a handful of the largest US cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta.

From the 1980s to the present, two of the leading theoretical frameworks guiding global urban studies have been the global city thesis and neoliberalism. Both frameworks are influenced by the neo-Marxist urban political economy tradition, and they emphasize how urban structures and processes are shaped by unequal economic relations in the larger world-system. More recently, since the mid-2000s, the global city thesis and the neoliberalism framework have been increasingly critiqued by scholars influenced by the postcolonial tradition. Postcolonial scholars propose a broadening of the research focus beyond the most established global cities to encompass the complex historical, political, and sociocultural processes that are not limited to capitalist economic relations.

The Global City Thesis

Up until the mid-twentieth century, the dominant approach to urban studies presumed that cities were nested within national territories, and that the national economy was the basic container for socio-spatial polarization within and between cities. This thinking was challenged in the 1960s by a group of neo-Marxist urban political economists, such as Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, and David Harvey. They disputed that the nation-state was still a meaningful scale to analyze urban processes, and they argued that uneven urban development had to be studied both in a broader geopolitical context and in relation to worldwide capitalist production. In the 1980s, John Friedmann first proposed the world city hypothesis, arguing that the form and strength of a city’s integration in the world economy—and the function it plays in the international division of labor—largely shape the socio-spatial relations within it. Friedmann & Wolff point out a major trend in the world economy since World War II represented by the growing number of transnational corporations that operate across national boundaries and organize production and labor on a global scale. This emerging world-system of economic relations has had a profound impact on cities, giving rise to a global urban hierarchy of influence and control. Atop this hierarchy are a handful of powerful cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris. Called “world cities” by Friedmann, these are the places where major transnational corporations launch their operations. World cities are closely connected with one another via transnational flows of corporate transactions, information exchanges, branch office locations, and personnel travels.

In 1991, Saskia Sassen refined Friedmann’s world city hypothesis and proposed the concept of the global city. “World city” and “global city” are often used interchangeably in the literature, but the latter focuses in particular on the role played by the agglomeration of producer services (e.g., finance, accounting, legal services etc.) in the making of global cities. The global city thesis identifies the rise of a group of powerful cities as command-and-control centers of the world economy. The shifts in the world economy have given rise to a network of interconnected global cities. The agglomeration of advanced producer-services firms inevitably has also created a dual structure in the social fabric of global cities, generating a divide between a highly paid urban professional class and a class of low-paid, informal, and often immigrant labor.

The global city research has focused on three general topics: global urban networks, the restructuring of urban space, and the transformation of the social fabric.

Neoliberalism

Since the late 1990s, neoliberalism has become a popular theoretical framework in global urban studies. Broadly speaking, neoliberalism refers to a set of deregulatory reforms and policy orientations in the 1970s that sought to expand market rule through state intervention. Critical geographers such as David Harvey have argued that urban restructuring in both the Global North and the Global South could be viewed as part of a larger process of market-oriented regulatory reforms aimed at reestablishing conditions for capital accumulation and restoring elite power. In Western Europe and North America, regulatory reforms in the 1970s significantly shaped urban policies and governance, turning cities into key sites for capital accumulation.

Although derived from postindustrial cities in the West, the neoliberal thesis has enjoyed wide appeal among scholars working on non-Western cities. These scholars observe similar trends of urban restructuring led by local governments in order to enhance the competitiveness of their cities and urban regions.

The Postcolonial Critique

Since the mid-2000s, the global city thesis and the neoliberal framework have come under criticism, most pointedly by scholars operating within the postcolonial tradition. Postcolonial scholars raise three major concerns. First, they question the single focus on global cities at the expense of other, smaller places. For example, Robinson (2006) proposed to redirect research from global cities to “ordinary cities,” that is, places that are not major financial centers but nevertheless deserve to be studied to understand uneven development. Second, they question the emphasis on economism, i.e., the overwhelming attention paid to the economic dimensions of urban processes to the detriment of other social, cultural, and political forces at work. Third, postcolonial scholars also challenge the overly deterministic nature of the neoliberal thesis in particular and of neo-Marxist urban political economy in general.

Other postcolonial scholars have proposed alternative frameworks to guide urban analyses. Anthropologist Aihwa Ong, for example, takes a Foucauldian approach and interprets neoliberalism not merely as a series of economic relations, but also as a set of market-based subjectivities. She proposes that research be directed away from political economy analysis and toward a wider range of sociocultural practices (Ong 2006, 2011). More recently, she has co-coined the concept of “worlding” (Roy & Ong 2011) to draw attention to practices of inter-borrowing and inter- referencing in public policy, urban planning, and city marketing.

Postcolonial scholars intend to provincialize the generic neoliberal thesis by spotlighting local histories, institutions, and state-society relations, as well as the resistance and contestations enacted by the subaltern class against neoliberal policies and projects. Currently, there is strong disagreement between neoliberal theorists and postcolonial scholars on how to treat local variations of urban restructuring: Whereas the former insist that the neoliberal thesis already acknowledges path- dependent urban restructuring along market-driven criteria in individual cities, the latter reject any attempt at generalization and stress local particularities.

The coming of urban age in China and India

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, the center of world urbanization has shifted from the Global North to the Global South, especially to urban regions in Asia. Whereas urbanization rates in Europe, North America, and most of Latin America have stabilized since the mid-twentieth century, with most people living in urban areas, some Asian countries have begun to climb the curve of urban population growth only in recent decades. Since the market reforms began in 1978, China has aggressively urbanized. The percentage of people living in urban area dramatically increased from 17.9% in 1978 to 59.6% in 2018. Urban population reached over 831 million. In 2011, 32% of India’s population, about 447 million people, live in urban areas. Together, the combined urban population of China and India exceeds one billion. Put another way, one out of six people in the world lives in a city or town in one of these two countries.

The scale of urbanization in China and India has prompted many governance challenges, especially in sectors such as housing, infrastructure, urban planning, and environment. But they also make urban China and India among the most exciting places to theorize about urban processes under twenty-first-century capitalism.

The scholarship on urban China and India has followed the dominant paradigms developed in global urban studies since the 1980s: the global city thesis and the neoliberalism framework. In both fields, scholars have begun to question the meta-concepts borrowed from the West and have embarked on research that aims to theorize Chinese and Indian urbanism in their own right.

Toward global urban comparisons

This essay began with the journey of Chicago School sociologist Robert E. Park, who taught in Beijing, visited a dozen cities worldwide, and showed great interest in initiating large-scale inter- national comparisons. In contrast to Park’s wide-ranging research and teaching interests, many US urban sociologists today confine their work to large US cities, and US urban sociology in general is disconnected from the dynamic developments in global urban studies.

There are different ways to engage comparisons, and to use Charles Tilly’s typology as an example, one can pursue four different types of comparisons: individualizing, universalizing, variation-finding, and encompassing (Tilly 1984). A theoretically informed comparative approach can be a heuristic device to gain a deeper understanding of the cities we study. 

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