China in the Urban Age

A truly multidisciplinary theme must be comprehensive enough to touch the research interests of many in this wide community of knowledge.

Our theme, China in the Urban Age, envelops almost every discipline, so that we can build a more complex narrative of China’s urbanisation and its historical relevance for a better urban world.

Why China in the urban age?

Across the sciences, social sciences and humanities, urbanisation is perceived as a goal or a challenge: better, more secure, more equal, more efficient, more culturally grounded, altogether more sustainable.

Nowhere in the modern world has the phenomenon of territorial and social transformation been more rapid, comprehensive and all‐encompassing than in China.

While disciplines tend to advance their own concerns in isolation, there is increasingly the need for a hub connecting diverse findings, languages and questions.

We want to claim the increasing impossibility of approaching these urban issues as discreet, separate or as solely relevant to China, while also highlighting the importance of local knowledge to the engagement of global issues.

Ways of thinking about the city

To challenge well-established ways of seeing the city, we propose a series of creative pairs that recognise the need for a multidisciplinary gaze:

• Health and Society (a planetary approach)
• Spaces and Places of Connection (building sustainability and connecting humans and artefacts)
• Production and Consumption (why the city?)
• Wealth and Poverty (whose city?)
• Arts and Cultures (hidden losses and gains in urbanisation)

We welcome suggestions and proposals that can further develop this collaborative research agenda. See the full document (PDF, 104.4KB).