From China to the world – Urban China studies for a global community

Abstract

As the inaugural editors of Transactions in Planning and Urban Research, we would like to welcome you to this new journal, which we hope will become a platform for diverse new inquiries and dialogues on the urban and regional development and planning processes in urban China. We would like to start this editorial statement by answering the most important question first: what is the motivation for launching a journal that is dedicated to Urban China studies? Firstly, we believe that China’s phenomenal and accelerated urbanisation presents an exciting laboratory for researchers to observe economic, environmental, social-cultural, and governance changes and innovations in the contemporary world. For instance, being the world’s largest carbon emitter and the second largest economy means that China’s role in tackling some of the most pressing challenges such as climate change will have huge implications for the entire planet. Yet despite being the largest carbon emitter, China is also an important site of experimentation in new ways to reduce carbon emissions including urban energy transitions towards renewable energies and the development of a range of urban green infrastructures such as eco-cities, greenways, and sponge cities. Secondly, although urban China may display aspects of uniqueness, these novel features of Chinese cities are neither exceptional beyond compare nor do they exist in silos disconnected from the rest of the world. Instead, Chinese cities are intricately connected to other contexts and are parts of wider transnational and global processes. At the same time, however, many aspects of China’s urbanisation and its future trajectory are not pre-defined by existing theories and instead require both contextual and comparative research (Robinson, 2016). We are therefore of the conviction that urban China can provide fertile ground to critically reflect on existing theories and create new concepts as well as become a launching pad to establish dialogues with other contexts. Thirdly, as a research field, ‘Urban China’ is growing rapidly, and is one of the most active, dynamic, and well-connected. The research field is situated at the conjuncture of China Studies, which comes from the tradition of area studies and is oriented towards historical, cultural, and political contexts, and Urban Studies, which treats Chinese urbanisation as part of political, economic, environmental, and social-cultural changes of the (de-) globalising world. While both research traditions have contributed greatly towards a better understanding of urban China, we felt that there is a need for a journal that can bridge these two research traditions and treat Chinese urbanisation in a holistic, reflexive, and grounded view without being confined within historical and cultural specificities. We therefore believe that it is time to introduce a journal that pays particular attention to the recent developments in China and their policy implications while situating this research in comparative perspectives within wider urban processes. There are several objectives that this journal aims to achieve. First and foremost, our goal is to better understand urban China and to identify, analyse, and critically reflect on the most pressing urban issues and latest urban planning practices in China and to promote the development and implementation of actionable planning and policy solutions that could be of relevance to contexts beyond China. The second aim is to render research on urban China more accessible to a global audience who may not be researching China per se but are nonetheless studying urban issues and processes that are relevant, connected, and/or similar to the ones in China. For example, one key area of interest to this journal is the practice of urban planning, which has played a pivotal role in the urban transformation of China and the continued dominance of the state in From China to the world – Urban China studies for a global community 1094935 TUP0010.1177/27541223221094935Transactions in Planning and Urban ResearchEditorial research-article2022