Planning the Reform Era: Shekou and the Origins of Chinese Urbanization
What caused China's rapid urbanization over the last 50 years? Through an investigation of the Shekou Industrial Zone from 1978 to 1992, Smith complicates the commonsense assumption that the radical transformation of Chinese society during the post-1978 reform era was a straightforward result of economic liberalization. Rather, Shekou suggests that planning played a crucial role in catalyzing urban growth and that planners viewed markets ambivalently, as tools for achieving other social and political objectives. Now part of the city of Shenzhen, Shekou preceded the larger Special Economic Zone by more than a year and was the site of China’s earliest and most ambitious reform experiments during the 1980s. At the heart of the zone’s success was the creation of new spaces capable of transforming new arrivals into proactive agents of reform. This began with housing, which was incrementally commodified in order to enable people’s independence as free-thinking selves. It also included Shekou’s many social spaces, such as parks and libraries, which were meant to impart new civic sensibilities, as well as Shekou’s school system, which aimed to produce a new generation of Shekou people. But the zone's planning was also premised on exclusion and exploitation. Isolated from their families back home, migrant workers were relegated to Shekou’s dormitories, which suffered from difficult living conditions, limited access to social spaces, heightened criminal activity, and a general lack of community. Shekou was thus a highly unequal space, divided between a smaller community of cadres and office workers and a much larger population of atomized factory workers. In this respect, the planning of Shekou anticipated the stark inequality that came to characterize China’s cities as development took off in the 1990s.
Nick R. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Prior to joining Barnard, Smith was one of the founding faculty members of the Urban Studies Programme at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Smith’s research explores the spatial politics of urban development and planning in Asia, with a particular emphasis on mainland China. He is the author of The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China and is currently writing a history of China’s early experiments with urban development in the 1980s.
co-sponsored by the Rutgers Department of Geography