Living in the future city: time, politics, and urban imaginations in Chengdu’s new city center
Embargo Date
2027-10-22
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
Within the past decade, state power in China has increasingly hinged on infrastructural development, particularly through the proliferation of model cities built from scratch. Among these state-led megaprojects, “national new areas” have emerged as the vanguard of new urbanism following the central government's announcement of the first national strategic urbanization plan in 2014. This dissertation examines city-making in Tianfu New Area, one of China's 19 “national new areas,” to explore the interplay of time, politics, and urban imaginations. In addition to seeing “national new areas” as state-orchestrated infrastructure spaces, I contend that time works as a mechanism for generating affective resonances and also as a site of mundane power negotiations throughout multiple layers of city-making. On the one hand, city planners envision a cosmopolitan urban future that is undoubtedly entangled with economic incentives, real estate speculation, and aspirational citizenship. On the other hand, a potent, unfailing image of the socialist state itself always lies at the heart of urban imaginaries of the model city project that aims to stage new political futures. Drawing on 15 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, I trace different imaginaries engendered by state planning, examine what those imaginaries mean to urban residents, and analyze how they materialize in practice to both perpetuate and change social dynamics surrounding class, family, and work. I argue that infrastructural enthusiasm orients the planning and making of the New Area toward a future deferred that hinges upon constant (re)calibration of the temporal sensibilities of the state bureaucracy, the local property market, community building, and individual life courses. These different, sometimes conflicting, modalities of time also manifest through imaginative ways in which urban policies and initiatives work to make and unmake emptiness in the built environment. Furthermore, through empirical exploration of the plural temporalities involved in inhabiting, interpreting, and envisioning the emerging model city, I highlight not only how these processes entail hope, anticipation, and speculation, but also how suspension, delay, and disillusion are implicated in various individual and collective projects of future-making.
Description
2025
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International