China’s Urban Revolution

China’s Urban Revolution PDF Author: Austin Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350003239
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
By 2025, China will have built fifteen new 'supercities' each with 25 million inhabitants. It will have created 250 'Eco-cities' as well: clean, green, car-free, people-friendly, high-tech urban centres. From the edge of an impending eco-catastrophe, we are arguably witnessing history's greatest environmental turnaround - an urban experiment that may provide valuable lessons for cities worldwide. Whether or not we choose to believe the hype – there is little doubt that this is an experiment that needs unpicking, understanding, and learning from. Austin Williams, The Architectural Review's China correspondent, explores the progress and perils of China's vast eco-city program, describing the complexities which emerge in the race to balance the environment with industrialisation, quality with quantity, and the liberty of the individual with the authority of the Chinese state. Lifting the lid on the economic and social realities of the Chinese blueprint for eco-modernisation, Williams tells the story of China's rise, and reveals the pragmatic, political and economic motives that lurk behind the successes and failures of its eco-cities. Will these new kinds of urban developments be good, humane, healthy places? Can China find a 'third way' in which humanity, nature, economic growth and sustainability are reconciled? And what lessons can we learn for our own vision of the urban future? This is a timely and readable account which explores a range of themes – environmental, political, cultural and architectural – to show how the eco-city program sheds fascinating light on contemporary Chinese society, and provides a lens through which to view the politics of sustainability closer to home.

China’s Urban Revolution

China’s Urban Revolution PDF Author: Austin Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350003239
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
By 2025, China will have built fifteen new 'supercities' each with 25 million inhabitants. It will have created 250 'Eco-cities' as well: clean, green, car-free, people-friendly, high-tech urban centres. From the edge of an impending eco-catastrophe, we are arguably witnessing history's greatest environmental turnaround - an urban experiment that may provide valuable lessons for cities worldwide. Whether or not we choose to believe the hype – there is little doubt that this is an experiment that needs unpicking, understanding, and learning from. Austin Williams, The Architectural Review's China correspondent, explores the progress and perils of China's vast eco-city program, describing the complexities which emerge in the race to balance the environment with industrialisation, quality with quantity, and the liberty of the individual with the authority of the Chinese state. Lifting the lid on the economic and social realities of the Chinese blueprint for eco-modernisation, Williams tells the story of China's rise, and reveals the pragmatic, political and economic motives that lurk behind the successes and failures of its eco-cities. Will these new kinds of urban developments be good, humane, healthy places? Can China find a 'third way' in which humanity, nature, economic growth and sustainability are reconciled? And what lessons can we learn for our own vision of the urban future? This is a timely and readable account which explores a range of themes – environmental, political, cultural and architectural – to show how the eco-city program sheds fascinating light on contemporary Chinese society, and provides a lens through which to view the politics of sustainability closer to home.

The Concrete Dragon

The Concrete Dragon PDF Author: Thomas J. Campanella
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1568989482
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
China is the most rapidly urbanizing nation in the world, with an urban population that may well reach one billion within a generation. Over the past 25 years, surging economic growth has propelled a construction boom unlike anything the world has ever seen, radically transforming both city and countryside in its wake. The speed and scale of China's urban revolution challenges nearly all our expectations about architecture, urbanism and city planning. China's ambition to be a major player on the global stage is written on the skylines of every major city. This is a nation on the rise, and it is building for the record books. China is now home to some of the world's tallest skyscrapers and biggest shopping malls; the longest bridges and largest airport; the most expansive theme parks and gated communities and even the world's largest skateboard park. And by 2020 China's national network of expressways will exceed in length even the American interstate highway system. China's construction industry, employing a workforce equal to the population of California, has been erecting billions of square feet of housing and office space every year. But such extensive development has also meant demolition on a scale unprecedented in the peacetime history of the world. Nearly all of Beijing's centuries-old cityscape has been bulldozed in recent years, and redevelopment in Shanghai has displaced more families than 30 years of urban renewal in the United States. China's cities are also rapidly sprawling across the landscape, churning precious farmland into a landscape of superblock housing estates and single-family subdivisions laced with highways and big-box malls. In a mere generation, China's cities have undergone a metamorphosis that took 150 years to complete in the United States. The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World sheds light on this extraordinary chapter in world urban history. The book surveys the driving forces behind the great Chinese building boom, traces the historical precedents and global flows of ideas and information that are fusing to create a bold new Chinese cityscape, and considers the social and environmental impacts of China's urban future. The Concrete Dragon provides a critical overview of contemporary Chinese urbanization in light of both China's past as well as earlier episodes of rapid urban development elsewhere in the world--especially that of the United States, a nation that itself once set global records for the speed and scale of its urban ambitions.

The Consumer Revolution in Urban China

The Consumer Revolution in Urban China PDF Author: Deborah Davis
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520216402
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This wide-ranging collection of essays by leading sociologists on the new consumerism of post-economic-reform China is an important contribution to our understanding of Chinese society and culture.

China's Urban Transition

China's Urban Transition PDF Author: John Friedmann
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816646155
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A timely and thorough analysis of the rapid urban growth in China.

China's Urban Revolution

China's Urban Revolution PDF Author: Austin Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350003262
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
By 2025, China will have built fifteen new 'supercities' each with 25 million inhabitants. It will have created 250 'Eco-cities' as well: clean, green, car-free, people-friendly, high-tech urban centres. From the edge of an impending eco-catastrophe, we are arguably witnessing history's greatest environmental turnaround - an urban experiment that may provide valuable lessons for cities worldwide. Whether or not we choose to believe the hype - there is little doubt that this is an experiment that needs unpicking, understanding, and learning from. Austin Williams, The Architectural Review's China correspondent, explores the progress and perils of China's vast eco-city program, describing the complexities which emerge in the race to balance the environment with industrialisation, quality with quantity, and the liberty of the individual with the authority of the Chinese state. Lifting the lid on the economic and social realities of the Chinese blueprint for eco-modernisation, Williams tells the story of China's rise, and reveals the pragmatic, political and economic motives that lurk behind the successes and failures of its eco-cities. Will these new kinds of urban developments be good, humane, healthy places? Can China find a 'third way' in which humanity, nature, economic growth and sustainability are reconciled? And what lessons can we learn for our own vision of the urban future?

China's Urban Billion

China's Urban Billion PDF Author: Tom Miller
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1780321449
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
By 2030, China's cities will be home to 1 billion people - one in every eight people on earth. What kind of lives will China's urban billion lead? And what will China's cities be like? Over the past thirty years, China's urban population expanded by 500 million people, and is on track to swell by a further 300 million by 2030. Hundreds of millions of these new urban residents are rural migrants, who lead second-class lives without access to urban benefits. Even those lucky citizens who live in modern tower blocks must put up with clogged roads, polluted skies and cityscapes of unremitting ugliness. The rapid expansion of urban China is astonishing, but new policies are urgently needed to create healthier cities. Combining on-the-ground reportage and up-to-date research, this pivotal book explains why China has failed to reap many of the economic and social benefits of urbanization, and suggests how these problems can be resolved. If its leaders get urbanization right, China will surpass the United States and cement its position as the world's largest economy. But if they get it wrong, China could spend the next twenty years languishing in middle-income torpor, its cities pockmarked by giant slums.

Making Urban Revolution in China

Making Urban Revolution in China PDF Author: Joseph K. S. Yick
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9781563246067
Category : Beijing (China)
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
An attempt to rethink the traditional interpretation of the victory of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949. The focus is on the activities of the student-intellectual-based communist underground, which played a crucial role

China's Emerging Cities

China's Emerging Cities PDF Author: Fulong Wu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113411771X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
With urbanism becoming the key driver of socio-economic change in China, this book provides much needed up-to-date material on Chinese urban development. Demonstrating how it transcends the centrally-planned model of economic growth, and assessing the extent to which it has gone beyond the common wisdom of Chinese ‘gradualism’, the book covers a wide range of important topics, including: local land development the local state private-public partnership foreign investment urbanization ageing home ownership. Providing a clear appraisal of recent trends in Chinese urbanism, this book puts forward important new conceptual resources to fill the gap between the outdated model of the ‘Third World’ city and the globalizing cities of the West.

Making Urban Revolution in China: The CCP-GMD Struggle for Beiping-Tianjin, 1945-49

Making Urban Revolution in China: The CCP-GMD Struggle for Beiping-Tianjin, 1945-49 PDF Author: Joseph K.S. Yick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317465687
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1945 brought not peace but renewed confrontation between Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party and Chiang Kaishek's Guomindang. The ensuing Civil War, at the threshold of the Cold War, held enormous significance for international strategic alliances, and in particular the interests of the United States in East Asia, and has been the subject of intense research and debate ever since. Joseph Yick's Making Urban Revolution in China: The CCP-GMD Struggle for Beiping-Tianjin, 1945-1949, based partly on the rich new sources available in the PRC since 1978, rethinks the traditional interpretations of the Chinese Communist Party's victory in 1949 and makes a major contribution to the historiography of this period.

Curating Revolution

Curating Revolution PDF Author: Denise Y. Ho
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108417957
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Curating Revolution examines how Mao-era exhibitions shaped popular understandings of, and participation in, the political campaigns of China's Communist revolution.