Reinventing the Chinese City

Richard Hu unpacks recent trends in urban planning and development to explore the making and imagining of the contemporary Chinese city.

Richard Hu is a professor at the Canberra Business School, University of Canberra. He is the author of The Shenzhen Phenomenon: From Fishing Village to Global Knowledge City (2020) and Smart Design: Disruption, Crisis, and the Reshaping of Urban Spaces (2021), as well as the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Asian Cities (2023), among other books.

Shahid Yusuf, Chief Economist of the Growth Dialogue, George Washington University:
This book provides a compact, lucid, and timely account of Chinese cities at the leading edge of urbanization. With China hitching its socialist modernization to indigenous innovation, cities are being charged with realizing the vision of a smart, livable, green future. Richard Hu does an admirable job of showing both top-down and bottom-up actions shaping cities into innovation hotbeds, the emerging lessons for others, and the way forward being charted by planners. It is a must-read for experts and those interested in the urban facets of China's development.

Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University:
Richard Hu integrates both inside-out and outside-in perspectives and offers a holistic, balanced, and insightful reading of the real China. His analysis captures a particular kind of transversality, jumps into the unknown, and explores possibilities that go beyond the familiar. He unpacks an astounding array of complexities in China's transformation that we in the West might have overlooked or forgotten. Yes, this is a splendid text worth reading!

Peter G. Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor:
Richard Hu provides a probing, well-informed, and cogently organized account of how China is crafting its 'new normal' of urbanization in its era of a green revolution, smart city commitment, and post-industrialization.

Carola Hein, Professor and Head of the History of Architecture and Urban Planning, Delft University of Technology, and President of the International Planning History Society:
Over the last decade, China has engaged a new, centrally led path of urban transformation with the aim to achieve a new-type urbanization connecting socialist principles with environmental concepts. Yet, the thinking behind this shift, the planning tools, and the national goals are difficult to grasp for scholars and practitioners outside China. Richard Hu builds on his first-hand knowledge of China and of international planning discussions to explore the new urban era. Notably, he explores the historical conditions that shape the present and influence future planning. This important book provides unique, refreshing insights into contemporary China for a global public.

Edward J. Blakely, Emeritus Professor of City Planning, University of California, Berkeley, and former President of the Pacific Rim Council on Urban Development:
The path from small, poor villages dotting a vast desolate Asian hinterland to the world's largest middle-class urbanity in four decades is impressive and compelling. Richard Hu guides global readers through China's metropolitan rise with analytical sophistication that shows both promise and flaws of the Chinese megacities. He presents China's new cities not as clones of the West but as a new genre of city building and an authentic attempt at reinventing urbanity. This is a timely text for policymakers, environmentalists, urban planners, and architects as we try to build cities of and for the future.