These Books Aren't Easy, but They Can Help You Understand "the City" | Some Good Books

Over the National Day holiday we asked eight young writers to recommend the books they rate. Each is accomplished in their own field and glad to share what they read and think. This is the third: Zhao Yimin.

It's time to recommend books again.

At this time last year, QDaily asked a number of interesting people behind the big accounts on Weibo, WeChat and Zhihu to recommend books to us. They included Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan, Guokr founder Ji Shisan, Zhang Wei, who created the WeChat official account "Shixiang", Wu Miao, who created the WeChat official account "Leviathan" and screenwriter Shi Hang. The brief then was simple: recommend a book from the past year that you think is good — it might help you in your work, or it might just be good. Chinese or English, either way.

This year we have changed the format a little.

In any era, the expert reader is a scarce resource. What such people say about books can be a useful guide to what the rest of us read; sometimes the criticism itself is worth reading as a book, as with Tony Judt's Reappraisals.

Not all of the writers we invited brood on the twentieth century as heavily as Judt does. They are younger, more interesting, sharper-eyed, and they are not professional writers: each carries some weight in their own field and likes to share what they learn and think.

We want to introduce them to you in the form of a reading list plus a long review — a small guide to the small matter of reading.

Because their experience differs, so do the books they pick and the way they write about them, and puzzling over those differences is a pleasure in itself. From October 1 to October 8 we will publish one writer's list and review each day. If you know other good expert readers, tell us in the comments; you may see their piece here before long.

This is the third: Zhao Yimin.

Zhao Yimin goes by "Duanzhang" on Douban. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the London School of Economics, working on space and power, urban political economy and land politics. What follows is a long run of books about cities and space; even the novels are about cities.

Some of the notes below make hard reading, but these books should help you work out, in a systematic way, where it is you are standing. The pity is that several have no Chinese edition yet.

Book Recommendations

By Yimin Zhao

The Urban Revolution

Author: Henri Lefebvre

Publisher:

Univ Of Minnesota Press

Publication date: February 2003

Urbanization has moved so fast that urban space is now a word we cannot get away from in daily life. But before we take our place in the city for granted, do we understand what the city, space and urban society actually mean? This short book, a representative work by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, gives us a good way in — a chance to think again about the urban condition, and about where we stand as the city takes shape around us. The French edition came out in 1970, after the fever of the sixties but before The Production of Space (published in 1974, one of Lefebvre's most important theoretical works). True to his historicism and his politics on the left, Lefebvre draws a distinction between the city and urban society that is metaphorical and yet exact. On one side he shows how the space of our daily life is eaten away by the abstract space that capital and the state command; on the other he treats "urban society," this new form, as a "concrete abstraction," a way to build a new centrality in space and, from there, to remake politics and everyday life. One aside: "planetary urbanization," a term this book proposed for the first time, borrows Trantor, the city Isaac Asimov invented in his science-fiction series Foundation, and in recent years it has become a new frontier in urban studies.

For Space

Author: Doreen Massey

Publisher:

Sage Publications Ltd

Publication date: March 2005

Space is the keyword of geography as a discipline, and different scholars and schools read it in wildly different directions. Massey's own background sits at the crossing of Marxism and feminism, with some poststructuralist influence, and that double concern drove her rethinking of core concepts such as space. In this book, published in 2005, she sets out to build a concept of space that works as a method, resting on relational foundations, and then to use it to reactivate politics. The work goes in two directions. First, she breaks up the hidden fetishisms of space: the structuralists' reverence for space in fact abolished it, while the postmodernists' revolt against them produced only another, equally shallow view of time and space. Second, she attacks the essentialist split between place and space — the targets include, but are not limited to, Heidegger, Yi-Fu Tuan, and David Harvey's early and middle work — so that, by refusing a "poetics of place," she can recover the grounded connections and the liveliness the concept of space contains. This book is not thick either, and it repays reading and rereading. My last reread was in 2015, and again it took a very wide stretch of time, and of space: from Manchester in March to Chicago in April, then New York in May, finishing at last in London in June. A further note: the Chinese edition is titled 《保卫空间》, "In Defense of Space," which is beyond doubt a mistranslation. Massey criticized Althusser's structuralist framework in depth; she would hardly borrow his habits in naming a book. Althusser's For Marx may survive being turned into "in defense of"; what Massey feels about space is far more than defense.

The Great Urban Transformation

Author: You-Tien Hsing

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Publication date: March 2010

Lefebvre and Massey read the city and space mainly at the level of theory; You-Tien Hsing's book is the link between theory and the reality of China's urban transformation. Working from geography's interest in urban space and how it changes, and borrowing method and material from sociology and anthropology, she tells many urban stories and offers many insights. Her central argument is about how China's local governments have themselves been urbanized — the urbanization of the local state. Rather than governments driving urbanization, they use urbanization as a spatial mechanism to satisfy their own ambitions for accumulation and territorialization. But local governments do not have a monopoly on the process; other interests are tangled into it, and the result is a picture no one can neatly unpick. To keep the argument moving, Hsing first borrows Deleuze on territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and then, on the ground, leans on a spatial typology of China's urban transformation: urban cores, peripheries and township enclaves. The theoretical and spatial frames she assumes cost the narrative a little depth, but on the whole the book is still the most perfect introduction there is to contemporary Chinese land politics and the changing urban political economy.

The Politics of the Encounter

Author: Andy Merrifield

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Publication date: April 2013

The book asks whether the fashionable "right to the city" still works, and how far. The context for the question is the wave of urban occupations since 2010, movements deeply fused with social media — from Tunisia to Egypt, from St Paul's Cathedral in London to Zuccotti Park in New York. Faced with the gap between theory and practice, Merrifield goes back to the old books for an answer. His main tool is Lefebvre's distinction, mentioned above, between the city and urban society: if the city is a spatial entity that history has formed, then urban society is better seen as a pure form — a form with no shape of its own, one that only the human practices inside it can give shape to. On this view, calling for the "right to the city" cannot open a way to remake political action; it is more likely to stay caught inside the myth of "rights" that capital and the state have built. The late Althusser's "philosophy of the encounter," by contrast, takes up several lines of thought from Marx's Grundrisse and from Deleuze's account in The Logic of Sense, and offers a new way to build political action under changing urban conditions. In analyzing Occupy Wall Street, for instance, that framework works better than the "right to the city."

Global Gentrifications

Editors: Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin & Ernesto López-Morales

Publisher: Policy Press

Publication date: January 2015

In Chinese, gentrification is usually rendered by words that mean something like "turning genteel," "becoming a gentry district" or "becoming middle class." Readers who do not know better often take the process the word describes to be legitimate, "modern," even admirable; in academic use it is an outright term of abuse. The British geographer Ruth Glass coined it in the 1960s for the way working-class neighborhoods in inner London were being taken over by the middle class. The term has been stretched ever since: on these authors' account, wherever urban space is transformed and the transformation comes with forced demolition and the displacement of the people who lived there, gentrification has occurred. At its core the word names the worsening of social injustice through spatial change. By that definition, most of what Chinese cities now call "urban renewal," "spatial upgrading," "old-town redevelopment," "shantytown redevelopment" and "key village redevelopment" on the urban-rural fringe can be pulled into this framework and analyzed critically.

The book widens the field of gentrification research both theoretically and empirically, and it also questions, at the level of method, Western urban theory's claim to universality. "Comparative urbanism" has been noisy in urban studies for years, but how to actually do it is still disputed. Gentrification is the book's analytical subject, yet its real purpose is to free urban theory from its comfort zone through careful case studies and a conversation among them, and so to break the colonial hegemony of Western urban theory. The chapters are ordered by the authors' surnames, an ingenious arrangement in itself. Suggested reading order: introduction, conclusion, then the empirical chapters on whichever region interests you.

Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom

Author: David Harvey

Translators: Wang Zhihong & Xu Tailing

Publisher: Socio Publishing

Publication date: February 2014

If you had to name the first figure in geography today, David Harvey would win without argument, as the crowds at his recent lectures in China suggest. His move from standard-bearer of the quantitative revolution to giant of Marxist geography is still a turning point no intellectual history of the discipline can avoid, and the path of his thinking since he began publishing critical geography in 1973 makes another important story. Capital has always commanded Harvey's respect and colors almost everything he writes, but in the actual analysis and writing his thinking has never been boxed in by Marx's classic texts. He is good at taking nourishment from his critics and turning it into part of his own argument. In this book, for instance, guided by his political ambition — to find the conditions under which a transformative revolutionary politics becomes possible — Harvey attacks Kant's idea of cosmopolitanism and its geographical foundations, and ends by grounding his own new cosmopolitanism in Whitehead's process philosophy of nature, stressing what relational theories of time and space (Lefebvre belongs to this camp too) mean for geographical argument. He works through neoliberalism, the geographical banality of evil, and basic geographical concepts such as space, place and territory. All of this helps in rethinking what geography is, and the closing reconstruction of the concept of the state from a relational view of time and space is valuable as well. The translation has a few small flaws but is on the whole first-rate.

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City

Author: Dung Kai-cheung (text) / Yang Zhiheng (illustrations)

Publisher: Linking Publishing

Publication date: June 2011

Turning time into space is probably what makes this novel, built on the maps of Hong Kong, so attractive. The map is not the territory, yet changes in the map answer to the stories inside the territory — sometimes as confirmation after the fact, sometimes as prophecy. It is in that sense that the author can claim: "Fiction is the essence of every city, and the map of a city is necessarily a novel that revises and disguises itself." The novel's ambition does not stop there. It takes its slice of time at some uncertain moment in the future and uses an "archaeology of the future" to rebuild the Hong Kong of the present, in space and in society. Within that scheme, the map — cartography, a system of signs devoted to truth — becomes the vehicle for literature's intent to invent. The tension between telling the truth and making it up is tightened further by the use of geographical theory. In the first part of the book, if you only read the table of contents, you would hardly believe this is a novel at all: it is crammed with terms like counterplace, misplace, nonplace, extraterritoriality, utopia and omnitopia, and they leave you thoroughly lost. Only after finishing the book and looking back do you see the care behind the arrangement. Between true and false, future and past, theory and reality, what lies in wait is unease; what the unease is about is identity; and what identity attaches to is a "place" that keeps drifting. If Chan Koonchung's Hong Kong Trilogy tells the story of his generation of Hong Kongers, then the V City Tetralogy, this Atlas included, traces the changing inner life of Dung Kai-cheung's generation of Hong Kong intellectuals.

Medieval Cities

Author: Henri Pirenne

Translator: Chen Guoliang

Publisher: The Commercial Press

Publication date: July 2006

The book sets out to explain how European cities rose, yet its heart does not seem to lie in the city itself. In Pirenne's account the city is not the lead actor in social change; trade and the economy are what matter, and the city is a by-product, something that follows naturally once the conditions are right. When the Muslims closed the Mediterranean in the eighth century, the Carolingians happened to walk onto the stage of history — and that was no coincidence. The Merovingians giving way to the Carolingians marked the moment the Franks turned from a seafaring people into an inland one: cut off, closed, with no outlet. The Middle Ages proper in fact began then. But medieval Europe's darkest economic years lasted little more than a century before a new light appeared. From the tenth century Western Europe entered a period of relative peace and stability; the birth rate climbed sharply, and trade began to revive. The First Crusade of 1096 marked Islam's final retreat; sea trade grew, and the urban economy grew livelier with it. In this way the "new Europe" slowly recovered the basic character of ancient Europe as a region of cities: the burgher class kept growing, the nobility kept retreating, and in the end, "city air makes you free."

Without the assault of the Islamic states and the closing of the Mediterranean, Western Europe's economy would not have been in such a sorry state in the early Middle Ages, and its cities would not have fallen so far. By the same token, without the reopening of the trade routes, the revival of cities, the Renaissance that followed and even the Industrial Revolution would all have been impossible. Only a thin line separates the medieval from the modern. History has in fact never been interrupted. The true logic of social development runs in the currents hidden beneath the great visible gulfs. It is only that, without careful digging, almost no one notices those thin streams.

Gazing at the Spring Wind (《望春风》)

Author: Ge Fei

Publisher: Yilin Press

Publication date: June 2016

This is a book about home, and its climax arrives at the moment when home, under the blaze of urbanization, disappears. By Ge Fei's own account, the idea for the book spilled over from his Jiangnan Trilogy. The frame of the story may still rest inside the trilogy's system of time and space, but when the story ends, so does the village as a physical place; the only thing left is the book. The narrator, Zhao Boyu, a retired factory librarian, was born after the founding of the People's Republic and from childhood lived through every shadow the changing times cast over his village — among them his mother's departure and his father's unnatural death. The events of half a lifetime are organized around the people in them and told in his own voice. The story flows slowly: he leaves the village, enters a factory, the market reforms come, urbanization begins, and at last he meets a home he no longer recognizes. In the end it is Biantong Nunnery, a relic of the old days, that is done up and becomes his dwelling, the place where he writes down the memories of half a life. That spatial metaphor can be read many ways: it is home and memory projected onto the present, and it can also be seen as a local utopia that stands for the loss of "home" both as a place and as an idea, and for the impossibility of reaching it. Whichever reading you take, this realist story asks us to consider what we have gained in the course of urbanization, and what we have lost. At the moment home vanishes, what are we clinging to, and what can we do? To my own ear, on the same subject of nostalgia inside urbanization, Ge Fei's book has far more chew and far more feeling than Yan Lianke's mythorealist writing — The Explosion Chronicles, for instance.

Book Reviews

Arrival City

Author: Doug Saunders

Translator: Chen Xinhong

Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House

Publication date: February 2012

Under Constraint, We Built a World That Constrains Us

By Yimin Zhao

How the arrival city develops is a decisive link in urbanization: get it right and the rest goes smoothly, get it wrong and conflict follows. That is the central idea of Doug Saunders's Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World. What is an arrival city? It is an enclave that rural migrants build inside a city. It sits at the edge of urban space and is the core zone of social change. The arrival city has ambitions of its own. It has never thought of itself as a slum and settled for that. On the contrary, it gives newcomers a sea of work, the chance to work for themselves, a network of neighbors on all sides, and it holds the balance between country and city. It is a converter, not a slum.

True, the poverty rate in these districts has never fallen to the level people hope for. But the poverty of arrival cities is exactly where their success lies. As converters, they do not have to end up middle class and gentrified; their greatest use is to give residents the conditions to climb the social ladder faster. Every time one cohort moves out to a better neighborhood as its money and standing improve, a new cohort of poor newcomers moves in to fill the gap. The poverty rate holds, or even rises — but who can say this arrival city is still the one it was?

Arrival cities draw attention as a phenomenon, or as a "problem" in the orthodox view, first of all because of the people living in them. To arrive is to land somewhere after entering the city. The city's new migrants come, without exception, from the countryside. So the arrival city is at bottom a spatial container, and inside it a change of identity takes place: villagers become city people. That is a process with many dimensions — economic, political, social. But in the end what we should be watching is the people.

Saunders, a journalist, observes this crucial link in migration with great delicacy. He finds that in many countries the road home is in fact an important part of the migration into cities. That the return trip is a leg of the journey away sounds improbable. The explanation lies in what Charles Tilly once called chain migration. When villagers decide to leave for the city, what they give up is not only the unchanging rhythm of seasons and daily work but a whole set of familiar customs and relationships. They dare not break with the countryside completely; they dare not let go of the old network before a solid urban safety net is in place. So they use the arrival city as a base from which to move and rebuild that network as a whole. To keep the old network alive they must preserve some basic tie to home, and the annual — or more frequent — journey back is how they do it.

After people, the biggest subject in the arrival city is land. Why here and not somewhere else? What force helped new migrants seize this particular patch? By Saunders's observation, the land of arrival cities is nearly always state-owned wasteland or derelict ground, and the private occupation of state land for housing is an international phenomenon. It has become rarer in recent years, partly because property rights are drawn more clearly, partly because there is less idle urban land left to take.

Chinese cities were not caught off guard by arriving migrants the way other developing countries — India, Brazil, Mexico — were. Our urban edges hold plenty of villages waiting for urbanization to reach them, and the influx of migrants is the first step of that spatial change. Every such village takes in a sizeable number of migrants. They put up with poor infrastructure (which is, of course, still far better than what they left) and with crowding into tiny rooms, not because they love living that way but because the prospect ahead is good enough to make the present worth enduring.

It is here, though, that Chinese urbanization diverges further from everyone else's. In almost every country where state land has been taken privately, the matter has ended with that land being granted to the occupiers. City governments come to see that secure ownership is central to the future of an arrival city, and that a place without security has no reason to improve its infrastructure or its social fabric. Granting title turns migrants into property owners, pulls them into the economy and gives them seed money to start something of their own. In our urban villages, migrants own almost nothing. They cannot own the houses or the land they live on, and they cannot, in any short span of time, save enough to secure their own lives. So their tie to the countryside will stay rigid and unbreakable for a long while yet.

Not every city grants title to its residents, of course. A strong municipal government takes the initiative instead, pushing all sorts of fine-sounding "slum redevelopment plans." These plans make spatial renewal their mission while burying the social content of space out of sight. In the finished blocks, the usual view is low-density middle-class housing dotted among plazas and wide avenues. And the residents? Do the original inhabitants still have a chance to move back? Do they still have room to meet one another? Can they hold on to the close networks they had? Attending only to the built environment and ignoring what social relations mean, such redevelopment destroys the vitality of the arrival city rather than raising it.

Arrival cities shape the present, and they have left heavy marks on history too. Saunders goes so far as to say outright that the great Paris revolution was in essence a revolution of arrival-city residents. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx faulted smallholders for lacking class consciousness, judging them less political than urban workers and blaming them for the revolution's failure. In fact Marx's view was blocked too. He failed to look carefully at who the revolutionary subjects were, missed the fact that arrival-city residents made up the overwhelming majority of them, and paid no attention to what those residents wanted from the revolution.

There is nothing new under the sun. Iran's Islamic Revolution of the 1970s was the same in essence: arrival-city residents were its vanguard and its main force, and they overthrew one dynasty and installed another extremist regime in its place. The root of such revolutions is a crisis of interests. Social and economic progress is often bought at the cost of crushing the weak, and arrival-city residents usually take the first blow. When the Pahlavi Shah launched the White Revolution, hoping that economic growth would hold off the danger of going red, he can hardly have imagined that what finally beat him would be not leftists but a crowd of new migrants living on the city's edge.

The White Revolution worked, visibly: Tehran and other Iranian cities took on a new face, and that in turn drew huge numbers of rural people in. But the migrants were soon disappointed. They found the city's fine things had nothing to do with them. There were no good apartments and no well-paid jobs — only a piece of waste ground called the Shrine of Isa. Once they had made a grudging home there, the Shah began to panic. He feared the migrants and feared unrest, and so the arrival cities were flattened and the migrants had nowhere left to go. And so, in the end, a cleric named Khomeini wrote a heavy page into history.

The threads binding arrival cities to politics are countless, and they run well beyond nineteenth-century Paris or 1970s Tehran. In Turkey the arrival city is called the gecekondu, "put up at night." The land under Istanbul's largest gecekondu once belonged to a prince of the last dynasty; it was nationalized after the revolution, but that did nothing to hold back private occupation. In such districts power is no longer formal; militarized tactics and underworld connections run it. That power structure kept evolving until it produced an entirely new political force and set off a riot on a huge scale. The riot failed, but it was not wasted. Once it was over, the city government began to face the gecekondu and its problems, granting residents ownership of their houses and land, drawing them into the economy and making them partners in a shared interest. The city also began to take infrastructure in the arrival cities seriously and put substantial money into it.

The gecekondu did not then subside into ordinary life. Their political appetite stayed strong, and small parties took root there one after another. When the secular government could no longer hold the economy and society together, these opposition parties shot up. One of them, the Virtue Party, later split, and out of the split came the Justice and Development Party. Later still, that party's leader, Erdoğan, the son of migrants, born and raised in a gecekondu, was elected prime minister and then president of Turkey, and has been re-elected ever since.

Paris's own "arrival city" neighborhoods are likewise reshaping the city's landscape and its social relations. Under the ghost of Le Corbusier, these migrant settlements in the northern suburbs are Cartesian communities: building density is low, public space has turned into ground for crime, and residents cannot build a community that talks to itself or helps itself. Drift becomes the central fact of migrant life. Because of postal-code racism, and the loss of belonging and fair opportunity that comes with it, migrants struggle to find a network that connects them to French society, while losing their connection to home at the same time. The result was the Paris riots of 2005. One line the young rioters used at the time — "We are not Africans, and we are not Europeans" — is one more footnote on the spatial and social character of the arrival city.

The time and space of arrival cities keep developing and changing shape. Faced with them, judgments split sharply. Some see the arrival city as the source of every evil; others believe it is the very root of a city's vitality. Judged by what it can become, the arrival city is a necessary condition for the upward movement of the floating population, so its significance is enormous — that is the argument the author holds throughout. Judged by its present state, the infrastructure and living conditions of the arrival city are wretched, so it must be cleared away — and that, presumably, is what our city governments firmly believe. Measures of every kind, from "urban-rural fringe redevelopment" to "clearing out low-end industries" to "reducing the floating population," are under way at full tilt in certain megacities. The authorities rarely stop to ask how much of the sorry state of these landing places is the fault of the space and the migrants, and how much is their own.

The arrival city is never the destination. In the social journey that rural migrants plan so carefully, reaching it is only the first step. As the author puts it: "They have staked their whole lives and sacrificed a generation's income and peace of mind, and certainly not in order to trade one form of poverty for another. The people of the arrival city do not think of themselves as 'the poor' but as successful urbanites who must first pass through this poor phase, which may last as long as a generation." (p. 278) So what do arrival cities and the migrants inside them need in order to develop? The author names four things: title to land, business opportunity, an economy they run themselves, and networks of mutual aid. However you group them, the most important aim is to give new migrants a way in — the tools and chances Amartya Sen says are needed to become a real citizen. Whether the recommendations work can only be settled later, by more empirical study.

The book has more story in it than theory, but the journalist's sharp eye and the wealth of his material are enough to open a new window onto urban change at a global scale. Whatever your position here, and whatever angle you choose, any discussion of space — and of the arrival city in particular — should follow the rule R. E. Park set out: spatial structure and social relations are bound tightly to each other. This book practices that rule with great clarity.

(This article first appeared on Douban; it has been abridged and revised.)

Cover image from: boell