Agenda

CHINA GOES URBAN
New Insights into China’s Urban Metamorphoses in Post-socialist Times

Online conference - 6 November 2020
9:00-12:00 a.m. CET
3:00-5:30 p.m. CET 

Over the last two decades of the Reform and Opening Up era, China has undergone an urban revolution. The market economy has boomed and cities have grown at an astonishing rate. Both traditional and emerging cities have been theatres of dramatic metamorphoses across the spatial, political, socio-cultural and environmental domains. This on-line conference provides new insights into these recent transformations by bringing together senior and junior scholars from a wide range of disciplines (Anthropology, Architecture, Asian Studies, Urban Planning, and Sociology) and institutions across the world. Stressing the interconnectedness between space production, policy, and the lived experiences of city dwellers, presentations will address a broad variety of issues on urbanizing China:

• The ways in which collective and public space improvement affects citizens’ wellbeing and welfare;
• The relationship between territorial morphology and architecture in shaping China’s contemporary urbanscapes;
• Norms and organizational practices underpinning urban sustainability;
• Local land finance and its impact on spatial expansion of cities;
• The resurgence and transformation of beliefs about ghosts during the process of urbanization;
• How urbanites articulate piety and self-cultivation in urban Buddhist contexts;
• Why and how a new psychotherapeutic culture has been thriving in Chinese cities to counter social anxiety;
• The dialectics between state-induced urban spatial restructuring and place-making by long-established ethnic minority communities in frontier regions;
• Shifting discourses and practices of heritage conservation in urban regeneration processes.

Speakers:
 
Prof. Andrew Kipnis (Dep. of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Prof. Wu Weiping (Urban Planning Program, GSAPP, Columbia University)
Prof. Li Zhang (Dep. of Anthropology, University of California, Davis)
Prof. Francesca Tarocco (Dep. of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Prof. Aldo Aymonino (IUAV University of Venice)
Prof. Maria Chiara Tosi (IUAV University of Venice)
Prof. Daniele Brombal (Dep. of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Dr. Antonella Diana (Dep. of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Dr. Anna Paola Pola (WHITRAP—UNESCO, Shanghai)
 
Participation upon registration at this LINK 
For information please contact the conference convener, Antonella Diana, at: antonella.diana@unive.it

This conference is organized within the framework of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 748961. Grant beneficiary: Antonella Diana