The redevelopment of Chinese cities and regions under new economic and social demands involves also the reconfiguration of their spaces. This usually involves the installation of new infrastructures at national, regional and urban scales and their integration in the social and economic patterns of regions, cities and neighbourhoods. As a planning strategy, infrastructure development is often misunderstood. It involves much more than the improvement of accessibility or the ‘compression of spacetime’ across existing social and economic landscapes; it involves just as importantly the establishment of sets of new or renewed social and economic places that depend on the integration of new infrastructures with old, usually across scale levels. In thinking of infrastructures at scale levels of the nation or transnational region (high-speed train for example), or at the level of the city or metropolitan region (metro or high-speed tram for example), we neglect the necessary work required to coordinate these interventions with already existing movement patterns and places, and the life-patterns these support. The way these cross-scale interactions link to centrality formation (conventionally conceived in terms of ‘agglomeration’) is a vital part of many of the projects in this cluster. Cities already studied include Jining, Nanjing, Jinan and Tangshan.
Chunxiao Liang ‘Dual Map 2040: Guide to a Vital, Diverse Jining‘
Jingya Wang ‘ CITY, YOU ARE NOT ALONE’
Yao Wenxuan: Culture landscape Nanjing
Shuying Yu: Power, memory, identity
Planning Complex Cities TU Delft 