Adrian Blackwell presents his lecture:
 
Casting nets: the co-constitutive dispersion of governance, production and urbanization in contemporary China
Global Urban Studies Program at Michigan State University
November 11, 2008 4:00 PM

The contemporary movement of people from the Chinese countryside into the cities has been mirrored by a corresponding move of cities into the countryside. Beijing’s New Development Zones, the networked industrial/agricultural fabric of the Yangzi delta and the factory villages of the Pearl River Delta, are each specific illustrations of the ways in which cities are currently decentralizing.  This paper compares the urban forms of these three urban conurbations, in order to locate this decentralization in relation to coincident dispersion of governance and production: the devolution of the central government’s authority, and the breaking apart of state owned industries. This generalized situation of dispersion, characteristic of neoliberalism around the world, brings with it a specific set of contradictions in China where it confronts the forces of an authoritarian and still Keynesian state, processes of primitive accumulation, and strategies of ideological interpellation. These apparently Chinese characteristics, in turn reflect back on neoliberalism in general, asking us to look at the similarities between these and strategies of governance, production and urbanization in the rest of the world.

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