“This is an excellent book, well researched, clearly written and taking an original approach to an important issue, China’s urban villages. The originality lies particularly in using the public goods/commons debates to provide a new lens on urban China.” • Alan Smart, University of Calgary
“Urban China is an excellent setting to rethink the commons and public goods... The discussion is informed by a serious reading of relevant theory and is ethnographically rich.” • Niko Besnier, University of Amsterdam
Illuminating the complex processes of China’s uneven urbanization through the lens of the transition from village commons to public goods, this book is set in three urbanized villages in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Xi’an, which have experienced similar demographic explosions and dramatic changes to their landscapes, the livelihoods of its inhabitants, and the power structures governing their residents. Graduated provision is the delivery of public goods informed by the teleological ideology of urbanization, and by neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, and has been employed as an answer to the challenges of making public goods, such as welfare provisions, public parks, education, and senior care, equally accessible to all in recently urbanized communities.
Anne-Christine Trémon is director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She has recently published Diaspora Space-Time: Transformations of a Chinese Emigrant Community (Cornell University Press, 2022).
LC: HT384.C6 T746 2023
BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC026030 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Urban; SOC008020 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Ethnic Studies/Asian Studies
available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
