This timely collection raises two very important normative questions about urban China: whether the Chinese way of urbanization is “smart”; and if not, how can we make it so? “Smart urban growth,” an idea developed by American planners trying to cope with urban sprawl, is a set of planning practices that tries to correct the wrongs of the past by promoting compact and mixed land uses, investing in public transit, bicycle and pedestrian-friendly projects, conserving natural resources, and encouraging citizen participation. Applying these ideals to evaluate China's urbanization pattern, the authors lean heavily toward a conclusion that the Chinese mode of urbanization is perhaps better described as “dumb” rather than “smart” growth. What we see in China is low-density sprawl at the urban fringe; large-scale development projects that lack a mixture of land uses and that inhibit walking, cycling, and transit ridership; increasing reliance on the automobile; increasing job–housing imbalance; unsustainable resource extraction; and limited public participation in the development process. It other words, the pattern of urban growth in China today has largely been a repetition of what American cities have undergone since the 1950s. And these issues are more urgent in China today because China is only 40 per cent urbanized (compared to the 80 per cent urbanization rate in the US), and it still has a chance to fix the problem. The larger question hanging over this issue, then, is what is to be done, and how?

The strength of this book is found in its responses to the “how” question. The contributors, mostly urban policy thinkers and planning practitioners, thoroughly examine the institutional context of China's growing pains in the areas of land use, land rights, property tax, public finance, and the organization of urban and regional planning. They then propose thoughtful solutions aiming at win-win results. The chapters are useful for readers seeking a comprehensive and clear map to the labyrinth of spatial management in post-reform China.

While the contribution of this book is unique, it faces two challenges that are shared by many studies of China's current transformation, including my own.

The first is the paradoxical relationship between analyses of policy and politics. While students of policy, on the one hand, often search for “win-win” solutions, students of politics, on the other hand, are often too pessimistic, if not outright cynical, to be bothered with the question of what is to be done. While the former are criticized by the latter for paying insufficient attention to the contingency of power, the latter are excluded from the power circle altogether. In cases where policy thinkers take politics into account, as with Chang-Hee Christine Bae's chapter comparing South Korean and Chinese “greenbelts,” the difficulty of applying experience from one policy environment to another often discourages policy thinkers from venturing further into the muddy field of power dynamics. Meanwhile, when analysts of urban politics probe deeper into the roots of problems, the problems they find tend to be so structurally intertwined that the kind of piecemeal reforms that are realistic will only serve to sustain these same urban and social ills. Ultimately, an analysis of power leaves us with a distinct feeling of powerlessness.

The second challenge lies in the contradiction between an analysis of accumulation and distribution. While smart urban growth emphasizes public participation and environmental conservation, the underlying assumption seems to be that growth cannot be compromised by any other agenda. “Smart growers” ask how to make growth more pleasant and accumulation more sustainable and effective. But the question of who benefits from growth, be it smart or dumb, rarely seems to receive the same level of analytical sophistication. The question of distribution is particularly pertinent when unprecedented urban growth is sponsored by massive displacement and dispossession, as China is undergoing today. These questions go beyond effective accumulation, and they cannot be resolved by smart growth alone.