Over the last decade so much has been written about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that on encountering another book, my first reaction is to ask, does it contain anything new? And there certainly are familiar (though contested) claims in this book, for example, the argument that: “[t]he immense ambition driving the Belt and Road Initiative puts it in the category of a grand strategy aimed at hegemonic transition” (p. 45). While no Chinese language sources are cited, and at heart it is an extended review of English language material, the book is rewarding, especially for urban studies scholars. There are some valuable tangential studies too, for example, chapter three “Urban spaces: transformed and contested”, whose first 16 pages provide an excellent study of wider Cold War urban geopolitics. Indeed, I found this section of the chapter more compelling than the treatment of the opening of Chinese cities and the subsequent vignettes of “BRI cities.” I will say more about this below. Overall, though, as “invitation to further study and debate” (p. 10), The Belt and Road City deserves wide readership.

Early on, Curtis and Klaus note the growth of literature on “the nature of and significance of Global Cities – those astonishing, planet-shaping urban artefacts of late modernity: the product of a distinctive form of US-led liberal international order” (p. 10). They place the book within that literature, attending to the impact of a global China, of which BRI becomes a visible spatial manifestation. The rise of China is backdrop, therefore, along with the assumption that this signifies a geopolitical transition and decline or partial displacement of US hegemony. Whilst these are big assumptions, as noted above, the historical analysis of the urban forms associated with what the authors call “the Cold War Empires” that opens chapter three is richly suggestive. They describe how design, architecture and urban planning became entangled with the Cold War. Their analysis of sites and key figures (pp. 105–110) is fascinating. The analysis proceeds to consider three Chinese cities as prototypes: Shenzhen, Shanghai and Xi’an. These are relatively brief studies though, and it’s not clear how or where these cities are serving as templates. There is an interesting consideration of how, within China, there are plans to articulate smaller and medium-sized cities with BRI. This too is brief, and others have already traced the longer trajectories at work in this – and how BRI relates to decades of China’s internal spatial strategies, which, in turn, were shaped by Cold War contexts (Shaun Lin, James D. Sidaway, and Chih Yuan Woon, “Reordering China, Respacing the World: Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路) as an Emergent Geopolitical Culture,” The Professional Geographer, 2019 71[3]: 507–522).

I do have other questions moreover about the analytical utility of the term “Belt and Road City.” Whilst infrastructures, corridors and urban spaces understandably take centre-stage, the book also offers a series of studies of what the authors identify as “Belt and Road Cities,” based on secondary material. How helpful is it to label Cape Coast, Kilamba, Gwadar, Boten, Vientiane, Sihanoukville, Addis Adaba and Djibouti City in this way, however? What analytical work is “Belt and Road City” doing here? What is gained and lost through such a lens? Curtis and Klaus also identify a series of “core features” (p. 12) of the emerging urban dynamics associated with the BRI. These include corridors and logistics, linked urban gateways, a focus on urban connectivity and the layering of new forms and structures onto existing ones, and “the construction of discrete new buildings that are explicitly linked to the rhetoric and narrative of the BRI” (p. 13). How distinctive to the BRI are some other features they identify, such as a proliferation of bilateral agreements, often involving corporations and the roles of architects and designers? These questions further prompt us to ask how to disentangle spatial forms attributed to the BRI from wider dynamics and Chinese foreign investments. What is within and what is outside BRI crops up too in the book’s conclusion, which notes that: “Despite China’s desire as a benevolent international leader, as a great power leading a society of states and a community of common destiny forward into the Chinese dream of a better twenty-first century, this all sits uncomfortably alongside the emergence of a technological basis for a totalitarian surveillance state at home, elements of which have been exported abroad along the BRI” (p. 212). It is a pity that no references about this export are offered. Such surveillance is hardly confined to China, but it may prove part of BRI’s appeal to some governments. There are other questions too, about how reactions and responses to BRI come into the equation (see Hangwei Li and Yuan Wang, “Adaptive Governance at Work: How Chinese State Actors Respond to Overseas Pushback on the Belt and Road Initiative,” The China Quarterly 2025). In the current fraught global conjuncture, how will the BRI – and pushbacks – evolve?