In this book, Samuel Y. Liang provides an account of spatial transformations in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou under the People's Republic. Its areas of thematic focus are urban planning, urban form, urban political economy and cultural change. These themes are developed through an examination of archival and primary materials and a synthesis of recent scholarly and journalistic work on Chinese cities produced by historians, planners, geographers and urban critics. Though the bulk of the book discusses reform-era developments, and specifically changes wrought to cities since 1992, Liang is keen to highlight the deeper historical continuities and differences in patterns of change discrete to each of his three case-study cities. In this aspect, the book provides two main lines of comparison: across cities and across historical periods. It is on this historical comparative basis that Liang argues recent changes in China's cities constitute what he calls a “banal revolution.” By this, Liang means that the modernist-inflected revolutionary approach to socialist urban form and planning, exemplified by the danwei compound, has been abandoned in favour of an ordinary market-driven logic, one that aims to satisfy individual desires rather than meet collective needs and whose subtext is the refutation of the socialist city.
Administrative restructuring, tax reform and the formation of markets for urban land in the 1980s and 1990s, as Liang points out, were pivotal changes that ushered in China's remarkable on-going urban transformation. As Liang contends, these shifts brought about a powerful real-estate sector during this period and decisively reoriented urban planning and governance toward the enhancement of land and property values. “Planning,” as such, Liang argues, was reinterpreted from the socialist era's notion of a comprehensive economic and social programme to a set of politically expedient spatial reforms catering to an emergent middle class. Critical urban theory, notably that of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, give this line of analysis theoretical ballast and provide a spatial lens on urban process as expressive of deeper political-economic currents.
This book consists of nine chapters, including the introduction, divided into three parts. The introduction lays out the scope of the book and presents the conceptual frame of the “banal revolution.” The first part, in two chapters, covers the history of urban planning under the People's Republic up to the present. Chapter one delivers historical sketches of urban planning in the three case-study cities, noting the persistent but ever-changing mismatch between centralized planning and local exigency. In chapter two, Liang theorizes the changes in urban form since 1949 as alternating modes of utopianism – a modernist iteration under Soviet-inspired planning, and a more recent neoliberal one that proffers limitless growth in market terms. The second part, in three chapters, examines the politics of housing in the socialist and reform eras. The book's third section, in three chapters, reviews cultural debates that have surrounded urban architectural conservation and preservation since the 1950s and considers the different tensions that emerged amid the reconfigurations of monumental and vernacular spaces in the three cities. An epilogue, brief to the point of seeming cursory, caps the book with a lament about urban China's subjection to the law of capitalist accumulation and a nod to informal spatial practices that purportedly counter this trend.
The broad range of thematic foci – planning, architecture, advertising, the ideology of home, rights consciousness, historic preservation – and the effort to draw comparisons among three different cities in starkly different historical periods all speak to the enormous ambition behind Liang's project. The results, in terms of balance in the empirical data and analytical coherence, are uneven across the different chapters and parts. Liang's discussions of urban planning and urban form in part one and chapter eight's analysis of conservation, for example, supply the book's most systematic and compelling comparative study of his chosen cities. The reader gains a clear sense of the specificity of each city's development process within the national framework. Passages detailing Guangzhou are particularly fruitful, as this city is the least studied of the three. In contrast with these historical comparative sections, the first two chapters of part two differ sharply in their emphasis on cultural analysis of trends in residential architecture and property marketing. Given the flamboyance of advertisers' discursive tactics in real estate advertising across China, Liang's analysis of this important area of urban landscape change is a welcome one, and the contributions here are noteworthy.
Ultimately, Liang's diverse analytical approaches reveal astonishing urban transformations in short chapters accessible to readers outside Chinese studies. Yet, the findings tend to be additive and scattershot in the absence of a unifying and consistently applied conceptual apparatus to tie the themes together. One is left curious midway through the book as to what has become of the term “banal revolution” raised at the outset. The idea is provocative in the face of such dramatic change. What could be banal about urban China today? Unfortunately, the explanatory potential of this term is never fully developed. Other intriguing concepts – utopianism (chapters two and three), negation (chapters two and three), heterotopia (chapter four), spoliation (chapter eight) – make similarly short-lived appearances, giving the chapters the distinct feel of stand-alone articles. This is the book's most notable shortcoming. An over-abundance of spelling mistakes and other infelicities (e.g. Deng Xiaoping's name is spelled in three different ways on pages 4 and 5; the citation for Hua Lanhong on p. 75 is incorrect) also detract from the text, though Liang's writing is otherwise clear and effective.
Remaking China's Great Cities is on the whole a strong contribution to our knowledge about urban transformation in the PRC. It has opened new windows onto this huge topic and deserves attention from urban scholars across disciplines.
