- This event has passed.
Urbanization & Governance in China & India: Informal Settlements, Land Disputes, & Citizen Rights
March 5, 2014 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm CST
Free
“Urbanization and Governance in China and India: Informal Settlements, Land Disputes, and Citizen Rights”
Xuefei Ren
Associate Professor
Sociology and Global Urban Studies
Michigan State University
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Great Cities Institute
412 South Peoria Street
Suite 400, CUPPA Hall
Over the past three decades, large-scale and high-speed urbanization has posed severe governance challenges in post-liberalization India and post-socialist China. The different modes of urban development in China and India present excellent cases to theorize urban governance and citizen rights in the developing world. This talk presents research and findings from a current project on urbanization and local governance in China and India. The project challenges the widely held notion that Chinese urban development occurs in a top-down manner because of one-Party rule, whereas Indian urban development occurs through bottom-up, or “subaltern” strategies based upon democratic contestations. Through case studies on informal settlements and land acquisitions in Delhi, Mumbai, Guangzhou, and Shanghai during the past two decades, Prof. Ren discusses how urbanization in both countries has enabled a reassembling of citizen rights with simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Xuefei Ren is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Urban Studies at Michigan State University. She received her BA in Comparative Literature, MA in Urban Planning from Tokyo Metropolitan University, and PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Her research interests are urbanization, governance, architecture and the built environment, and international development. She has published widely in urban studies journals and is the author of two books. Her first book, Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), won the Best Book Award from the Political Economy of the World System Section and an Honorable Mention for the Robert Park Award in the Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. Her latest book, Urban China (Polity Press, 2013), is listed as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine in 2014. She is a columnist for Thinker magazine in Beijing and has been a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
To request disability accommodations, please contact Christiana Kinder, Great Cities Institute, (312) 996-8700, christia@uic.edu
