 So it's 9 AM, so we're going to start the Zoom. People are still joining. So as they come in, we'll begin. So this script is going to sound vastly familiar for those that were here yesterday. But good morning, everyone, and to everyone watching here in New York City. And good evening to our speakers and audience members coming to us virtually from across China. Thank you all for being here for the second day and taking time away from your Saturdays to have a discussion on Chinese urbanism. My name is Victoria Lin, and I'm the co-president of Urban China Network of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. On behalf of my team, I extend everyone a warm welcome to day two of the ninth annual Urban China Forum sponsored by the Urban Planning Program and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute here at Columbia. We extend special thanks to our sponsors and to the support of Columbia Global Centers who are streaming our event through their online WeChat platform. The Urban China Network was found in May 2013 by a group of Columbia Urban Planning students with a strong interest in China's urban issues. We aim to bring students, scholars, and practitioners from various disciplines here in the US into the discussion of Chinese urbanization and ultimately to facilitate communication between cities in China and out of the world. To speak a little bit more about the special relationship between Columbia's Chinese students and academic scholars, here is Ms. Helena Xiao, Associate Director of Columbia's Global Center Beijing, who joins us virtually tonight from across from China. Good evening for the second time, Helena. Good morning, Victoria, for the second time. Also good evening, good morning, good afternoon to all the distinguished friends and professors online. So thank you for spending some time with us today. I'm very honored to be invited to give a very brief remarks, welcome remarks to you for the nice conference of Urban China Forum representing here of Columbia Global Centers Beijing, which is a regional hub in China of Columbia University. Just very briefly, our mission is to facilitate and promote academic exchange and research collaboration between Columbia's students and scholars with their counterparts in the region. As many of you may know that before 2020, hundreds of student faculty members and administrators participated in various program and events each year in China. So we're really eager to resume that. If some of you are interested, our office is located in Zhongguan Sun area on the Upper West side of Beijing. We would be very pleased to have you visit us while you are in the city. So it is with much pride for me that our student at the Urban Planning Department at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, like what I mentioned yesterday already, I would love to see it again, one of the best major at the university as well as in the country. They have amazingly brought the scholars from Columbia, as well as China, and we're facilitating the last day of discussion. So yesterday, we're very glad to hear from Professor Li Tian from Tsinghua University and Professor Wei Fengli from the University of Hong Kong, as well as with the department chair of Columbia Urban Planning Professor Wei Pingwu, along with hundreds of online and in-person participate. They had such a stimulating discussion about their ongoing research work in dealing with the challenges in the post-pandemic China urbanism. So today, we hope that the new academic insights and best practice presented and discussed will provide us more useful resources and inspirations for us to resolve some problems in the real world. So lastly, I hope that everyone who participated in today's discussion will enjoy it and will be able to have an opportunity to engage with the professors on the questions you are seeking answered too. I'm also looking forward to receiving suggestions and idea on how to follow up on the academic exchange and the collaboration in this area with Columbia. So I wish that conference a big success and now I'll give back the microphone to Victoria. Thank you. Thank you so much, Helena. And I can't wait to see the events that Columbia Global Center's Oak Black holds now that China is opening up and it's all very exciting. So with that, today the theme of our forum is sustainable urban planning. Yesterday, we listened to two wonderful speakers who spoke on their research of the living environment and governance structures that straight the path towards urban sustainable like building. Today, we have three distinguished guests who are speaking on how their work intersects with urban regeneration and transformation. Now that we have exited one crisis, Chinese cities are on the forefront of issues and research that surround the dynamic living and built environments of over 800 million people. Despite the difficulties of onsite research for the past two years, we are joined today with speakers who allow us to continue opportunities of cross-cultural understanding between Columbia University and China. Here to speak a little on our forum is our urban planning program director, Professor Wei Ping Wu. She's an internationally acclaimed scholar whose book, The Chinese City, offers a multidisciplinary look about the Chinese urban issues we speak about today. Her recent work, China Urbanization Impacts and the Transitions of Interdisciplinary Issues, like of Chinese urban, looks at the inter, like trans, sorry, China Urbanization Impacts and Transitions looks at the interdisciplinary issues of Chinese urbanism from a historical and regional perspective. It is my honor to welcome our very own department chair, Professor Wu. Thank you, Victoria and thank you, Helena. And again, welcome to this urban China forum. I'm just thrilled. I wanna give a big round of applause to our students who really put in a lot of efforts and energy to connect with scholars and to organize this forum. And the forum has been going on for a number of years now. And I think yesterday we really sensed this hunger, right? We have been separated, of course, involuntarily across regions and across geographies. And I think our urge and our desire for exchange and for learning from each other remains so strong. I think yesterday when I heard that thousands of people who are in the WeChat live stream are not just speaks to the importance of intellectual exchange. And so I wanna welcome all of you, whether you're in person, dialing in Zoom or through WeChat live stream. And yesterday we also were able to see quite a bit alumni from the program and also friends from the past. So this also speaks to the urgency about this topic, right? And the cities are obviously at the forefront of confronting not only pandemic, but also challenges brought by climate change, demographic transition. We know that in China, that's particularly acute, but also environmental transition in which cities in China and elsewhere are experiencing features and phenomenon that are both similar to global North cities, as well as to global South cities. So we're in a unique time for Chinese cities, for us as scholars and students of Chinese cities to understand better. And we are also at a critical juncture where technology, digital technology, are significantly affecting how cities are governed, cities are managed. We already can see that during pandemic, particularly in Chinese cities where there's a lot of cutting edge use of digital technology. And so I'm very much looking forward to today's presentations. And we have one of our own alum, Yun Jingli now at University of Hong Kong. We have also Nick Smith, a professor and a partner. I remember you were at Urban China Forum, I don't know just before pandemics, right? We were able to do it in person. And then Professor Yang from Nanjing. And it really is truly also cross-disciplinary. We have geography, urban planning, urban studies and architecture. So it's a terrific and fertile forum for exchange. And I very much look forward to your insights and learning from your work. Thank you all. Thank you, Professor Wu. Okay, so a gentle reminder to audience that each speaker will have a 30 minute lecture which will be followed by five minutes of the media questions. And after both lectures, the discussion panel will be open to the public. Please enter your questions in the chat or use the raise hand functions to indicate you wish to speak. And if possible, please open your cameras so the speakers can see you. Here is my friend and co-president Wei Xiao to introduce our first distinguished speaker and panelist. Good morning and good evening, everyone. And thank you, Victoria. It is my great honor to introduce you to our first forum speaker, Professor Qian Changyang. He's a professor in the School of Architecture at South East University and an active registered urban planner in China. His research area includes urban regeneration, historic preservation, urban planning and urban design. Professor Yang has multiple publications, including the theory and methodology of urban regeneration, the urban regeneration in West Europe, urban planning and design, et cetera. Many of his publications are selected as teaching materials for the urban planning curriculum in China. Besides his distinguished academic reputation, Professor Yang has also led many urban planning and design projects across Chinese cities. Let's welcome Professor Yang. Hello. Thank you, Professor Wu, for your kind of opening. Thank you, Urban China Network for holding this very important conference. Hello, everyone. Good morning, good evening. Today, I'm very pleasure and very glad to introduce my research on urban regeneration in China. I come from South East University. I'm Professor Yang. Urban regeneration has been a significant topic for urban planner along the world since the Industrial Revolution. After more than 13 years of rapid urban development, China urbanization has shaped from high speed goals to middle high speed goals. Now, urban development in China is transitioning from a faster modernization to a stage where it's designed for its people by the quality of life. In the current stage, urban regeneration has become a global priority in social economic development. It is also a relief for the project closely related to the well-being of the people and improvement of life quality. Today, I will talk about three main sections. Section one, a historical review of urban regeneration in China. Section two, so goal and characteristic of urban regeneration. Three, talk about planning paths towards sustainable urban regeneration. Part one, the development history of urban regeneration in China. We know in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the main task of urban regeneration was to improve the basic living environment and the conditions of urban residents. With the establishment of a market economy system in the post reform era, urban planner began to carve out a larger scale restructuring of all the city and the renovation of all the residential area. In the rapid urbanization period, there is a regeneration of all the district, so culture and creativity related to the development of all the industrial area and the conservation of historical area. Today, we have entered a transitional period with emphasis of people's century and the high quality development. Now, I will introduce more detail. First one is from 1949 to 1977. It focused on improving the basic environment, sanitation and the living condition of the city. Most of all the urban area was built under the police for making fuels and gradually transformed for me. There are many great projects. For example, the renovation of Longxu Gou in Beijing, the renovation of Sainte-Tang in Shanghai and the improvement of the Qinghai River in Nanjing. During this time, Mr. Liang Shicheng and Mr. Chen Zhangxiang proposed the famous Liang Chengxuan. So he tried to solve the problem of conflict between the urban development and historical preservation. So he offered a new idea for holistic urban regeneration. First two, from 1978 to 1989, both on addressing housing shortage and the repel infrastructure debts. With the long over landmark reform, urban regeneration has increasingly become a key issue. There are many projects and works. For example, the renovation of the old city in Shenyang, the renovation of the old city in Hefei in Nanjing. And there are other famous projects in Beijing, for example, Juer Futong, and the renovation of old and live hold in Shuzhou. It also includes the renovation of the Yisheng Nanjing Road in Shanghai and so on. There are two people who are very famous. We know Professor Wu Liangyong. He worked in Qinghua University. He proposed the old and live regeneration theory. This theory lead to a fundamental change of urban development from demolish and conjunction to all the regeneration. He pulled out a new direction for China. Another professor is Professor Wu Mingwei. He worked in our school in the University. He proposed comprehensive and systematic thinking on urban regeneration. He played an important role in getting urban regeneration practice. For the three years from 1919 to 2011, along with the land reform and commercialization of Haosen, the urban regeneration has been promoted by strong economic movement. There are also many great work and projects include Shanghai Tianzifang, Shanghai Qingtiandi, and Beijing Qijiuba. It also includes the project Pingjiang Road in Suzhou and the World Aesopo Park in Shanghai and so on. And first of all, from 2010 to present, it opened up a new dimension of people centered and high quality development. There is a new situation of multiple types, level, and perspectives. Now we'll discuss some questions about what's the value and what's the characteristic and what's the goal of urban regeneration. Please look at this picture. This is a schematic diagram of comparative analysis on the level of urbanization development of China and the world in the past 14 years. Look at this land, it's a red land. It's a change of China urbanization in red. The blue line is the change of world urbanization in China in 2011, the urbanization that excited 15% and after 10 years, it reached about 64%. In the new state, the state proposed the urban regeneration action. In today, urban regeneration was writing in the National Government Work Report for the first time. It began the new time about the action connotation. In my opinion, I say the city is leaving Ogden and the urban development is Ogden and the urban change process. Urban regeneration is not only a construction activity, but more importantly mechanism for regulating urban development. Urban generation, of course, involves as part of society, economy, and physical environment. It is comprehensive, politic, policy-oriented, and strategic social setting project. What's the value? I think under the overall framework of the new National Government setting, urban regeneration has become more focused on the internal development of the city. As an important part of the urban development work, urban regeneration, of course, involves more comprehensive overall objectives and many goals include six factors. One, improving the function of making the city development healthier and safer. Two, optimizing the structure to make the urban development more intensity and compact. And three, inheriting culture and make urban development more harmonious and elegant. Four, protecting the environment and make urban development more ecological and sustainable. About urban quality, improve the quality and make the city more livable and beautiful. In the end, it's enhancing with tenacity and make the city more prosperous and diverse. I will introduce for you and discuss planning parts toward sustainable urban regeneration with today's practice. Planning part one is focused on the adjustment and optimization of the overall function structure of the city. We know today Beijing's overall plan goal is to build a water class harmony and livable city. It transforms the traditional model of urban development. It's driven by incremental discipline. This is a top-level design include suitably controls increasing quality. The return is the stock of the team is such and enhancing efficiency. Look at this picture. I took this picture last year. This is a view of the old city, Beijing, from the Jinsang Park. This other picture is the view of West Mountain. It's also from Jinsang Park. We can see in Beijing, the special environment and the quality of the old city have been improved. Because it's through the deconstruction of all the functionality and the many efforts in Shanghai. Shanghai is trying to build into a city of innovation, city of people, city of ecology. It's in three dimensions. Dimension one is city of Venice. Dimension city of Chong. Dimension sustainable development. Look at this picture. With the development of creating a world-class world from the area, Shanghai proposed plenty of cities in terms of functioning layout, public space, green ecology, skyline, comprehensive transportation and municipal vicinity. This strategy enhanced urban quality along the Huangpu River and Shuzhou River. Now we talk about planning path two. Path two is about highlighting the creation and the enhance of human public space. Nanjing city wall is very famous and very typical in China's Asian capital city. In accordance with people's city for the people, we created human public space from the protection and improvement of the area along the old city wall. During this year, we make a master plan and start city planning include pedestrian city, motor vehicle city, facility service and landscaper design guide. Please look at this picture. It's an old city wall. It's an area along the city wall. Today is a beautiful city park for children, for our people. This plan strategies are in terms of history and culture, public space and green and leisure and recreation and integrated transformation and so on. The enhance quality of the environment. This picture is for old city. It's view from the city of the wall is beautiful and fantastic. Part 3 is improving and enhance the living environment and living condition of old labor food. This is the generation of old labor food in old city in Nanjing. As the most basic living unit of the city the old labor food is expensive and complex. In the old district there are many traditional houses and heritage. Under the guidance of the planning we introduce small scale and progressive approach to the width of the city and landscaping environment. With public participation we also fully respect the view of the government, the residents, the development and other parties. In other cities they also make use of abandoned land to create small and micro activity. Look at this picture. This public open space is for old man or the woman seeing this public space for people creation and leisure and so on. In the course of building residents sense of belonging and identity the community planner become more and more important. This is many activity for participation. Now I will talk about bus 4. Bus 4 is changing the protection and revitalization of urban history and culture. Look at this picture. This picture is the view of Suzhou. We know Suzhou is seeping in history cultural heritage and beautiful landscape and garden. The historic district is an embodiment of the city traditional cultural and custom in urban development. This historical area is the most important and valuable. On the premise of overall protection we thought comprehensive capacity model to determine the reasonable density of construction in the old city. Therefore organic regeneration will be carried out to promote the way and sustainable development of the old city. In the urban development of the city developed a new area under the policy of comprehensive protection of the old city. Suzhou has preserved very well the traditional state traditional appearance. It also is a double transboard special pattern of paranoid water and land adjacent to the river and the street. Look at this picture is the view from the Pingjiang road. Pingjiang Gano is a very famous traditional house. It's a famous garden of Wan Shiyuan. This storage enhanced the value and quality of the Asian city. In the end I will introduce the planning path 5. Path 5 is promoting the upper grounding of the industrial structure in the old industrial area Beijing's Sogang industrial is very famous. It retains the coloring of the industrial element through reasonable function replacement and cultural remodeling. It's very successful it's a successful case from the old steel mill to the Winter Olympic. In this year it is successful hosted 24 Winter Olympic Games. Look at this picture is a very good during this time the Sogang area has created a condition for the great transformation and the new to the industrial heritage. Another case is conservation generation of the old industrial town of Tanza in Nantong. Tanza is very famous is the first modern industrial town in China. It built in 1886 in our research we try to build balance between conservation and regeneration we make a model objective include preserve the heritage finding new model for economic development and create a local job also include improving living conditions it's also very important for us to attract young people and so on. This situation for today is before is after is before is after this plan effectively the conservation utilization and quality improvement for this area through a great effort of many years it preserved very well many heritage all the industry and attracted more and more people especially young people to go back to the old town finally I will make up a conclusion in China this is because different background different approach different mechanism different regeneration and different regeneration policy for each phase it's very important for the cognize in my opinion urban generation is comprehensive holistic policy and social setting project it is also necessary to establish the guiding methodology for people oriented to face a long time a more comprehensive overall goal of promoting urban civilization and harmony social development it is very important to explore urban regeneration planning path from a social economy special and cultural dimensions as well as from a macro medium and micro level in the end we hope to establish good cooperation and the current academic change in the field of urban regeneration focus on old labor food historical preservation urban regeneration and so on we hope to promote sustainable diversified healthy and harmonious development of urban regeneration in the end we also hope to create a better life for human beings that's all, thank you for listening thank you thank you very much thank you professor yang your talk reminds me of the restoration of the historical sites of the general consul which is next to my elementary school this urban renewal project now is one of the city level this urban renewal project now becomes a label of Nanjing City and brings us the fabulous confidence in our culture we have received several questions we chat during my answering them thank you professor and if it's more comfortable for you to use Chinese to answer the questions and we will post the English translation on our account later for those questions so we have received a couple of questions on the WeChat platform for audiences from Hong Kong we are on WeChat we have received some questions from the Hong Kong audience the first question is how do we deal with the high-level housing in Hong Kong or high-level buildings and for the audience in Hong Kong they think that the government doesn't have the effective measures to deal with some old-fashioned high-level buildings so what do you think about this problem from the urban renewal thank you ok this is a very complicated question can I still answer it in Chinese? no problem because in every region the urban renewal is very complicated and special for example the high-level buildings in Hong Kong in order to deal with such an extreme development there are a lot of high-level buildings but the construction of high-level buildings is very difficult because of its structure and the construction cost there are a lot of funds including the structure of the population in order to improve the construction also needs high-level attention these questions for example in Shanghai including in Nanjing all face these problems now the country is also deciding how to update some policies including some technical methods including some laws and regulations thank you we also received a question from we also received a question from Richard Jordan I'll say it in English first and I'll do the Chinese translation question for Professor Yan the dean of UN non-governmental representatives for 43 years United Nations adopted the new urban agenda on October 20th 2016 to acknowledge our schools of architecture in China incorporating the new urban agenda and student courses thank you United Nations proposed a new city on October 20th 2016 a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city a new city We put this together among the course of the classes we put this together among the classes we put this together among the classes for our students you are talking about this history we are focusing on Chinese and how to face these changes and these complicated situations, we need to make some new policies. So I will immediately translate this, although like not in full version, to the answer of this question. So the courses that the Chinese architecture schools is adopting the new urban agenda that the United Nations has adopted to propose and to think about new policies for urban regeneration at the city scale of how we promote the sustainable development of the country and the city. So to your question, yes, it is an in progress and I think it will for sure be developed in the future curriculum as well. And I actually also have a personal question to ask Professor Yang. Just like you mentioned, for urban restoration and some applications, it is like a series of contacts between the cultural heritage city and the tourism industry. I want to ask, just think about the cultural heritage protection and the series of contacts between the tourism industry, it has produced two possible urban results. The first one may not be materialistic, it is a change in the economic structure. People will turn the local economy into a cultural heritage in the tourism industry. The second one is the cultural heritage protection. For example, in order to make the entire area historical, you can use modern architecture methods to make some more historical buildings. What are your insights on sustainable development through this? For the sake of restoration. Yes, your question is very good. And for the present, a lot of the cities are opening up to protect some areas. Because the protection of the city now starts from the tourism perspective. It may make it a guide. Of course, these methods have a certain reason. It can make the government get benefits very quickly and be able to enter the area of some economic activity. It can also make the tourists know about the city's historical culture. Of course, there is a very serious problem here. Because the most important thing is to emphasize the authenticity of its protection. Protecting the continuity of life, including the protection of the entire space structure, including the protection of the people's lifestyle, etc. These more serious problems should be more important to protect you. So in the future, we should return to the beginning of protection. That is to say, we should really let the protection melt into the daily life of the people, and improve the lives of the people in the everyday life. Let the people be able to get a very good sense of happiness, satisfaction, and let the people be able to experience its culture better, including the transparency of its entire area, etc. So I think that in the future, the direction of our protection should turn to some more lifestyle, including some serious, original, and original lifestyle, and the protection of the space. Thank you. Thank you. And then there will be people in Zoom. So, Yun Jingli, come on in. Hello, Mr. Yang. So please let me ask a question in Chinese, okay? Hello, Mr. Yang. I have a question. It's about the third path you mentioned, which is the old-school improvement in the city. Because I have been doing research like this to see the improvement in the old-school area. After that, I found that it is very different from the past. It is its funding source. There are many projects, such as home appliances. It requires the people to make money by themselves. Who can make this money? Who can agree? Who can make this project? But there are some, for example, such as the strong power change. Sometimes it requires the two-level government to make money. In a different way, it will often affect some projects. It is easy to land and implement. Other projects are not easy. Or you can communicate with the residents and get a final understanding of each other. You will encounter some problems. So I am very interested in trying to ask you about the city improvement in this small-scale area, especially the improvement in the old-school area. Do you have any new ways to make money or some innovative policies on finance? Thank you. Thank you. The problem you mentioned is very typical in China. It is also a very difficult problem to solve. Because the improvement in the old-school area in our country can be said to be very large. And it is directly related to the lives of the people. There are some minor improvements here. Some of the furniture in the furniture shop are very important. These are very minor changes. But in fact, the needs of the people and the daily needs are directly related to the needs of the beautiful life. In fact, the country can borrow some financial investment from the country. Of course, this amount is too large. Another thing is that the country is also researching how to absorb social capital. Of course, there is a very good mechanism in this area. For example, in the small-scale area, there are some changes in the development rights or some profit-saving projects. How to agree with them? We need to understand the path of policy. Of course, there are many small-scale areas in Beijing such as the National Development Bank and a lot of financial investment. There are also some financial investment in the society. Overall, there should be a lot of paths in the future. Of course, the most important thing is that there should be a policy and a guarantee of freedom. If it is a project, it may be very difficult to promote it. There is a lot more to do now. It is more important to build a system that is convenient for the country. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Yang. Professor Yang, you may need to join us later. Professor Yang, it is a pleasure to live if you want to catch up on your next schedule. Now, we have the seventh speaker. It is a great honor for me to introduce Dr. Yun Jingli, also a alumni of Columbia GSAP. Dr. Lee is a post-doc and a fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on low carbon city planning and urban climate governance. Dr. Lee, this is a Columbia University through Shenzhen as a case study to explore the concept of low carbon city and its implementation in Chinese cities through the lens of urban governance. She also previously worked with the United Nations and the UN Habitat on Environmental Sustainability Issues, as well as the Urban Technical Assistance Project. A Columbia initiative that aims to provide support for inter-city communities. Now, let's welcome Dr. Lee to give us a talk in sustainability. Thank you. Also, a great thanks to Professor Yang again. Thank you for your introduction and thank you for having me today. So I'm trying to share my screen with you. So can you give me a thumb up if you can see my screen? Yes, we can. If you like, you can un-raise your hand so that emoji is on the right of your screen again. Sorry about that. So let me just put down my hands. So where is it? It should be on the bottom at Reactions, the button. So on the tab with the share screen, there's record, close captions and Reactions. And just un-raise your hand. So let me just exit from this and then... Pardon everyone. We're having a little bit of a technical difficulty, but it wouldn't be... Sorry about that. So let me... And let me have a look on the bottom. Yes, share screen next to it on the right is record, close captions and Reactions. And you can just click on the Reactions button and you should be able to... Okay, let me stop sharing screen first and then Reaction, right? So now... Perfect. How is it? Yes. Okay, so let me share again. Sorry about this technical problem I caused. It wouldn't be a Zoom conference without it. All right. That looks perfect. So this is it, right? Hello everyone. So today I'm going to share research I've done recently. And it is based on my doctoral dissertation, which received tremendous help from Columbia Urban Planning Program and Professor Wu Weiping. So this is what I did based on that. And after I moved to Hong Kong, I just built on my previous research and then moved a step ahead to look at this whole concept and phenomenon of the low carbon cities. And today I'm going to talk about a couple of things. First, I'd like to provide a very brief introduction of the short history of the low carbon city movement in China. And I'm going to introduce the existing theory and conception of this particular phenomenon in urban China. And I'm going to introduce more about the present research, which is going to see low carbon city from a perspective of the environmental state and the methodology of how I can, I explore this topic from a standpoint of the legal disputes. And if time allows, I'd like to maybe tell a very interesting story of the two neighboring cities to pursue similar low carbon city experiments that with very divergent outcomes. And in the end, there is a conclusion. So my research in low carbon cities is inspired by the sudden surge of the low carbon city as an idea and as a mega project category across different cities in China. And this picture shows maybe this is the day one of low carbon city in China. And you can guess the time of it is back in 2008 and it's either maybe the most globalized moment. And this is the first low carbon city initiative, which is led by the worldwide fend for nature in conjunction with the HFBC and the NDRC. And at that time they selected two cities of Shanghai and Baudin as the two pilot low carbon city, which is going to be implemented in the following years. And this is the launch ceremony where the representatives from the different entities join together and smash the balloons labeled with the same name labeled with the CO2. And that is the first introduction of the idea of the low carbon city in China. And after that, this practice of low carbon city just spread very quickly. And we can see during the year of the 2011 to 2015, there are more than 200 cities who set explicit carbon reduction targets in their five year plans. And by 2014, there are more than 130 cities had a very ambitious plan of developing as low carbon cities. And more recently as the double carbon policy gain momentum, so we can see more ambitious go in the name of the carbon peaking city or carbon neutral city, which indicate a more ambitious and more urgent imperative to control the territory CO2 emissions at a city level. And this is actually not a very China specific phenomenon. And indeed it is a very global trend where we can see the higher and higher visibility of the city in the domain of climate governance. So this can go back to the very early 2000s when the nation states, which are the established actors to lead climate governance under the global framework of the UNFCCC met difficulties in reaching agreement. So cities just stand up. And this pays just get a new momentum after the Copenhagen summit, which is considered a total failure for nation states to agree on and commit to a global agreement after the Kyoto Protocol, which is going to end in 2010. So at that time, several mayors just stand up and speak out the need for cities to take the risk of possibility. And the discourse at that moment is a very contradictory between cities and the nation states and the Wild Nations Talk Cities Act. That is a very popular and white-saturated slogan at that time to portray cities as maybe the last hope and maybe one of the most appropriate solutions to climate crisis. And this trend of the linkage between cities and climate change is increasingly institutionalized under the global framework of the UNFCCC. And one of the most recent steps it takes is in the Glasslow summit last year where there is an initiative to advocate for a specific summary for urban policy mayors in the IPCC annual report, which is the scientific foundation for all climate-related policymaking. So this just take the urban policymaker as a particular group of the audience which IPCCC is going to be delivered and to see the urban scale as a particular scale and the site and agent to deliver the policy related to the global climate issues. And in the epidemic world, this phenomenon to linking cities and climate change attracted increasing attention from scholars from different fields such as the urban study, urban culture, urban sociology and geography. And this has developed into a very established strength of the literature to look at climate urbanism. And this particular strength of the somehow critical urban studies, they looked at the nature of the climate urbanism and what it embodies and what kind of the strategies it used and what is the implications for the development and governance of the cities. And there is an overall consensus that the climate urbanism works very easily and conveniently with the conventional idea of the city competitiveness and ecological safety based on how city can sustainably develop their economy and maintain the social well-being of the urban residents. So this is the notion of the climate urbanism. And this remotely echoes the earlier argument and thesis of the urban sustainability fix to see this as the leverage of the environmental agenda to promote the traditional go and the traditional motivation of increase the economic growth and global competitiveness of the cities in a very globalized world. And this is sometimes under the name of the green branding to add the green color as a framing strategy and as a competitive edge in the global cities. And the following this kind of the thinking one main line of the discussions on China's low carbon urbanism just is inspired by this kind of the global notion of the climate urbanism. And it usually started with the theoretical framework of the policy mobility to see how the idea is transmitted to China through different platforms and networks especially the municipal climate networks and how the channels of the technology transfer and policy learning and knowledge transfer helps to facilitate this process of the growth of the low carbon cities. At the same time, it is realized that the particular urban political economy in China which combines the land politics how the municipal finance works based on urbanization and makes a based on the change of the land uses from farmland to urban construction land. So this particular dynamics in urban China just interacts with how the global networks how the mobility of the actors of the resources of the knowledge so how they come together to become the driving forces behind China's low carbon cities. But this cannot explain fully why so many cities with the very diverse development stages and also the social economic characteristics will suddenly at the same time set a similar goal and accept or embrace the same vision of the urban development in the future. So there is an alternative theoretical framework to see the rise of low carbon urbanism in China and this is to see whether the low carbon city heat is motivated by an authoritarian environmentalism. This is how the state can use is a top-down dynamics of the power position to push local governments to pursue the path of the low carbon urban development. And there are two very apparent institutions that can help explain and support this hypothesis. One is the target responsibility system which allows the central government to allocate a carbon reduction to provincial governments and then provincial governments have their choice to further allocate these provincial level targets to lower levels of the government. So this top-down target responsibility system in together with the China's local evaluation which established carbon reduction as one mandatory indicator in local governments official evaluation. So this is one of the institutions and the other is the very well-known pilot program initiated by the NDRC to designate particular cities as the pilot low carbon cities. And from 2010 there are a total of the three batteries which include 81 cities in this program of the low carbon city pilot program. And this is only one of the many programs led by different ministries which have some relation more or less relation to low carbon. For example, the sponge city initiative and low carbon transportation city program. So there are multiple initiatives and programs going on at the central level and they are choosing particular cities to develop as low carbon cities. And these two lines are two very different parallel explanations of the low carbon city actually existed for a while to explain the overall environmental turn of China in the past decade. So whether this is a global phenomenon and dominated by the new liberal globalization and urbanization project to increase the competitiveness of the city using the green framing, using the green technology or it is a product of a particular type of the state and it is approach to environmental issues. And despite very different perspectives of these two theoretical frameworks I find that both of them are very micro-level dynamics and see the power of the capital or the power of the state as almighty and as penetrating into different aspects and different places across China. And it is very useful to think about the rise of the low carbon cities at one hand but on the other hand it for short of explaining why the effectiveness of low carbon city development varies across different places in China. So in my doctoral dissertation that is what I looked at. So I looked at low carbon city as a discursive project and explored how the discourse of low carbon city is formed and is utilized and what kind of the resources are leveraged by this particular discourse and what kind of the effects, what kind of the outcomes can be related to the utilization of this low carbon discourse. And I find that maybe this discursive project perspective provides some useful information to bridge the mainstream the two kinds of the explanations from the globalization and authoritarian environmentalism because the discourse of the low carbon plays as a clue to expand the coalition or build the alliances of different actors who commit to the project of low carbon city development and contribute different kind of the resources and to reach a very temporary but very instrumental consensus to go on the path of the low carbon city development and these findings also include the kind of the new actors involved in this picture and how the power relations remain somehow the same and how the new actors in climate finance, in climate technology they are absorbed into the traditional power hierarchies in the government of the city government and also the central local dynamics and all these findings point to a point that the nation state is playing a very strategic role in this kind of the low carbon city development in other words in China low carbon city is not only about the city it's about how cities interact with the nation state but also the national government because the national agenda of the low carbon development and this role the relationship between the urban climate mitigation and adaptation and also on the other side is the nation state their relationship is subject to ongoing discussion and the role of the nation state is very ambiguous the rise of the city is often considered as a result of the slow move of the nation state or withdrawal of the nation state from the environmental issue and there is also the discussion of the nation states destined environmental failure because of the internal contradiction of the environment and economic development in the nation state and on the other hand if we follow this line of the discussion we can see the nation state is not playing a very important or significant role instead city because it's closeness to the civil society as well as to the market they can provide more effective and innovative solutions to environmental crisis like climate change but on the other hand as urban climate experiments and initiatives taken by the city they do not always end up in success and actually there are more failing stories to be told for the city-led climate programs as well as other scholars to look into this gap between the promise of the cities to solve climate crisis and the reality on the ground they always point to and notice the embeddedness of cities in the higher level of governments and also the national politics will cast a significant influence on cities to pursue ambitious climate goals and to provide innovative climate solutions so these two different perspectives just point to a very understudied aspect of what is the role of the nation state what is the relationship between a greenling state and urban climate governance so for this present research the objective of the research is to explore the dynamics of urban climate experiments within the context of an emerging decarbonization focused environmental state and there are two research questions the first is how is the low carbon environmental state articulated and contested on the ground and second how does this process of articulation and contestation affect the efficacy of urban climate initiatives so a practical goal for this research is to identify or to explore the reasons why there is the long lasting and widely observed gap between the promise of urban climate governance and this is a point in our reality and the environmental state this is a widely discussed concept because although there is the discussion of the environmental failure of the nation state so there is the consensus that the state can restructure and reconfigure to focus or to give more priority to the environmental issue and this environmental state denotes a process for the nation states to turn more attention to the environmental and to develop the regulatory regime to integrate more environmental concerns into the social economic development of the society and this refilled interest and this started from the very early the mid-2000s and so far there is an ongoing debate about what is an environmental state is it a normative idea with a very clear defined end or it is a dynamic process composed of the institutionalization of the environmental concerns of the nation states and mostly there is the assumption or conventional idea of the environmental state as the power exertion from the top to the local level and also through very formal channels mainly the regulation, the redistribution and organization and knowledge management of the environmental state and this can fit into China's context not easily and I would like to take an alternative understanding of the environmental state so instead of this cascading flow of the power exertion I would like to suppose that the environmental state is it entails a contested process and with the emergence of a new priority, a new imperative of climate mitigation of carbon reduction there will be different perception of the national agenda or global agenda across different scales and different levels and the cross scale and cross level dynamics will determine the outcomes of the climate governance at a very local and that will be explaining factor to somehow explain the success or effectiveness of the urban climate by experiments and also my understanding of the environmental state does not only include the power exerted through formal channels but also to extend this understanding of the power as exerted through informal channels and in particular the discursive and performative dimensions of power so this extension extended understanding of the climate in particular important when we see China's issues because as the scholar acknowledged that the national policy may cover far more key realms such as the plan just made by officials on inspection tours, party propaganda and the spirit of the center in its dictatorship style governance context in the area of the climate governance so before maybe the most recent what we are familiar with is the rise of the carbon policy just following the pledge of presidency to announce and commit to the international community that China will achieve a carbon peak by 2030 by 2060 and long before that actually back in 2010 to 2015 when the cities set explicit carbon reduction those that is a direct result of the pledge made by the then premier when at the at the Copenhagen summit to commit to China's ambition and decision to pursue for climate mitigation so this kind of the informal pronouncements and also the leader speeches they have always played a very essential role in determining the direction and the speed of the progress of climate governance and climate policy making in China and beyond China this is also can be seen as the climate politics is increasingly manipulated and utilized as a strategy election politics in the western democracy context so this attention to the discursive and the dimensions of power is very important to understand the operation and functioning of the environmental state in the field of the climate governance and the following this conception of the environmental state this is a research which I collaborate with professor judging at the Hong Kong you and we developed this conceptual framework of a decarbonization for the environmental state so this framework is structured around two dimensions the first horizontal dimension is how this new value and new norms and principles created by the carbon control is applied whether it is applied to prevent future events and activities in the future or it is applied to redefine reassess and re-judge the past ongoing existing activities on the ground and along the vertical dimension there is the factor whether this discourse or rhetoric value of the carbon is exploited by state actors or by non-state actors so a point that maybe deserves attention is that all climate not all but most of the climate actions involve very complicated networks and alliances between the state actor and non-state actor and there is the increasingly more obscure boundaries between the state and non-state sphere so in this conceptual framework the non-state actors they represent the more resistant or the non-state actors who hold different views or different perceptions of the low carbon agenda against or in comparison with the state actors and what we use as the empirical evidences is the legal disputes and we looked for looked into the legal disputes under the China's administrative litigation law so this law is to adjudicate administrative action taken by an administrative agency or as employee against which a citizen, legal person or any other organization files are complained so basically this is a formal channel for non-state actors individuals and different entities to claim their discontent or decent with the administrative action such as the climate control and the government authorities and we used a set of five key words including climate change, greenhouse gas, low carbon emissions and carbon trading to identify that cases with possible relations to the topic we are interested in and we find a total of 141 investigations and an interesting finding at this very early stage of the search is that a majority of the these cases are irrelevant so this irrelevant represents maybe a plaintiff with a name or company name including low carbon and a place because when you a government branch you need to address and address has a name including low carbon so that are considered irrelevant also there are more than 120 cases which use the climate change to indicating the variable weather conditions so this is like climate change but with totally different meanings and that are just they want to claim that something is caused by the bad weather and the sudden change in the weather but they use the same word of climate change and those group of more than 120 cases they are also considered as irrelevant and excluded from our further analysis and by this search process we finally located 94 disputes involving 152 investigations so maybe one dispute include multiple trials and there is the first and second instances they are considered as one dispute because the reason the cause is the same and we choose the period from 2010 to 2020 as this is the first decade of low carbon urban development and carbon control at the local level in China and geographically these cases are distributed across 15 different provinces and 30 cities and we can see there is the pilot province the pilot low carbon provinces and many of them are the pilot low carbon city and under the NDRC's national pilot program and for the next step we looked into each of this 94 disputes and to look for what is it about what is it what is the articulation of the climate or carbon in concrete cases and striking but in reflection somehow very sense making finding is that only a single dispute was about carbon emissions per se so this single dispute is in a habit in Shenzhen and it is about an enterprise through the municipal government to overcharge the carbon emissions fines so this is because Shenzhen is one of the pilot city and they demand carbon treating and for under this program Shenzhen has the authority to allocate carbon cap onto the scale the companies and manufacturers with particular scale and this is how the dispute arises so they have this this distance in the calculation results in a particular year and except for this single dispute about the carbon emissions all the other 93 disputes they involve every kind of activities and low carbon is used as a banner to denote low carbon building low carbon transportation and low carbon events something like that this is a very diverse representation of the low carbon echoes for response to our hypothesis or our initial intuition that low carbon is used as a rhetoric and there is tremendous symbolic value that can be exploited by both nation and non-nation or non-state actors and another point that corresponds to our conceptual framework of the environmental state is that top leaders speeches are playing a very prominent role in these cases both plaintiffs, the individuals the companies, enterprises and the course they are using the addresses or speeches given by top leaders to focus on the issue of the low carbon development and low carbon city and along the two dimensions in our conceptual framework we find four different directionals to articulating and explaining low carbon on the ground the most prominent majority is the state use of carbon related reasons to revoke or change long established practices and this includes how the government is using the reason of the climate change to launch resettlement programs and also to transfer the land use and ownership in the name of the low carbon development or for the construction of particular low carbon industry parks and also this includes the suspension of particular factories production activities as well as the residential heating provision because of the low carbon reasons for the low carbon bill and in the last year maybe if we scan the time frame of this research to the last year maybe this can be seen more widely because of the carbon reduction bill and ambitious and aggressive pursuit of this bill in the last year which leads to the suspension of the heating provision in multiple cities in China which entails the state's prescription or prohibition of particular future events to curb carbon emissions so this somehow resembles the most typical understanding of the environmental state building to institutionalize to define and identify the new institutions and new government subjects to pursue the environmental goals and here we can only see we only find four cases including the one with the carbon emission calculation and also the other three cities using the low carbon framing to stop or to reject the application of the vehicle use permit and at the same time we can see also very active pursuit of the low carbon costs by non-state actors and for the non-state actors to question some policy implementation some particular activities taken by the government and we call this carbon rationalization this denials non-state actors use of climate-related reasons to justify their own actions claiming claims which are existent for example nine informal red-sharing drivers they just claim their justify their activity of the provide red-sharing because this contributes to low carbon transportation and they cite this low carbon transportation as one of the national buildings that are currently claimed by the central government so what I did is contributed to this national bill and also seven cases in seven cases the property owners of the informal buildings are defended their property and building structures because of the materials of the building that are located in a low carbon city project so this is the kind of the third rationale and the last rationale is the non-state actors request for special treatment due to their low carbon future and a group of the seven disputes from seven different cities they use the various titles the honorable titles are listed here to ask for exceptional treatment and specifically the exception from the existing punishment and regulations because they have this kind of identity which responds to the goal of the carbon control and also in the other four cases we see that individuals they question the existing regulatory framework to applied to be applied to particular innovative practice involving low carbon technologies for example one case is questioning the information disclosure scope of the developer because this development project is taken is carried out under the name of the low carbon city a low carbon community and all the building they acquired the green building certificate so the property buyers they are requesting more information regarding the low carbon and green characters of these properties they are just very illustrative of the composite nature of the low carbon city in contrast to a very straightforward cascading flow of the power exertion as the traditional understanding of the environmental state and also we can see the most two problems groups they are actually scanned in direct opposite with each other and the other side is the regulation which is the government branches they are using the rhetoric of no carbon to re-judge and re-decide existing and past events and on the other side is the carbon rationalization which is the same very similar activities but taken by the men's of the government branches and as a result of this contested nature and contestation process urban climate mitigation governments entails not only absorbing and translating national priorities into local policies and programs but also managing the emergent exploitation by diverse urban actors and this is a case study between Shenzhen and Huizhou but I think the time limit I will just briefly introduce this case and if you are interested in more detailed information the findings of this research is just published by the Journal of Urban Affairs and you can maybe identify this article to look for more information of your interest and what we find generally speaking is that all these four kinds of the rationales can be find their representation articulation in both of the cases and the divergent outcomes of Shenzhen can be set a success because of the degree of the carbon reduction in the past eight years since the establishment is very impressive over 80% of the carbon reduction intensity and Shenzhen's project just stopped at a very early stage and just bankrupt in the end so when we take a very close look into how this happened what can explain their divergent outcomes we find that they are using the different strategies to negotiate and connect and to orchestrate different rationales held by different actors and we just call this process of the negotiation and connecting between different rationales as the localizing the low carbon state so finally I'd like to conclude with a couple of observations during my studies on low carbon city so the first observation is that there is an emergent low carbon state and this is low carbon state we defined it as a decarbonization focused environmental state but instead of a sub-category of the environmental state we'd like to see it as more like a variant of the environmental state because there are totally different rationales and logics within the low carbon state particularly low carbon state includes a lot of the green technology innovation and application in the real world and also the whole project of the green economy, low carbon economy and sometimes called circular economy so this integration of the economic growth and the balance between this challenges the long established binary of the growth versus deep growth in the discussion of the environmental state so environmental state is also as always seen as faced with a dilemma between the legitimacy which is closely related to environmental problems and economic growth so this binary relationship they disappear or somehow evolve in the observation of the low carbon state so this low carbon state may contribute to a more exploration of the environmental state the evolving nature and shifting priority in the era of the climate change and the second conclusion is that effective urban climate action is contingent on the process of localizing the low carbon state and the lack of successful localizing practice on the large extent is playing the persistent gap between the high promise and the disappointing reality of urban solution urban response to climate change and the last one is the planning implications so as an educated planner I always expect to think what is the implication and what is the what can we learn as the planning spoiler and the planning practices so here under this whole agenda of the low carbon urban development planning technically it is more related to the defining selecting and negotiating the different multiple and sometimes contrasting or conflicting carbon rationalities held by different persons and appeared across different levels so this might be a challenge for planning to do for planners to do both technically to calculate to use the new matrix of the carbon to imagine the future of the city and to measure the operation of the city and the governance of the city at one time and also to critically think about the undertone or the meanings behind this carbon very technically speaking and very quantifiable material to represent the well-being or the success of the cities and also this can be contextualized into the discussion of the low carbon urbanism and China's case is intriguing and not so representative in terms that China has a very particular administrative and political environment and environmental governance style is very different than other countries in the world but also China can be treated as an extreme case so in China theoretically the carbon which is seen as a quantifiable can be easily territorial realized into different places they theoretically can be implemented the control of the carbon should be straightforward and easier, at least easier than other places with the authoritarian character and the top down environmental management and governance structure but in reality this whole contested contestation process in the space crafted by this value and symbol of the carbon is tremendous in China and what about the other places when there can be more contestation and more storytelling and more utilization of the frame of the low carbon development to direct or drive the different motivations and aspirations in the society so I would like to stop here and thank you for your time this is the reference list and I would like to welcome all the questions from the floor, thank you. Thank you so much Dr. Lee I think you set a great example for students to follow in your footsteps in regards to your research as well as the questions maybe at the end we're running a little bit short on time behind on schedule so next we have the great pleasure to hear from Professor Nick Smith at Columbia's Barnard College, his work explores the politics of urbanization and planning in Asia with a particular focus on contemporary China his recently published book The End of Village resticates an epical shift in Chinese urban policy and its experimental implementation in Chongqing, his current research in the Shikou industrial zone reexamines the origins of China's rapid urbanization in the early reform era, all students here at Columbia interested in the study of Chinese urbanization would greatly benefit from auditing his class please welcome Professor Smith. Hi folks and thanks to the urban China network for organizing this event and for the invitation and to Professor Yang and Dr. Lee for very interesting presentations this is a great panel I know we're running a little bit behind on time and so I'm going to do my best to keep my remarks brief and then you know I look forward to answering questions if there are any afterwards So the theme of this conference is sustainable urban planning and you know I think Dr. Lee did a particularly good job of sort of giving us an understanding of of the treatment of sustainability from in Chinese urbanization and planning from a more what I would say a conventional understanding of what sustainability is right in terms of the intersection of urbanization with environmental and ecological considerations current considerations around climate change et cetera what I want to do in this talk is look at the question of sustainability in a slightly different sense than we usually talk about it to think instead about urbanization at a macro scale and to ask what China's approach to urban planning requires in order to sustain that process of urbanization and that in fact to explore the possibility that the logic of Chinese urbanization in fact necessitates continuous expansion and without that expansion it would not be sustainable that actually the process of urbanization would sort of crumble under its own weight in China though of course you know from a more conventional perspective of course that constant expansion is itself unsustainable from an environmental perspective or challenges sustainability from an environmental perspective so let me share my slides here and just preface this by saying that the sort of main claim of my talk which is entitled the urban origins of China's built road initiative is in essence that this necessity of constant urban expansion that is sort of written into Chinese urbanization and specifically China's more recent efforts to expand urbanization beyond the sort of the coastal provinces that have been very highly urbanized and to instead now expand urbanization into the nation's late developing western interior that those processes are actually one of the main drivers of China's Belt and Road initiative also known as the BRI which China announced in 2014 and so this argument is actually rooted in a larger ethnographic projects that I undertook in Chongqing primarily in 2011 and 2012 and so here's Chongqing in southwestern China and at that point I was focused primarily on the experimental implementation of something called urban rural coordination or in Chinese Chengxiang Tongchou which was a new policy announced in the early 2000s that was focused on the urbanization of rural areas particularly in China's west and has since been sort of updated you might be more familiar with the national plan for new type urbanization the precursor to that national plan was this policy of urban rural coordination now administratively Chongqing is you know as you probably know one of the world's largest municipalities it covers a territory nearly the size of Ireland with a population of about 32 million though of course the autonomous seat of Chongqing the actual city of Chongqing is significantly smaller and when I was there doing research I spent about 18 months there doing ethnographic field work including interviews with you know a variety of urban planning and urban development officials in the municipal planning and policy establishment and all of that resulted in this recent book the end of the village urbanization of rural China which primarily focuses on the implications of urban rural coordinations for China's villages how villages navigate those changes in China's urban development policy the talk that I'm giving today is sort of an outgrowth of that project that instead of scaling down to understand how urban rural coordination in urban policy affects villages instead scales up to understand how China's urban policy and approach to urban planning affects sort of larger regional and continental practices and patterns of urbanization and that is if you're interested in sort of reading more about the arguments that I'm going to sort of briefly summarize today those arguments are available in this recent paper in urban geography which is entitled continental metropolitanization Chongqing and the urban origins of China's Belt and Road initiative so as we know China has urbanized very rapidly since the beginning of the reform era in 1978 but the benefits of urbanization have largely been concentrated along China's eastern coast and this is you know in part a result from the relatively pragmatic ladder step approach to development in the early reform era which allowed coastal provinces which had more immediate access to global markets to open up and to develop first and then the idea being that the sort of central and western regions would catch up later as development diffused or trickled down into the interior. Now of course the result of this has been rising inequality with urban development concentrated primarily along the coast and rural poverty concentrated primarily in the interior and a widening gap in terms of real income between urban and rural areas and that rising inequality leads to a variety of efforts to try to equalize development and urbanization across China's geography both regionally and across the urban rural divide and so that really starts at a national level of course there are previous efforts at regional and provincial levels but the national effort really starts with the great western development campaign starting with that starting with the great western development campaign we get the series of policy programs and approaches that seek to shrink that developmental gap largely through expanding infrastructural development into the nation's interior and so the idea here is that these investments are meant to help encourage the diffusion of economic development and urbanization into China's interior and you know there have been some successes right there have been sort of marginal gains in marginal gains and sort of expanding development into the interior and yet on the whole regional inequality and urban rural inequality have actually increased over the last 20 years and that is at least in part because China's economy has not fundamentally changed China's economic geography they haven't fundamentally changed the structural advantages enjoyed by China's coastal provinces and cities where port cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen remain the gateways to the global economy and therefore the expansion of China's infrastructure networks to the interior highways, high speed rail, etc rather than diffusing economic development into the interior they actually end up enhancing the existing agglomeration advantages of the coast of coastal cities and make it easier for things like labor and goods to make their way from interior provinces to coastal cities already benefit from lower transaction costs and higher returns to capital so that that infrastructural expansion in these various development programs actually further aid the urbanization and development advantages of the coastal cities rather than balancing development towards the interior now excuse me as one of the largest cities in China's west Chongqing has played a particularly prominent role in these efforts to expand urban development into the interior in particular starting with its designation as a provincial level municipality in the late 90s and then in part as a reflection of that in the early 2000s Chongqing undertakes a new master plan with the goal of doubling the size of the central city of Chongqing in both built land area and in population now despite that sort of attention from the central government to try to establish Chongqing as a growth pole in the west despite these efforts around urban planning and urban expansion Chongqing runs into much the same challenges that confront the larger western development campaign where it you know where the cities are really confronts a variety of barriers and trying to sort of achieve these goals in terms of urban expansion and that tension that comes to a head really in 2007 when President Hu Jintao really doubles down on the central government's plans for Chongqing in something that is known as the 314 scheme in which Hu Jintao pushes Chongqing's leaders to turn the city into to really achieve this plan to turn the city into a growth pole for China's west and in the years that follow that moment in 2007 and really with the explicit support and approval of the central government Chongqing's leaders embark on a series of quite ambitious proposals to rethink how the city is approaching urban development and so the idea here is really to model the prior practices of cities like Shanghai and the construction of the Pudong new area which you see here on the left with Wu Jiazui and the approach that Shanghai models in terms of international metropolitanization right and the leaders of Chongqing conclude that the city needs to essentially do the same thing that they need to internationalize Chongqing's economy in order to grow and here you see a rendering of Jiangbei Zui which is very clearly models on Wu Jiazui in Shanghai. Now, the key difference between Chongqing's approach and Shanghai's approach is that instead of connecting to the global economy through existing maritime trade networks which of course are dependent on port cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen Chongqing proposes to instead connect to the global economy but through China's continental land borders resulting in what I refer to as continental metropolitanization so similar to international metropolitanization but instead based on continental connections to the larger continent of Eurasia and so Chongqing's leaders develop this plan to become essentially a powerhouse in the production of notebook computers for the international market and within a few years Chongqing is actually producing more than a third of all notebook computers worldwide most of which are destined for the European market. Nevertheless despite their intent to do this they still have this problem because they still rely on places like Shanghai and Shenzhen to export their products which requires several days on a train in order to get to these ports and then more than a month at sea in order to get to places like Europe all of which puts Chongqing and its notebook producers at a distinct disadvantage compared to factories located along China's coasts or in fact elsewhere in the world particularly given the high turnover nature of the personal computing market and so they embark on this alternative export path which is by rail through Central Asia and Eastern Europe to the port of Rotterdam and the physical rail infrastructure to do this actually already exists there's already a rail line that connects from Chongqing to Rotterdam but it's very difficult to traverse all of the different rail gauges all these different countries all these different customs regimes as you cross one border and another make it very difficult and slow to use this export pathway and so in fact in anticipation of one of the core features of the Belt and Road Initiative which emphasizes institutional coordination alongside the construction of physical infrastructure Chongqing's leaders convene in different countries along with a variety of national ministries in China to harmonize everyone's different rail and customs management in order to make it possible to load a train in Chongqing and unload it in Rotterdam just 16 days later and that is in fact more than twice as fast as the oversee export route you know this freight line which is now called China Express starts running in 2011 it now serves many different cities in China but it originates in Chongqing and Chongqing's leaders in 2011 start referring to it as the new Silk Road and you know they readily admit that they're not the first ones to use this term but they claim to be the first ones to actually put it into practice and this is then followed by plans for a second of these freight lines originating in Chongqing that would run through Myanmar to the Indian Ocean and that second freight line actually it never has not yet materialized because as opposed to the central Asian freight line the physical infrastructure for that second rail line doesn't yet exist and has run into a variety of political difficulties but it's on the basis of this idea there being these two rail lines running from Chongqing that Chongqing starts articulating something called the One River Two Flanks Three Oceans Strategy the idea being that by connecting the Yangtze River corridor which is this economic corridor that connects Chongqing to Shanghai so connecting the Yangtze River economic corridor to these two freight lines Chongqing would become in essence the economic fulcrum or China connecting the Chinese economy to the Pacific Ocean the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean now as Chongqing's leaders emphasized this approach is meant to finally allow China's west to escape its economic dependence on the coast right that that sort of coastal advantage that I talked about earlier and to finally fulfill the promise of the Great Western Development Campaign and it also in many ways anticipates the two-pronged structure of the larger Belt and Road Initiative where we have the Silk Road Economic Belt in the north and the Maritime Silk Road in the south right looks very similar to this One River Two Flanks Three Oceans Strategy and in fact when I was in Chongqing in 2015 talking to a variety of urban development officials one of the things that was getting talked about a lot was how the BRI which had just been announced in 2014 was in many ways modeled on Chongqing's internationalization efforts now in addition to these rail lines there are a number of other initiatives that Chongqing also pursued including expanded air freight connections Chongqing's airport becomes the largest air freight airport in western China as well as an effort to build up Chongqing as a cloud computing hub and as a global center for financial accounting services in with the original intent and it's particularly true in the west of the city so this is the the central core of Chongqing right the historical core and these various internationalization efforts really aid urban expansion in the west much of which is established as a tax-free export zone which is actually the physical terminus of the China Express rail line and then also expansion in the north including another export zone that joins Chongqing's airport and then finally also this new financial center just across the river from Chongqing's historical downtown and that's the Jiangbei Zui financial center which is modeled on Gujiazui in Shanghai and of course all of that adds up to this gigantic expansion in Chongqing scale concentrating the municipalities population of 32 million within a one-hour circle of travel time around the central city of Chongqing and turning the city of Chongqing into the first western city with more than 10 million inhabitants now of course the Belt Road initiatives urban implications are by no means limited to Chongqing and another part of this investigation explores how the BRI has been explicitly conceived as a driver of urbanization throughout China's west where the BRI's international infrastructure all of these different rail lines and highways and economic corridors that expand beyond China's borders are really meant to transform the Eurasian continent into an expanded economic hinterland for domestic Chinese urban development and all of that international infrastructure is conceived of as really an extension of existing domestic infrastructural networks which of course China has already been expanding over the past 20 years in large part as part of the Great Western Development Campaign and then as a result of that these various inland cities in the west are serving as essentially as catchment areas for newly enabled trade in the southwest and in the northwest and so that all drives the metropolitan expansion of these various cities similar to how it's driving metropolitan expansion in Chongqing and in turn that metropolitan expansion then in turn drives regional integration across multiple cities and so for instance in the southwest we get the regional urban mega region of Dianzhong which is centered on Kunming and is conceived of as the economic capital of southeast Asia and then in the northwest we get Guanzhong centered on Xianyang, Lanzhou which is understood as sort of a catchment area for central Asia and then those two urban mega regions in turn feed into the Chengyu-Guai mega region which connects Chengdu, Chongqing and Guiyang through this newly operational high speed rail and together those three mega regions now form in essence this new inland economic belt that is meant to parallel and balance the historical coastal economic belt that has historically anchored China's development with of course the Pearl River Delta in the south the Yangtze River Delta and then the Bohei region now Xingzhen-Zi and of course in all of this we come back to Chongqing which really serves as that fulcrum point that ties this new inland economic belt into the Yangtze River corridor and down to Shanghai now the last point that I just want to make briefly before wrapping up is to conclude with a few words about how this investigation might speak to larger bodies of literature in urban studies and urban planning the first thing that I would say is that I think it's quite tempting to see this as a relatively straightforward example of what we might otherwise call state rescaling both the scaling up of transformational infrastructure networks and scaling down to empower municipal development policy and urban expansion and I think there's actually quite a bit of wisdom to that the BRI is a powerful example of the dialectically intertwined movements of on the one hand internationalization and extentsification and on the other hand urbanization and intensification as twin responses to crises of capital accumulation but I actually think the BRI takes on a slightly different character when we start to look at it through the lens of post-colonial urban studies where conventional accounts of state rescaling talk about the strategic repositioning of cities within global economic hierarchies without really challenging the stability of those hierarchies themselves in the conventional state rescaling literature New York and London remain the center of the global economy by contrast post-colonial urban studies seeks ways to ontologically destabilize those hierarchies to use novel epistemological and methodological techniques to generate new geographies a theory that re-center urban studies away from those conventional centers of urban power places like New York and London and in a way the BRI tries to accomplish in practice what post-colonial urban studies has sought to achieve theoretically so through the production and integration of this nearly planetary urban network the BRI ultimately aspires to transform the global urban hierarchy itself not only rescaling urban regions and infrastructures to ensure a competitive advantage within the existing hierarchy but also re-centering global economic networks away from those historical nodes of urban primacy in Europe and North America and toward these new continental metropoles cities like Chongqing in China and so China has in essence flipped the script of state rescaling creating this whole new global geography and at the same time that is also restructuring urban regions in its western interior to take leading roles in that re-centered future okay I'm going to stop there and I look forward to your questions thanks thank you so much professor Smith we have I will be opening up up to questions for both professor Smith and Dr. Lee and I believe there is a direct question for professor Smith right away from Christian okay I will read it for him do you think there is a possibility of the rail line replacing the maritime route especially considering how much higher and simpler the capacity of the maritime trade is yeah it's a good question I am certainly not claiming that the real line is going to replace maritime trade right and in fact one of the things to know about the China express route is that it very much relies on state subsidies in order to maintain sustainability maintain its economic sustainability and that is in large part because the volume of trade from China to Europe is much higher than the volume of trade from Europe to China and so a lot of those trains go back to China empty right and so it requires subsidization in order to be able to maintain nevertheless you know China has the economic wherewithal to continue to maintain those subsidies and as long as they do it's transforming global economic geographies and at a certain point you're going to have the path dependencies such that you know those global economic geographies will be sustainable so I do think that it's not going to replace maritime trade but it's certainly going to become an important alternative and particularly when we're thinking about questions of climate change maritime trade is a huge contributor to climate change and that real infrastructure while not carbon neutral is putting quite a bit less carbon into the atmosphere to get you know goods from China to Europe so you know I do I think there are a variety of ways in which that rail route will be important in the future great thank you I see a question from Professor Wu yes thank you Nick and the Yun Jing I have actually a comment for Nick and a question for Yun Jing so Nick I am thrilled that you are expanding the work and looking into implications of BR you know Belt and Road I am just so so I mean I think your interpretation is in a sense the impact of the initiative for potentially reshape right the urban hierarchy although I I think the fundamentally the initiative is about energy security and is about geopolitical realignment so I just I feel that maybe the urban is not as central and so just sort of a point of debate that we can have offline some other time so for Yun Jing I am thrilled also to see that you have expanded your doctoral research and especially by using Wen Shu Wang I happen to also have been using that as well and so I am wondering if there is a timing issue here that you only have something like 90 some cases because when I was looking at Wen Shu especially on land dispute it just millions I don't know tens of thousands and so I was only able to focus on Shanghai and but then again land issue arose much earlier decades earlier and the issue of low carbon and also the actual sort of going to courts to challenge environmental issues it's much more recent so I mean how how do you actually sorted through these cases right I don't actually I did not never solve the you know environmental issues as the categories of organization of cases on Wen Shu Wang and so so it's very curious about your methodology of using that data source Professor Wu so the number because I think that this is the filtering process I took so first because I want to I'm interested in the contradiction and contestation between the government authorities and domestic actors so I only looked into the legal dispute just ended administrative litigation law so only I looked at only one kind of law which is a formal channel for individuals to see against government action I think that is maybe one reason why the number is limited and the second reason might be there are too many irrelevant as I search through the process there are so many using the low carbon as only a name of the company a name of the place a name of an organization and also as I find in the first stage of the search that can't change is like it's not like a climate change climate change but like the weather change and there is not a very exceptional cases on this use of the climate change but a whole bunch of the cases more than 120 pieces using the same word of the climate change to denote there is a bad weather so I just delayed my arrival to some particular cases and caused some legal outcome or legal effects so maybe I think that might also explain why the number is limited so for the next step maybe when the low carbon is and carbon control becomes a gender or an issue that penetrating into different aspects of the society maybe there are other kinds of the laws and the ways that these views will be judged and that may be provide more empirical evidence to look at this different interpretations of the low carbon city. Wonderful and I think that's a wonderful segue for me to open up the discussion so we're going to like I have a question for both of you and that is we're constantly thinking about ways to future proof cities from an economic and environmental perspective and both of you have the unique perspectives of scholars who have lived in state extensively in the United States and China what are some of the strengths of each countries from an urban sustainability perspective and your research perspective and what are some aspects that we can learn from each other and either of you can go first so maybe I can provide some constructive or intuitive reflections to this question so I think learning is really hard and not only learning across different culture and social context but also learning from your own past or learning from your one's failure or success that kind of the replication is extremely difficult to achieve and I think this might be somehow demonstrated by how we deal with the COVID and I think in these different Chinese cities and US cities I think this learning sometimes is like a counterpart but in a different context and the learning might cause some unexpected outcomes and also in the name of the same concept for example the climate and sustainability that might be articulated by different approaches and strategies and tactics on the ground so I'm not going to say that I'm not a believer in the power of learning but I just want to recognize that the difficulty of that and what does learning mean when we want to replicate the successful experiences from one place to another so I don't know whether I have already answered the question or just raised new questions Yeah I think I have sort of a similar to share as Yun Jing which is the balance between both the necessity of thinking across contexts in order to be able to learn but also the real care that you need to take in making those comparisons and that there is a lot of sort of misunderstanding or epistemic violence that can result from uncareful comparison and I think that is one of the things that contemporary urban studies has really been centrally concerned with over the last 10 to 15 years is how we go about the practice of comparison and I appreciate it in your question that it wasn't a unidirectional question I think 10 or 15 years ago it would have been a unidirectional question what can China learn from the United States and I think now it really needs to be a mutual conversation there are things that the U.S. can learn from China as well and it is not much about concrete practices so much as it is about sort of what China what truths China reveals about the United States and vice versa what truths the U.S. reveals about China when we start thinking about them comparatively when we use China as a lens for thinking about the U.S. as a lens for thinking about China I think we can start to see actually some we can start to think in more imaginative ways to sort of conceive alternative futures rather than be sort of locked into the way that things are so for instance one of the things that I think China helps understand about the U.S. is our sort of ideological commitment to the inviolability of private property rights which I think is one of the real stumbling blocks for real fundamental transformation on a lot of different things in the contemporary United States including climate change responding to climate change and a variety of issues in the realm of social justice including housing affordability and China with its system of state owned land ownership in urban areas and the role that the party plays in urban development and the real estate market I think really shines a light on the extent to which the exercise of private property rights is really is really political in the United States in a way that we don't often recognize right we often sort of just like put it in an economic bucket we say the market is going to take care of that but actually those choices to just let the market take care of it that's a political choice and I think using China as a lens for the United States really exposes that just as an example. Thank you both for answering that very difficult question so my next question is more for Dr. Lee the term environmental authoritarianism is very interesting to me because it indicates a continuation of a more top-down planning style in China we here at Columbia are increasingly looking at the movements of climate justice from the streets and by populations that are more vulnerable to climate racism which in the US intersects with discrimination towards racialized groups and low income groups and as alumni of GSAP who actually formally worked on community outreach initiatives such as UTAP do you see any movements of civic groups towards climate justice in Hong Kong or mainland China and how do these two differ? That is a very interesting question so this kind of the bottom-up initiative to not only tackle the problem of the climate change but also tackle the and even distribution of the other effects and the costs of climate solutions I think that is a very emerging topic in the scholarly discussion and we can see an increasing number of the empirical cases in the US as well as the Europe and in Hong Kong I also see this kind of the things that are happening toward the goal of the climate mitigation or adaptation but it is not conducted under the name of the climate justice and that is very interesting to me because sometimes you say a thing you carry on a title but what you do is maybe not actually toward that end but sometimes you can do something that worked for a particular goal even without the acknowledgement of the functioning of the action or activity toward the goal so I like to see many interesting initiatives in the civil society in Hong Kong who are claiming for working for the justice in terms of the food especially healthy food distribution and provision across different income groups so I can see in China there are some top-down initiatives but targeted toward particularly historically disadvantaged social groups and the overall agenda of the poverty allegation and that is how to develop for them how to develop renewable energy in the historically very poor rural and countryside areas but as I mentioned that is not always very clear direction or connection between the activities going on and the goal of the climate justice as the concept of the climate justice I don't see so many organizations or action in China or Hong Kong with this very explicit explicit title or aim of the climate justice thank you that is very very enlightening and I think we have a question in the zoom chat from Mr. Richard Jordan would you like to say yourself yes thank you very much can you can you see me and hear me yes you can I think Professor Smith does the concept of global citizenship help to expand this idea of intercontinental trade routes I'm thinking that shared human destiny is another way of talking about trade routes perhaps thank you very much I don't know about shared human destiny the question of citizenship is definitely a central one and you know I think it is noteworthy but in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative I that those various institutional collaborations are enabling the free flow of goods technology capital right along these infrastructural corridors but not necessarily labor people and that there remain important distinctions in terms of personal mobility and the mobility of labor and so I think that is something to keep an eye on as the Belt and Road Initiative progresses and as international migration as the international migration of labor to China increases particularly as China seeks to wind down the Hukou system and the exploitation of rural Hukou holders as a part of China's larger manufacturing economy and I think one of the implications of that is that China's manufacturing economy potentially becomes more dependent on international migration along many of these same infrastructural routes and then the question becomes what policies are put in place in terms of the selective permeability of international borders and so all of that is TBD and it will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe a last question and I'll go to the closing remarks of the urban China farm this year. First of all thank you so much Professor Smith and Dr. Lee for inspiring lecture. Personally I see the issue of scale in both of our presentations whether in Dr. Lee's approach the failure of large scale urban intervention adopting new this low carbon or even zero carbon concept. For example the recent failure in Shanghai or in Professor Smith your presentation the failure of high speed railroad in balancing urban and rural inequality. On the other hand the macro intervention that Professor Yan mentioned seems to be relatively more successful in terms of its implementation. Do you all believe that this is the issue of scale in terms of governance or geographical terrain that will largely impact how we approach urban sustainability. Thank you. Can you rephrase the question? I don't know that I totally understand what it is you're trying to ask. Yes so I was more thinking about like all the three presentations all together through the lens of scale the scale of urban intervention whether it is through a small intervention like what Professor Yan had mentioned those little interventions that they did for the neighborhood or in the larger scale intervention for example the high speed railroad system across the country or in Dr. Lee's kind of approach this adaptation of low carbon at a city or like a governance level while seeing the very recent experiment or like a failure of downtown city which is designed to be the first zero carbon city in China. I see this scale difference in terms of how we approach urban sustainability and do you think this is one thing that we should think about for how effective I would say an approach is working towards that? Certainly scale is an important dimension and we need to think about it. I don't think that we can think about different scales and isolation from each other and in fact you read the urban geography literature there has been a turn in terms of thinking about scale over the last 10 or 20 years from thinking of scales as these self-contained units as either macro or micro and instead of thinking about scale relationally whether it's tiny-scaled or big-scaled but rather the relationship between different scales. I think that would be my initial response which is that any of these interventions can't be limited to one scale of operation. You can build the biggest fastest high-speed rail network but if you are not also working at a metropolitan scale to understand how urban development is going to intersect with that or working at a community scale to understand how the station is going to interact with the community the high-speed rail network is not going to have the effect that you want it to so I think it is really important to be thinking relationally across these scales and how they intersect with each other. Professor Smith about this relational perspective on scales so scales in the scholarly discussion in recent years it is challenging at the view of scale as a spatial unit or a container to hone a particular amount of the things, entities materialities in a specific spatial unit instead scale I think entails more dynamic between different scales and in climate, urban climate governance from my area we always talk about how to upscale the good practices found in on the ground how to make a good practice is replicable or generalizable to other things that we call this kind of the upscaling process and this dynamic view on scale I think it is sometimes a little difficult for planning practitioners I think that may be one point I would like to mention as a planner a trained planner because for planners we always have a concrete project and this concrete project always has a physical and geographic boundaries and there is a past dependence for a particular planner when you get into the field and get into this profession and started to make planning for a particular size or a particular level of the spatial unit you are going to it is more likely that you are going to do the projects of the similar level or similar scale so it is somehow very challenging for practitioners to think across the scales to think out of the scale you are working on in terms of the physical boundaries of the projects but to the more contextual factors on a broader range in a broader context how that kind of the force is related to what you have at hand that is what my understanding of the scale so thank you both for your responses so on behalf of the entire urban China network team thank you professor Jin Jiangyang Dr Li Wenzhen and professor Nick Miss for enlightening lectures today we are so appreciative for taking your time on a Saturday morning or evenings to speak to us here at Coimbatricep we also thank the audiences that are there drawing a line or in person today urban accessibility and effects of urban regeneration and environmental destruction on urban areas is increasingly focused on in China and around the world and the forefront of government and economic concerns yesterday we explored the involving role of different levels of governance as well as issues of environmental preservation as part of methods for urban transformation in China well today we are here to discuss the complex spatial and social processes of urban regeneration and transformation including the history of the various phases consideration of the present and economic infrastructure initiatives of the future this allows us to understand a bit more about how the evolving dynamics of urban renewal impacts both Asian and new cities across the country despite the limitation of on-site research scholars from around the world to engage in researching Chinese cities which serve as both experiential laboratory an exciting frontier of sustainable urban planning for the urban regeneration we want to also give special thanks to Professor Wei Ping Wu for her support and her leadership in making GSAP urban planning the diverse program it is today we couldn't have done this without her we really appreciate hearing the insightful research of the three professors it will be very useful for the students future research if any other students have questions about this please let us know on WeChat or by email and if it's okay with the professors urban China network will forward the questions to you guys thank you all again for your participation today and hope you guys have a nice day slash night thank you thank you all so much thanks Smith unfortunately Dr. Li can't really fly in from Hong Kong to join us at our reception but it's Professor Nick Smith if you would like to come we're in there whether 209 there's plenty of food left there's plenty of food left so if you would like to join come over for some food we would love to we'd love to chat okay I'll try to make it over okay have a good afternoon everybody thank you