China's Emerging Cities

The number of rural migrants to Chinese cities is staggering, and in a China that is also experiencing other significant socioeconomic change, the resulting privatization of housing and other facets of urban development policy seem to be averting what could have become utter chaos. This collection of 14 studies examines how policies merge with perceptions to create a new methods of developing urban environments, covering the shift from gradualism to action, changes in land property rights, public/private partnership in infrastructure, divergent trajectories and impacts in economic and social transitions, labor market changes and protection for urban informal workers, policies on aging, home ownership as a method of the distribution of wealth, the process of rebuilding and redevelopment, and emerging leisure and consumption practices. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Fulong Wu is Professor of East Asian Planning and Development and the Director of the Urban China Research Centre at the School of City and Regional Planning of Cardiff University. He is co-editor (with Laurence Ma) of Restructuring the Chinese City (Routledge, 2005), editor of Globalization and the Chinese City (Routledge, 2006), and co-author (with Jiang Xu and Anthony Gar-On Yeh) Urban Development in Post-Reform China: State, Market, and Space (Routledge, 2007).