The Sage Handbook of Urbanization in China

The Sage Handbook of Urbanization in China is a pioneering handbook that reframes our understanding of China's extraordinary urban transformation—a demographic shift of unprecedented scale and speed that has seen two-thirds of its population becoming urban dwellers. Moving beyond conventional narratives, editors Hoffman, Hubbert, and Liu develop an innovative conceptual approach that emphasizes distinctiveness without exceptionalism, global connections without universalism, and complex interrelationships beyond binary oppositions.

Through twenty-eight meticulously researched chapters of critical literature reviews, leading scholars explore China's cities and urbanism not simply through top-down state directives but also through intricate negotiations among diverse actors, interests, and histories. Deploying the concept of "accompaniment," the editors argue the chapters reveal how state socialism and market mechanisms, rural traditions and urban aspirations coexist in dynamic tension rather than stark opposition.

From historic preservation to smart city technologies, from migrant experiences to environmental initiatives, from land use and architecture to housing and labor, this volume demonstrates how urbanization in China is simultaneously localized and worlded—connected to global currents while producing distinctive outcomes. By focusing on human experiences alongside institutional arrangements, the contributors illuminate how diverse actors actively shape urban spaces through their everyday decisions, creative adaptations, and sometimes resistance.

The Sage Handbook of Urbanization in China is essential reading for urban studies scholars, development practitioners, policy makers, and China specialists, this volume provides both literature reviews by scholarly experts and conceptual and analytical tools applicable far beyond China's borders, contributing to global urban theory while respecting local specificity.

Part One: Setting the Stage
Part Two: Land Matters
Part Three: Configuring Belonging
Part Four: The Creative and the Disruptive
Part Five: Negotiating Identities
Part Six: Generating New Geographies

Lisa M. Hoffman is Professor in the School of Urban Studies at University of Washington Tacoma and faculty in China Studies at UW.  Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she describes her interdisciplinary work as anthropology of the urban. Her scholarship has focused on questions of power, governing and social change, with a particular interest in subjectivity and its intersections with spatiality.  Research projects include studies of professionals/ism and volunteers/ism in urban China, anthropology of neoliberalism, and regimes of green urbanisms and rural urbanization in China.  Her work has been published in journals such as Economy and Society; Territory, Politics, Governance; IJURR, Pacific Affairs, and Hau. Book publications include Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China (2010, Temple UP), Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday (2015, UGeorgia Press, co-edited with Heather Merrill), and Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma (2020, UW Press, co-authored with Mary Hanneman).

Jennifer Hubbert is Professor of Anthropology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She received her BA and MA from Stanford University and an MA and PhD from Cornell University. She is the author of China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization (Hawaii, 2019). Her research on public culture, nationalism, the nation-state, public diplomacy, and global relations in China has been published in American Ethnologist, The Asia Pacific Journal, Visual Anthropology, PoLAR, Modern China, positions, and City & Society, among others. Hubbert’s recent research, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, explores the cultural worlds of liberal gun owners and has been published in Social Science Quarterly.

Zhilin Liu is Professor in the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University. Her research interests include urban planning and governance, housing policy, rural-to-urban migration, and sustainable urbanization. She has published widely in English and Chinese peer-reviewed journals. She currently serves as a co-editor of Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, is Chair of the board of directors for the International Association for China Planning, and Vice Chair of the Asian-Pacific Network for Housing Research, and a board member for various journals or academic associations including the Urban China Research Network and the Behavioral Geography Committee of China Geographical Society. She received her bachelor and master degrees in urban geography from Peking University and PhD in city and regional planning from Cornell University.