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Cross-Cutting
Dear All,
Multiple, often highly contrasting, stories can be told about China's urbanization. While we are drawing the Urbanizing China course to the end tomorrow, we will present in the last dialogue "Alternative Narratives of China's Urbanization", and collectively re-package the 26 dialogues, 17 guest speakers, 24 class videos and 200+ idea notes in different frames of reference following these narratives.
I'd like to thank my TA Liyan Xu, the 17 colorful guest speakers and 22 energetic students, official or unofficial, who have challenged me into making this learning experiment possible!
Best, Jinhua
China urbanized 350 million people in the past 30 years and is poised to do it again in the next three decades. China’s urbanization is immense and rapid but 'out of sync'. This subject poses three questions:
The subject treats China’s urbanization as the joint result of 'natural' socioeconomic processes and conscious actions by governments, markets and the public.One overarching theme is the intricate interaction between state and market in China’s context, yielding a variety of state-market “cocktails” devised and experimented in different cities in response to local problems, each involving a multi-layered projection onto urban space.
Instead of covering the various topics individually (land, housing, transportation, energy, environment, migration, finance, urban inequality, …), this course is structured to three clusters that examine the connections between these multiple functional domains. The subject will evolve continually to keep pace with the dynamics of Chinese cities, engaging students and guest speakers to provide critical inputs.
17 guest speakers are invited from MIT, Tufts, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Tongji and Tsinghua. A diverse group of 22 students, official or unofficial, contribute actively to the class. Jinhua is the critical commentator and provide a few generic logics that bind the dialogues into a coherent story.
Classes are organized as a semi-structured dialogue in the similar form of NPR’s On Point. Programming of each class includes:
Most of the dialogues are videotaped and available at MIT Tech TV.
All course materials are posted at MIT Stellar, including syllabus, lecture ppt, readings, class videos and student idea notes.