Doctoral Dissertation Research: Rethinking Urbanization and Development in the 21st Century

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The rapid urbanization being experienced today around the world is both lauded and feared by policy and development experts. Yet there are no standardized definitions of what constitutes the "urban" or how it should be measured, even in United Nations data bases. Consequently, urbanization projects are informed by variable and shifting definitions and goals. Because these projects include not only the expansion of cities and rural development but also large-scale demolition of urban spaces and relocation of city residents, urbanization can no longer be thought of as simply population shift or city growth. We need to better understand the effects of the shifting aims and ideologies that direct current urbanization policies and programs in practice.University of Chicago doctoral student Victoria Nguyen, who is supervised by Dr. Judith Farquhar, will undertake 12 months of ethnographic field research on the contemporary meaning and significance of urbanization. She will focus in particular on how diverse state, institutional, and everyday urban actors articulate and mediate changing ideologies and expectations of "correct urbanity." The research will be conducted in Beijing, China, a particularly apt research site because China is presently executing one of the most ambitious urbanization programs in modern history. The country's New National Urbanization Plan seeks to move 250 million rural residents into cities and towns within the next 12 years and also to remedy what it diagnoses as pervasive "urban disease" in China's largest and oldest cities. Beijing's antiquity should make the conflicts around urbanization particularly visible and therefore amenable to social scientific research. Nguyen's research will take place at four sites: a state-owned development firm, a cultural preservation NGO, international urban think-tanks, and within the neighborhoods of Old Beijing. Using such research methods as interviews and participant observation, the researcher will collect information on how shifting ideals of urban life affect built and social environments, the delineation of urban and non-urban spaces, historical preservation and demolition, and social inclusion and exclusion. Findings from the research will have applicability to theorizing the significance of urbanization in the world today, wherever it takes place, including in the United States. Her findings should also be helpful to planners, policy makers, and citizens who confront and must respond to urbanization in their daily lives.