URBANization in CHINA’s southwestern borderlands. The case of Jinghong, Xishuangbanna (URBAN_CHINA) is a pioneering, interdisciplinary research project whose overall scientific objective was to foreground the complexity and diversity of urbanization in China’s non-metropolitan and non-industrial multi-ethnic borderlands through the 2000s-2010s. It took as a case study Jinghong, an emerging city with a sizeable ethnic minority population, in southern Yunnan Province, on the border with Myanmar and Laos.
In particular, this project had 5 Specific Objectives: 1) The first specific objective (SO1) was to explore the changing urban morphology of Jinghong over the last 66 years, taking into account transformations in the urban layout and in the buildings’ aesthetics and structure. 2) The second specific objective (SO2) was to examine how the Chinese government’s urban planning, normative framework and governance underpinning Jinghong’s urban development under post-socialism relates to discourses of development, ethnicity, nation, civilization, citizenship and social order in the border context; and how this fits within or differs from China’s broader national urbanization framework. 3) The third specific objective (SO3) was to investigate the city’s socio-economic and demographic transformations, including the settlement patterns, change in the ethnic and class make-up, the formation of different mixes of “insiders” and “outsiders”, as a consequence of growing Han in-migration since the 1960s. 4) The fourth specific objective (SO4) was to explore the subjective and experiential aspects of Jinghong’s urbanization, probing into how the different groups of people have gained, maintained, transformed or lost their rights and senses of belonging to the city following recent urban re-structuring and in-migration. 5) The fifth specific objective (SO5) was to investigate the strategies and discourses that frame friction or conflict between the Han majority, ethnic minority groups and the government.
Research carried out for URBAN_CHINA found that the new rise of cities in China’s south-western frontier reveals sharply different spatial, political and socio-economic dynamics than long established cities in the centre: 1) urban development and re-development in the borderlands is a state project to “civilize” ethnic minority groups and integrate them into the Chinese nation; 2) frontier urban expansion is a means to securing Beijing's political control over the borderlands; 3) ethnic minorities are not merely victims of state-sponsored projects of space re-structuring, but active participants in the process of frontier urban change; 4) Jinghong's urbanization has favored the rise of ethnic Tai nouveaux riches that constitute a new sui generis frontier middle-class.
The Project had a duration of 24 months, articulated in two different phases at two separate host institutions:
1. 9 months (from 1 February 2018 to 31 October 2018 full-time), at the Department of Architecture, Design and Urban Planning (DADU), the University of Sassari (UNISS),
2. 15 months (from 1 May 2019 to 31 December 2020 part-time), at the Department of Asian and North African Studies (DSAAM), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (UNIVE).
