Between Big City and Authentic Village: Branding the Small Chinese City

While recent academic research has already produced an impressive corpus on big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, the small Chinese city has been mostly ignored. In this article, I suggest that consideration of the small city can bring a new perspective on the wider urban fabric of which it is an element. Although small city governments have embraced urban entrepreneurialism with the same enthusiasm as China’s big cities, different configurations of space, branding and the everyday have nevertheless resulted. My case study of Kaili in Guizhou province indicates that the small city exists in a complex relationship with the big city and the village; it is pulled towards large-scale urbanization while simultaneously attempting to construct a unique city image based upon the evocation of rural cultural practices. The perspective from the small city thus suggests the need to consider the rural-urban divide – long a dominant geographical imagination of China – alongside other geographies, including a triad of the small city, the village and the big city

Equilibrium or imbalance? Rail Transit and Land Use Mix in Station Areas

Although it is widely reported that rail transit has the potential to encourage higher density development, it remains unclear whether rail transit leads to more mixed urban development across station areas. This article provides rare quantitative analysis of changes in land use mix around the rail transit system in Tianjin, China through an investigation into the spatial effects of a rail transit line which cuts across both highly developed and less developed areas. By using longitudinal data over a twelve-year period (2004–2016) and by comparing the entropy-based land-use mix index, the study shows that with the operation of rail transit, land use mix has increased in formerly low-mixed station catchments, but the change is not obvious for already highly diverse areas. It also shows that a more balanced development occurs in station areas with higher land use dominance, while the leading functions are intensified in station areas with lower land use dominance. By presenting a clear picture of the spatial distribution and patterns of land use mix changes over time, this article concludes that rail transit leads to more balanced development across different station areas in the context of China’s rapid urbanization. The outcome provides a base for further exploring how the planning of rail transit stations may help tackle the differentiated development in cities