XClose

The Bartlett School of Planning

Menu

Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China

23 November 2022, 2:00 pm–3:00 pm

CPRG

A China Planning Research Group Seminar

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Organiser

Yi Feng

The event will be held online. Please joing via Zoom.

Zoom meeting ID: 993 3185 3302

This talk considers the politics of science and nature in China's urban conservation. Within this context, particular logics of ecological integrity and socio-environmental improvement underlie practices of conservation planning and human resettlement. These logics, often framed as part of "building an ecological civilization," laid a foundation for ecological protection zoning across municipalities and contributed to normalizing processes of ecological migration across the peri-urban fringe. This talk provides historical context for these logics and practices rooted in China's ecological thought. And it discusses how these logics shape contemporary ecological protection practices in municipal regions and uneven socio-economic trajectories for peri-urban ecological migrants. In considering the logics, techniques, and trajectories that undergird ecological urbanization, the talk examines how scientific planning to improve nature and society extend municipal state power and unevenly reconfigure China's citizenry.

About the Speaker

Jesse Rodenbiker

Associate Research Scholar at Center on Contemporary China, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University

He is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Previously, he served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell University, as well as a Visiting Scholar at Sichuan University's School of Public Administration and Department of Land Resource Management. His book manuscript, titled Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in 2023.