Governing the Urban in China and India

This presentation is co-sponsored by SFU's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Urban Studies Program, David Lam Centre, and Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

Urbanization is rapidly overtaking China and India, the two most populous countries in the world. One-sixth of humanity now lives in either a Chinese or Indian city. This transformation has unleashed enormous pressures on land use, housing, and the environment. Despite the stakes, the workings of urban governance in China and India remain obscure and poorly understood. In this talk, Xuefei Ren will present her book Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press; Winner of 2022 Robert Park Best Book Award, American Sociological Association). The book explores how China and India govern their cities and how their different styles of governance produce inequality and exclusion.

Speaker

Xuefei Ren is a professor of sociology and global urban studies at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on urban governance and the built environment in comparative perspective. She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a fellow in the Humanity’s Urban Future program of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.