Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to extend the discussion of post-socialist cities beyond Europe through consideration of urban China. It explores the disruptive influence of the contemporary Chinese cityscape on the everyday, and the stability imbued upon this everyday by place names from the socialist era.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I seek to extend the discussion of post-socialist cities beyond Central and Eastern Europe through consideration of urban China. I elaborate on one of the panel's overarching questions to ask: what has happened to the time-space of socialism in a country where there was no acknowledged fall of socialism, and in a contemporary era whose very designation ("post-socialist", "post-Mao", "reform") is a matter of contestation?

I address this question by exploring how the rapidly changing cityscape of contemporary China disrupts everyday leisure practices, and how these practices are given a certain spatial stability by place names which derive from the socialist era. Focusing on the specifics of everyday music-making in the small city of Kaili, I describe how music groups in the city have frequently had to relocate their activity in the face of a constantly shifting built environment. I then utilize Kevin Lynch's (1960) concept of the city image to argue that everyday life must have stable spatial reference points in order to be coherent and navigable. In Kaili, these stable spatial references points included place names which derived not only from contemporary schools and squares, but also from the long-demolished or relocated institutions and landmarks of the Mao era. Most notably, the numbered monikers of once secretive, military factories continued to feature and resonate in the everyday conversations of the city, as contemporary designators of urban neighbourhoods.