Paper short abstract:

This paper will shed light on how new-city planning schemes combine technocratism and ad-hockery and will examine how this paradoxical combination is generative of new urban spaces, as well as also new epistemologies of city-making and ways of imagining the good life and justice in the city.

Paper long abstract:

The notion of “test-bed urbanism” (Halpern et al. 2013) has been coined in recent years to identify a mode of contemporary urban development in which the city is cast as a site for trying out new and as-yet unproven concepts and technologies in urban space. Critical to the idea of test-bed urbanism is the emphasis placed upon the speculative nature of development agendas and an ideology of innovation for the sake of novelty itself. In this paper, I borrow the notion of test-bed urbanism to explore China’s urbanization in recent decades as being punctuated by the construction of an array of experimental development schemes touted as models and prototypes while simultaneously being highly aspirational, provisional, and performative. By focusing on the tensions between idealized plans and the usually incomplete outcomes of various experimental assays in city-building, I aim to shed light on how such urban planning schemes combine technocratism and ad-hockery and show how this paradoxical and messy combination is, in fact, generative in terms of creating new urban spaces but also new epistemologies of city-making and ways of imagining the good life and justice in the city.