ABSTRACT
China’s national development agenda has set a goal of 60 per cent urbanization by 2030. This means that each year about 16 million of its rural inhabitants will be moving into cities of different sizes. This trend has continued for more than a decade in what sociologist David Harvey regards as ‘the largest mass migration the world has ever seen’. 1 One of the outcomes of this massive urbanization is the numerous infrastructural and large-scale building projects across the country, from dams, bridges and highways to gated communities, shopping malls and spectacular civic buildings, which have fundamentally changed China’s urban landscapes.
