ABSTRACT
The urban transformations carried out in China since the 2008 Olympic Games are examined as the most recent chapter of the capitalist urbanization initiated in the Industrial Revolution. In this context of extreme urban forms, the author rediscovers the Benjaminian themes of “the ruins and worlds of bourgeois dreams.” Being a critic since the start of the “strategic urban planning,” which renewed the progress of the capital over the urban in the neoliberalism, Arantes analyzes here the new China and the large urban projects as a radical projection of the “dreamed worlds” about the destruction and reconstruction of Chinese cities. The speed as well as the scale of this process are possible only in the recent configuration of capitalism, which has its most advanced frontier in contemporary China.
