Ecological State: Science, Nature and the City in China’s Southwest

As the world’s most rapidly urbanizing country, China is taking measures to balance urbanization with sustainable development. Jesse’s work explores China’s urban green development at the intersection of environmental science, urban land governance, and social dislocation. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic, archival, geo-visual, and participatory methods, his research examines the cultural politics and political economies of urban land governance in the context of post-socialist environmental planning across major cities of the China’s Southwest. He makes the case that ecological sciences crucially inform urban land-use classification strategies that allow the local state to transform 20% of city regions into ecological protection zones. Far from neutral, processes of green zoning are remaking state and society through the uneven incorporation of peri-urban land and people. By interrogating the scientific roots and territorializing practices of land and housing dispossession, Jesse’s work speaks to state formations and social inequalities underlying green urban development across China. 

2018 Summer Research funded by Global Metropolitan Studies