RCCHC "Science, Technology, Society and Culture" Talk Series - Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China

This talk examines how Chinese citizens negotiate the everyday in a landscape shaped by expanding urban facilities, improved city infrastructure, digital technologies, and a pervasive surveillance regime. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with urban volunteers, the author explores how citizens not only engage with new urban spaces and upgraded facilities but also experiment with political, social, and cultural forms of participation. The book argues that volunteering has become an urban practice through which citizens navigate hierarchies of urban and rural status, gender, age, and ability while contesting top-down, mega-event-driven forms of urbanisation. It introduces the concept of infrastructural urbanism to analyse a form of urban modernity characterised by enhanced mobility, expanded civic practices, time-space compression, and broader technological and social transformations. Infrastructural urbanism also offers a framework for understanding how state power, consumption, and surveillance are intertwined in ways that generate new possibilities for political engagement and social change.