Tim Oakes

Place and the Paradox of Modernity

The concept of place has, over the past decade, been invigorated theoretically by geographers emphasizing the unboundedness, historical dynamism, and multiple identities inherent in places. This work is often characterized as a new way of conceiving place, enabled in part by the rise of postmodern cultural and social theory and the related demise of modernism in academia. Modernism, it has been claimed, devalued place as a relevant vehicle for understanding social change. This paper, however, contends that in fact place has been a particularly significant terrain for representing the experience of modernity, and that the conception of place envisioned in contemporary cultural geography has important humanistic roots in much nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. The paper examines the intersections between this literary tradition of place representation and academic geography, examining the work of Goethe and Hardy, and the fiction of Raymond Williams. These writers articulated a vision of place no...

Eating the food of the ancestors: place, tradition, and tourism in a Chinese frontier River town

This essay explores the development of tourism as a local cultural production in a remote region of south-west China. It offers a case study in the contests over how landscapes are represented and reconstructed for tourist consumption. Two issues underlie the analysis: One is the relationship between broader cultural discourse and its local appropriation and manipulation. In this case, that broader cultural discourse is one dominated by ideals of Chinese tradition, civilization, and refinement. The other issue is the way tourism gets mixed up in this process of local appropriation, rendering its development as much a local cultural product as it is an external force linking specific localities to much broader circuits of exchange and capital accumulation. The goal is a more culturally complex rendering of tourism’s ‘consumption’ of places, one that sees not merely a globalizing force bearing down upon a once-isolated community but also the dynamic ways local cultural meanings wrap the tourism experience in an envelope of local meaning.

Heritage as Improvement Cultural Display and Contested Governance in Rural China

This article explores the display of cultural heritage as a contested project of governance and social ordering in rural China. It argues that heritage preservation and display are viewed by many Chinese scholars, officials, and villagers themselves as powerful tools of modernization and development; that cultural display implies a project of “improvement” and of building “quality” among the “backward” rural population; and that this view of heritage preservation emerges amid a complex and often contradictory mixture of global perspectives on heritage preservation, state traditions of cultural regulation, and local yearnings for modernity and improved standards of living. The article proposes an interpretation of heritage as an ongoing project of improvement, generating its own unforeseen political dynamics as it churns along. In short, cultural heritage display is treated here as a field of government and social regulation.

Building a Southern Dynamo: Guizhou and State Power

Guizhous west to east electricity transfer project is a major energy infrastructure development project associated with the campaign to Open Up the West. In terms of state investments, the project has been the major feature of the campaign in Guizhou. It indicates the intensification of, rather than departure from, a long-term pattern of western primary resource exploitation for the purposes of eastern development. Guizhous experience in the campaign to Open Up the West has mostly been about “big development,” and the campaign may even represent a new stage in the provinces long history of internal colonization. In broader terms, the west to east electricity transfer project is indicative of the campaigns agenda to recentralize state political and economic control away from provinces which have gained considerable autonomy during the reform era. Along with the burst of infrastructure, the implications for Guizhou appear to be a continuation of uneven patterns of exchange between coast and interior. Tied increasingly to its role as net supplier of power to Guangdong, Guizhou could face fresh challenges in diversifying its economy sufficiently to withstand the impacts of Chinas World Trade Organization accession.

Cultural strategies of development: implications for village governance in China

Abstract Since the early 1990s, culture has come to be recognized as a significant regional development resource in China. This paper raises the question of whether cultural strategies of development have ameliorated or exacerbated the governments increasing inability to provide for the publics basic needs. Specifically, it asks: what are the implications of Chinas cultural strategies of regional development for local-level governance? Three case study villages in Guizhou are examined, each revealing different ways that villages have engaged state development strategies, each with different outcomes. I argue that cultural strategies of development in China introduce a capital logic that greatly influences village governance. Cultural strategies create economic value where none before existed and thus initiate new struggles over ownership among villagers, state actors and entrepreneurs. The privatization of cultural resources has presented new challenges to village governance even while it has been promoted as both an answer to the fiscal challenges faced by many rural communities and a key to the establishment of a new kind of rural citizen.

Traveling for a cause: Critical examinations of volunteer tourism and social justice

Over the last decade there has been a rise in ‘volunteer tourism’ or ‘voluntourism,’ which is characterized by the combination of travel and volunteering, typically in social or economic development or conversation oriented projects. The papers in this special issue theoretically and empirically examine the dynamic interplay between volunteer tourism and the broader expansion of market-mediated social justice campaigns. Also examined is the potential for volunteer tourism experiences to facilitate myriad implications for the volunteer tourists, volunteer tourism coordinators, and host community members. Positioned against larger transnational trends such as ethical consumerism in tourism, religious mission travel, work and study immersion programs, and academic fieldwork as “volunteer tourism,” this issue examines the various implications of volunteer tourism and its supposed benefits to social, charitable, or environmental causes. As such, it provides a theoretically rich analysis of emerging critical research agendas at the intersection of volunteer tourism and social justice. In this introduction, we consider these agendas – focusing on the theoretical themes of neoliberal development, governmentality, geographies of care and responsibility, and the dilemmas found at the frequently encountered intersection of ethics and aesthetics.

Resourcing Culture: Is a Prosaic ‘Third Space’ Possible in Rural China?

Recalling Tony Bennetts plea for a more ‘prosaic’ cultural studies, this paper proposes a redefinition of the concept ‘third space’ as a prosaic space of policy and governmentality. Based on field research in rural China, where cultural heritage has become a central resource in economic development, the paper argues that cultural development cannot be relied upon to produce spaces of resistance, empowerment, or ‘sustainability’. This is, in part, because cultural development tends to conceive of cultural spaces as ‘rooted’ rather than as spaces of translocality. While third space offers an attractive alternative to such a conceptualization, it remains vulnerable to the same alienating spatial abstractions as found in the practices of cultural development. The paper seeks to maintain the critical focus of third space while redefining it in more prosaic terms to better reflect the everyday governmentalized spaces of culture within which people live.

Villagizing the city: turning rural ethnic heritage into urban modernity in southwest China

Abstract This paper examines the rural ethnic heritage-inspired transformation of the built environment of a relatively small county town in China. The paper explores the ways village-based ethnic heritage is being repositioned by local leaders as a resource for tourism-oriented revenue generation and for ‘improving’ the ‘quality’ and behaviour of town residents. Viewing heritage as a ‘technology of government,’ the paper provides an analysis based on three interrelated themes: the discourses by which town leaders and planners have conceived the heritage development project as one of improvement, the spatial practices by which those discourses have been realised in the built environment, and the ways residents themselves have appropriated and ‘inhabited’ this new ‘villagized’ city as they go about their everyday urban lives. Based on ethnographic field work, a survey, and extended interviews over a period of four years, the paper finds the town leadership’s faith in the ability of the built environment to shape and improve the conduct of citizens to be overstated. While the town’s transformation has generated a new sense of urban modernity among residents, their ways of inhabiting and using urban space have little relevance to the ‘heritagized’ environment in which they now live.

Happy town: Cultural governance and biopolitical urbanism in China:

This paper explores the cultural inscription of urban space in China as a technology of government. Based on a three years of fieldwork, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation, the paper examines the case of one city’s campaign to increase its “happiness index” by creating an ethnic culturally themed built environment. The paper examines the city’s happiness campaign as a project of biopolitical urbanism, and finds that while urban Chinese governmentality bears some striking resemblances to liberal approaches that view the city as a machine for experimenting with, and producing, certain kinds of (governable) citizens and social relations, the happiness campaign should also be understood as a deliberate effort to reinforce state power at the local level. The happiness campaign, in other words, aims to reproduce a sovereign mode of state power even as it speaks a language of neoliberal governmentality. Thus, the colonization of culture by biopolitical urbanism in China today suggests a complex combination of disciplinary and discursive modalities of sovereign power rooted in the paternalistic legacies of Chinese statecraft.

Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China, by Ren Xuefei: Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2011, 240 pp.,

In a recent paper on China’s ‘gated and packaged suburbia’, Wu Fulong commented that ‘... the symbolic side of gated community development is relatively under-researched’ (Wu, 2010, 385). Much the same could be said about the ‘symbolic side’ of China’s explosive urban geographies in general. This despite the fact that symbolic capital seems to be just about the only thing real estate developers, urban planners and municipal officials are thinking about as they redraw and rebuild China’s cities (see, e.g., Campanella, 2009; Kipnis, 2012; Woodworth, 2011). I exaggerate, of course, but the point is this: it is difficult to spend any time in China’s cities today and not feel compelled to decode the symbolic languages embedded in the landscape. For a cultural geographer like me, spending any amount of time in a Chinese city induces a feeling of giddy reverie. Semiotic playgrounds all of them, China’s urban landscapes seem to grab you by the shoulders and yell, ‘deconstruct me!’And yet, most of the urban geography scholarship in China, asWu’s comment suggests, has averted its eye, focusing instead on the political economy of urbanization. This is not necessarily a failing of urban geography scholarship on China, however, since hidden behind the spectacular cityscape of signs is a troubling politics of exclusion, forced eviction, corruption and a willingness to let consumption substitute for democracy (see, e.g., Hsing, 2010). Nevertheless, we should appreciate Ren Xuefei’s attention to symbolic capital in her book Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China. It strikes to me that this is precisely what we need more of to round out our understanding of China’s urban development and, in particular, the connections between that development and the global cultural economy. At the same time, given the continuing importance of a political economic perspective that would see China’s cities less as semiotic playgrounds and more as landscapes of inequality, Ren could have gone further to draw out and indeed realize the potential of some of the broader political implications of her work. Building Globalization is a rewarding book. It brings broader perspectives on the symbolic capital of transnational architecture and design into conversation with China’s exploding urban geographies. The book offers a sharp appraisal of the ‘new state spaces’ of transnational design emerging throughout urban China as municipal governments and developers stumble over themselves in competition for their own piece of ‘global city’ status. Ren’s attention to the ironies and contradictions inherent in urban China’s pursuit of ‘global’ status through the marshaling of symbolic capital is particularly astute and timely. These ironies capture well the odd and wonderful hybrids one finds in China’s cities today. In writing about Shanghai’s Xintiandi development, Ren comments that ‘To Chinese visitors, the place looks foreign and modern. To foreign visitors, Xintiandi looks Chinese and traditional. It is the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the Chinese and the foreign that has generated a hybrid diversity that constitutes cosmopolitanism’ (119). The book is full of such pithy observations. Ren is at her best in distilling complicated trends into observations that lodge themselves with clarity in the reader’s mind. Urban Geography, 2013 Vol. 34, No. 8, 1217–1220