Events

We are organising a series of events including workshops, seminars and conferences to gather thoughts, inspire research and disseminate outputs.
The invited talk about ‘Performing the ecological fix under state entrepreneurialism in China’, Zoom (online). 21/11/2022.

Prof. Fangzhu Zhang was invited by Urban China Seminar, a research group which is supported by the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia, and the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studiesmeets, and meeets occasionally to hear talks on recent research related to urban China, to give a talk about ‘Performing the ecological fix under state entrepreneurialism in China’. The talk was held at online via Zoom on 21 November 2022.

During the talk, Prof. Zhang examined the recent green turn in China by investigating a large-scale urban greenway project—’Greenways of Paradise’ in Chengdu. Using the perspective of the socio-ecological fix, the talk demonstrated that the local state seized the opportunity provided by the central state’s ‘ecological civilisation’ to carry out green infrastructure development to upgrade environmental quality. The talk revealed complex motivations to incorporate environmental improvement into entrepreneurial urban governance instead of allowing economic growth to encroach on greenspace. The state-centred analysis revealed that Chinese green urbanism was promoted like a political mission, despite its implementation by development corporations. The talk argued that, while the socio-ecological fix facilitated capital accumulation, its deployment must be understood through state politics and actors.

For more information about this invited talk, please click here.