Xuefei Ren
Biographic Data
| ID | 3780017 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Xuefei Ren |
| GIVEN NAMES | Xuefei |
| FAMILY NAME | Ren |
| SIGNATURE | REN X |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3187-2226 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 238 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The comparative future of a canonical city
This essay revisits the Chicago School's enduring place in urban studies to argue for its renewed relevance through comparative urbanism. A century after Park, Burgess and Wirth formulated their foundational texts, students and scholars alike remain drawn to their big, accessible questions about why cities grow, how people inhabit space, and how urban life is structured. At the same time, these texts have been thoroughly critiqued by Marxist, pos…
Constrained Expertise in India and China
Constrained Expertise in India and China explores what kinds of knowledge and knowledge purveyors get mobilized and privileged, and what gets sidelined in policymaking in India and China. Through its detailed empirical studies in both countries, the volume illuminates a trend of increasing concentration of political authority which has frequently demanded that experts be aligned with the central government’s agenda. Spaces are shrinking for diver…
Rethinking Southern Urbanism from the Periphery
Global urban studies have seen a peripheral turn, as researchers shifted their gaze from the central city to the peri-urban areas. This shift in perspective is crucial for studying cities in the Global South, as most urban growth in the Global South has taken place on the urban fringes. This essay surveys the evolving scholarship on urban China and considers how China as a case study may illuminate the peripheral turn in global urban studies. It …
Repensando o urbanismo do Sul a partir da periferia
Os estudos urbanos globais têm testemunhado uma virada periférica, à medida que os pesquisadores vêm mudando seu olhar da parte central das cidades para as áreas periurbanas. Essa mudança de perspectiva é crucial para estudar cidades no sul global, já que a maior parte do crescimento urbano nessa região ocorreu na franja urbana. Este ensaio analisa a evolução dos estudos sobre a China urbana e considera como a China enquanto estudo de caso pode l…
The symbolic value of megaprojects in urban and regional development
Everyday Oblivion in Eco-Civilized China
The Wuhan Lockdown
The Wuhan lockdown in 2020 shocked the world. For seventy-six days, 12 million Chinese residents were sealed inside their apartments. Guobin Yang's book The Wuhan Lockdown describes how ordinary residents lived with uncertainty and endured those chaotic days. His protagonists include people from all walks of life—high school teachers, writers, feminist activists, frontline healthcare workers, officials, media professionals, and a food delivery dr…
The Peripheral Turn in Global Urban Studies
The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, with a more diverse group of urban scholars who study the global South following. Challenging the city-centric view, as exemplified by the Chicago School’s concentric model of urban growth, these scholars train their lens on urban peripheries, such as suburbs, small towns, and the sprawling hinterlands out…
Slums, Favelas, and Urban Villages
Comparing China, India, and Brazil reveals that current housing policies in all three countries have produced new forms of exclusion for inhabitants of informal settlements
From a comparative gesture to structured comparison
Drawing upon the scholarship in historical-comparative sociology, this article presents some guidelines for theoretically structured urban comparison by spotlighting four methodological issues: case selection, causality, historical analyses and wider implications. This is demonstrated with a comparative analysis of air pollution control in Beijing and Delhi. The analysis finds that Beijing’s clean air campaign features a territorial logic, centri…
Pandemic and lockdown
Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, a…
Toward a Global Urban Sociology
Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from the Northern, particularly American, cities on which much of urban sociology’s conceptual apparatus has been based. Thus, depicting them in terms of a standard urban vocabulary risks imposing an inappropriate way of seeing. We need a vocabulary that is able to accommodate their different urban experience. This special issue contributes to the work of building that vocabulary. We sele…
Suburbs and Urban Peripheries in a Global Perspective
Herbert Gans’ classic book, The Levittowners, has inspired generations of urban sociologists studying American suburbs, but it has also confined the field’s focus to studies of the local community. At the same time, however, outside the discipline of American urban sociology, an interdisciplinary field of global suburban studies has flourished. Global suburban studies address a wider range of topics that extends to infrastructural provision, gove…
Cities in Developing Countries
This entry discusses the contested meaning of “developing countries,” and then examines the evolution of urban scholarship on developing countries through four different perspectives from the 1970s: the colonial city, the world city, the global city, and the neoliberal city. It concludes with a brief discussion on how comparative scholarship on cities in developing countries can make a meaningful contribution to urban theory.
From Chicago to China and India
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, cities in the Global South have seen extraordinary growth, with China and India as the epicenters of urbanization. This essay critically assesses the state of the field of global urban studies and focuses particularly on the scholarship relating to urban China and India. The essay identifies three dominant paradigms in the scholarship: the global city thesis, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism. In …
The Globalizing Cities Reader
Special issue
This special issue presents a set of articles that critically examine the changing urban governance, politics, and rights to the city in Brazil in the wake of two mega-events: the 2014 FIFA World C
Aspirational urbanism from Beijing to Rio de Janeiro
The critical geography scholarship on mega-events mostly adopts the framework of accumulation by dispossession, highlighting the disruptive legacies such as displacement and gentrification wrought upon host cities. Though the critique is largely correct, it has failed to capture the complex layers of historical and institutional contexts that underlie urban social change in mega-event cities. This article makes a case for broadening our analytica…
Land acquisition, rural protests, and the local state in China and India
As China and India urbanize, land acquisition by state and private actors has become highly contentious in both countries. This article compares two large-scale anti-land acquisition protests—the Wukan protest in China’s Guangdong province and the Singur protest in the Indian state of West Bengal—to examine how the subnational state partakes in land acquisition and how rural protesters engage with different levels of the state in their resistance…
The Political Economy of Urban Ruins
This essay analyzes the political economy of the urban ruins captured in Greg Girard's photo album Phantom Shanghai. Rather than being marginal, irrelevant or merely objects for nostalgia, the ruins of buildings produced by real estate speculation offer crucial insights into the workings of the urban political economy and reflect wider trends of urban governance. Examining how building ruins come about in the first place and how they are represen…
The Creative Underclass
Words are restless things. Their meanings change over time, usually gradually through small acts of speech and writing, but sometimes a word is redefined so rapidly as to warrant scholarly investig
Artistic Urbanization
The discourse of creative industries arrived in China in the early 2000s via the epistemic network of international scholars and consultants. It has since garnered enthusiastic support on the domestic policy circuit, where it is viewed as the key to making the transition from 'Made in China' to 'Created in China'. This article situates China's creative industry development in its urban context, examining the state spatial strategies of reconstitu…
Building Globalization
The Changing Right to the City
This article examines the changing housing rights regimes amidst the urban renewal currently underway in Shanghai and Mumbai. We examine the policies and regulations that govern residential security and housing tenure, the alteration of policy implementations by electoral and extra–electoral contestations, and the opportunities and strategies for housing activism in each context. We find that political contestations have enabled the construction …
Olympic Beijing
This essay examines the urban legacies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The impact of the Olympics is not only confined to media coverage and city branding effects, but can also be located in the intensified global connectivity reshaping urban spaces in Beijing. Focusing on art space, heritage space, and new state space (i.e. state-sponsored mega-projects), this article traces intertwining global and local connections forged in the arts, preservatio…
The Changing Right to the City
This article examines the changing housing rights regimes amidst the urban renewal currently underway in Shanghai and Mumbai. We examine the policies and regulations that govern residential security and housing tenure, the alteration of policy implementations by electoral and extra–electoral contestations, and the opportunities and strategies for housing activism in each context. We find that political contestations have enabled the construction …
Forward to the Past
This article examines the role of historical preservation in the spatial restructuring of postindustrial cities through a detailed case study of Xintiandi, a preservation–based redevelopment project in the inner city of Shanghai. At Xintiandi, two blocks of Shikumen houses, Shanghainese tenements built by Western landlords for Chinese tenants in the colonial period, were turned into a posh entertainment quarter by international developers and arc…
Artistic Urbanization
The discourse of creative industries arrived in China in the early 2000s via the epistemic network of international scholars and consultants. It has since garnered enthusiastic support on the domestic policy circuit, where it is viewed as the key to making the transition from 'Made in China' to 'Created in China'. This article situates China's creative industry development in its urban context, examining the state spatial strategies of reconstitu…
Architecture and Nation Building in the Age of Globalization
This study examines the relationship between architecture and nation building in the age of globalization, with an analysis of the debates and controversies about the National Stadium, the main sports venue for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The article argues that nationalism, along with the cultural ideology of global consumerism, drives the production of flagship architectural projects in China. The dilemma between nationalism and global consum…
Pandemic and lockdown
Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, a…
The Political Economy of Urban Ruins
This essay analyzes the political economy of the urban ruins captured in Greg Girard's photo album Phantom Shanghai. Rather than being marginal, irrelevant or merely objects for nostalgia, the ruins of buildings produced by real estate speculation offer crucial insights into the workings of the urban political economy and reflect wider trends of urban governance. Examining how building ruins come about in the first place and how they are represen…
From Chicago to China and India
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, cities in the Global South have seen extraordinary growth, with China and India as the epicenters of urbanization. This essay critically assesses the state of the field of global urban studies and focuses particularly on the scholarship relating to urban China and India. The essay identifies three dominant paradigms in the scholarship: the global city thesis, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism. In …
The Creative Underclass
Words are restless things. Their meanings change over time, usually gradually through small acts of speech and writing, but sometimes a word is redefined so rapidly as to warrant scholarly investig
Suburbs and Urban Peripheries in a Global Perspective
Herbert Gans’ classic book, The Levittowners, has inspired generations of urban sociologists studying American suburbs, but it has also confined the field’s focus to studies of the local community. At the same time, however, outside the discipline of American urban sociology, an interdisciplinary field of global suburban studies has flourished. Global suburban studies address a wider range of topics that extends to infrastructural provision, gove…
Aspirational urbanism from Beijing to Rio de Janeiro
The critical geography scholarship on mega-events mostly adopts the framework of accumulation by dispossession, highlighting the disruptive legacies such as displacement and gentrification wrought upon host cities. Though the critique is largely correct, it has failed to capture the complex layers of historical and institutional contexts that underlie urban social change in mega-event cities. This article makes a case for broadening our analytica…
Toward a Global Urban Sociology
Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from the Northern, particularly American, cities on which much of urban sociology’s conceptual apparatus has been based. Thus, depicting them in terms of a standard urban vocabulary risks imposing an inappropriate way of seeing. We need a vocabulary that is able to accommodate their different urban experience. This special issue contributes to the work of building that vocabulary. We sele…
Olympic Beijing
This essay examines the urban legacies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The impact of the Olympics is not only confined to media coverage and city branding effects, but can also be located in the intensified global connectivity reshaping urban spaces in Beijing. Focusing on art space, heritage space, and new state space (i.e. state-sponsored mega-projects), this article traces intertwining global and local connections forged in the arts, preservatio…
Land acquisition, rural protests, and the local state in China and India
As China and India urbanize, land acquisition by state and private actors has become highly contentious in both countries. This article compares two large-scale anti-land acquisition protests—the Wukan protest in China’s Guangdong province and the Singur protest in the Indian state of West Bengal—to examine how the subnational state partakes in land acquisition and how rural protesters engage with different levels of the state in their resistance…
The Peripheral Turn in Global Urban Studies
The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, with a more diverse group of urban scholars who study the global South following. Challenging the city-centric view, as exemplified by the Chicago School’s concentric model of urban growth, these scholars train their lens on urban peripheries, such as suburbs, small towns, and the sprawling hinterlands out…
From a comparative gesture to structured comparison
Drawing upon the scholarship in historical-comparative sociology, this article presents some guidelines for theoretically structured urban comparison by spotlighting four methodological issues: case selection, causality, historical analyses and wider implications. This is demonstrated with a comparative analysis of air pollution control in Beijing and Delhi. The analysis finds that Beijing’s clean air campaign features a territorial logic, centri…
Architecture and China’s urban revolution
This paper seeks to understand the transformation of built environments in Chinese cities through the lens of transnational architectural production. I examine why private developers and government bureaucrats have opted for international architects to design their mega projects, as well as the consequences. I argue that the transformation of the symbolic capital embodied in architectural design is the key to understanding such preferences. Throu…
Everyday Oblivion in Eco-Civilized China
Forward to the Past
This article examines the role of historical preservation in the spatial restructuring of postindustrial cities through a detailed case study of Xintiandi, a preservation–based redevelopment project in the inner city of Shanghai. At Xintiandi, two blocks of Shikumen houses, Shanghainese tenements built by Western landlords for Chinese tenants in the colonial period, were turned into a posh entertainment quarter by international developers and arc…
Architecture and China’s urban revolution
This paper seeks to understand the transformation of built environments in Chinese cities through the lens of transnational architectural production. I examine why private developers and government bureaucrats have opted for international architects to design their mega projects, as well as the consequences. I argue that the transformation of the symbolic capital embodied in architectural design is the key to understanding such preferences. Throu…
Architecture and Nation Building in the Age of Globalization
This study examines the relationship between architecture and nation building in the age of globalization, with an analysis of the debates and controversies about the National Stadium, the main sports venue for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The article argues that nationalism, along with the cultural ideology of global consumerism, drives the production of flagship architectural projects in China. The dilemma between nationalism and global consum…
The Changing Right to the City
This article examines the changing housing rights regimes amidst the urban renewal currently underway in Shanghai and Mumbai. We examine the policies and regulations that govern residential security and housing tenure, the alteration of policy implementations by electoral and extra–electoral contestations, and the opportunities and strategies for housing activism in each context. We find that political contestations have enabled the construction …
Olympic Beijing
This essay examines the urban legacies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The impact of the Olympics is not only confined to media coverage and city branding effects, but can also be located in the intensified global connectivity reshaping urban spaces in Beijing. Focusing on art space, heritage space, and new state space (i.e. state-sponsored mega-projects), this article traces intertwining global and local connections forged in the arts, preservatio…
Cities in Globalization
Peter J. Taylor, Ben Derudder, Pieter Saey and Frank Witlox ( eds. ) 2007 : Cities in Globalization: Practices, Policies and Theories . London and New York : Routledge . This collection of articles is the product of a conference on world city networks held at Ghent University in 2005. The editors are all affiliated with the GaWC (Globalization and World Cities) group, which has long been dedicated to world city network research. The book is inten…
Building Globalization
The Creative Underclass
Words are restless things. Their meanings change over time, usually gradually through small acts of speech and writing, but sometimes a word is redefined so rapidly as to warrant scholarly investig
Artistic Urbanization
The discourse of creative industries arrived in China in the early 2000s via the epistemic network of international scholars and consultants. It has since garnered enthusiastic support on the domestic policy circuit, where it is viewed as the key to making the transition from 'Made in China' to 'Created in China'. This article situates China's creative industry development in its urban context, examining the state spatial strategies of reconstitu…
The Political Economy of Urban Ruins
This essay analyzes the political economy of the urban ruins captured in Greg Girard's photo album Phantom Shanghai. Rather than being marginal, irrelevant or merely objects for nostalgia, the ruins of buildings produced by real estate speculation offer crucial insights into the workings of the urban political economy and reflect wider trends of urban governance. Examining how building ruins come about in the first place and how they are represen…
Land acquisition, rural protests, and the local state in China and India
As China and India urbanize, land acquisition by state and private actors has become highly contentious in both countries. This article compares two large-scale anti-land acquisition protests—the Wukan protest in China’s Guangdong province and the Singur protest in the Indian state of West Bengal—to examine how the subnational state partakes in land acquisition and how rural protesters engage with different levels of the state in their resistance…
The Globalizing Cities Reader
Special issue
This special issue presents a set of articles that critically examine the changing urban governance, politics, and rights to the city in Brazil in the wake of two mega-events: the 2014 FIFA World C
Aspirational urbanism from Beijing to Rio de Janeiro
The critical geography scholarship on mega-events mostly adopts the framework of accumulation by dispossession, highlighting the disruptive legacies such as displacement and gentrification wrought upon host cities. Though the critique is largely correct, it has failed to capture the complex layers of historical and institutional contexts that underlie urban social change in mega-event cities. This article makes a case for broadening our analytica…
From Chicago to China and India
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, cities in the Global South have seen extraordinary growth, with China and India as the epicenters of urbanization. This essay critically assesses the state of the field of global urban studies and focuses particularly on the scholarship relating to urban China and India. The essay identifies three dominant paradigms in the scholarship: the global city thesis, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism. In …
Cities in Developing Countries
This entry discusses the contested meaning of “developing countries,” and then examines the evolution of urban scholarship on developing countries through four different perspectives from the 1970s: the colonial city, the world city, the global city, and the neoliberal city. It concludes with a brief discussion on how comparative scholarship on cities in developing countries can make a meaningful contribution to urban theory.
Slums, Favelas, and Urban Villages
Comparing China, India, and Brazil reveals that current housing policies in all three countries have produced new forms of exclusion for inhabitants of informal settlements
From a comparative gesture to structured comparison
Drawing upon the scholarship in historical-comparative sociology, this article presents some guidelines for theoretically structured urban comparison by spotlighting four methodological issues: case selection, causality, historical analyses and wider implications. This is demonstrated with a comparative analysis of air pollution control in Beijing and Delhi. The analysis finds that Beijing’s clean air campaign features a territorial logic, centri…
Pandemic and lockdown
Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, a…
Toward a Global Urban Sociology
Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from the Northern, particularly American, cities on which much of urban sociology’s conceptual apparatus has been based. Thus, depicting them in terms of a standard urban vocabulary risks imposing an inappropriate way of seeing. We need a vocabulary that is able to accommodate their different urban experience. This special issue contributes to the work of building that vocabulary. We sele…
Suburbs and Urban Peripheries in a Global Perspective
Herbert Gans’ classic book, The Levittowners, has inspired generations of urban sociologists studying American suburbs, but it has also confined the field’s focus to studies of the local community. At the same time, however, outside the discipline of American urban sociology, an interdisciplinary field of global suburban studies has flourished. Global suburban studies address a wider range of topics that extends to infrastructural provision, gove…
The Peripheral Turn in Global Urban Studies
The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, with a more diverse group of urban scholars who study the global South following. Challenging the city-centric view, as exemplified by the Chicago School’s concentric model of urban growth, these scholars train their lens on urban peripheries, such as suburbs, small towns, and the sprawling hinterlands out…
The Wuhan Lockdown
The Wuhan lockdown in 2020 shocked the world. For seventy-six days, 12 million Chinese residents were sealed inside their apartments. Guobin Yang's book The Wuhan Lockdown describes how ordinary residents lived with uncertainty and endured those chaotic days. His protagonists include people from all walks of life—high school teachers, writers, feminist activists, frontline healthcare workers, officials, media professionals, and a food delivery dr…
Everyday Oblivion in Eco-Civilized China
Constrained Expertise in India and China
Constrained Expertise in India and China explores what kinds of knowledge and knowledge purveyors get mobilized and privileged, and what gets sidelined in policymaking in India and China. Through its detailed empirical studies in both countries, the volume illuminates a trend of increasing concentration of political authority which has frequently demanded that experts be aligned with the central government’s agenda. Spaces are shrinking for diver…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Geography (17 works) · Law (16 works) · China (13 works) · Law (13 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (12 works) · Economic geography (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (11 works)