About the Event:

Urbanization is rapidly overtaking China and India, the two most populous countries in the world. One-sixth of humanity now lives in either a Chinese or Indian city. This transformation has unleashed enormous pressures on land use, housing, and the environment. Despite the stakes, the workings of urban governance in China and India remain obscure and poorly understood. In this book talk, Xuefei Ren explores how China and India govern their cities and how their different styles of governance produce inequality and exclusion. 

About the Speaker:

Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist whose work focuses on urban development, governance, architecture, and the built environment from a global perspective. She is the author of Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity Press, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Currently, she is working on a number of comparative projects, on urban redevelopment (China, India, Brazil, and the U.S), mega-events (Beijing, Tokyo, and Rio Olympics), and culture-led revitalization in post-industrial cities (Detroit, Harbin, and Turin). She is a recipient of a number of distinguished fellowships and grants, including from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and American Council of Learned Societies.

This lecture is part of the 2020-2021 annual lecture series on "Chinese Social Policy from Comparative Perspectives" co-sponsored by the Columbia China Center for Social Policy and Weatherhead East Asian Institute and supported by the Columbia School of Social Work.