At first glance, revisiting Robert Park for urban China seems anachronistic, an unnecessarily limiting lens that ignores the vast body of research being produced. Yet, taking Park as a starting point does not dictate the rules about speaking in his terms, nor does it require a retreading of the Los Angeles School critiques of his work. Rather, this volume shows that it can be a valuable approach to reviewing the research on urban China in order to situate this work within greater theoretical debates.

This concluding chapter presents some of the general issues of exceptionalism and methodology haunting the research on urban China. It seeks out scholarship beyond urban studies to look at the way that the entwined issues of Chinese exceptionalism and methodological nationalism can restrict urban research, its interpretations, and broader applications. In short, to address the reasons why the flood of research on cities in China has not resulted in a corresponding deluge of theoretical developments for contemporary urbanism. Finally, in revisiting a critical approach centered on the everyday, it seems Park might in fact prove more relevant than ever, especially insofar as he shifts the focus of urban research away from morphology toward the social. Rather than a research agenda like the one Park outlines in his 1915 essay on “The city,” however, perhaps the future of research on urban China demands a reconsideration of approach.

Theoretical rupture

The current debates around the parochial nature of urban theory often rest on critiques based on who and where. It focuses on “Western academia” as the institutional source of “Western knowledge” and its attendant limitations (see, for example, Edensor and Jayne, 2012). These ideas about the city have traveled and disseminated, imposing canons of thought on places “elsewhere.” So entrenched is this process of knowledge production that a theoretical rupture is needed—the question is how (see, for instance, Jazeel, 2016; Robinson and Roy, 2016).

Rather than considering the sources and locations of urban theorybuilding, a reflection on this volume suggests the need for a consideration of unstated assumptions and a turn toward an analysis of implicit knowledge (Lawhon et al., 2016). For this, revisiting Niklas Luhmann can be helpful for his differentiation of the first- and second-order observer (1995).