Introduction

“The city” by Robert Park (1915) was a seminal piece of writing because it provided a new way of looking at society, at social structures and processes, and at human agency, in light of the transformational effects of the urban environment. It directed attention to the nature of human ecology (even if that term is not employed in “The city”), socio-spatial organization, individual identities, belonging, the definition and development of neighborhoods, social networks, mobility, residential segregation, and other questions that still occupy us today in urban studies and other branches of the social sciences. Park's perspective occasionally reflects the mechanistic or deterministic tendencies of the epistemologies of the time, especially in his use of metaphors (humans as ants, neighborhoods as ant nests, and the like). Nonetheless, original and wide-ranging, it set the stage for an enormous literature containing many other landmark pieces, such as Wirth's “Urbanism as a way of life.”

It should perhaps be emphasized that “The city” is not so much about the city itself as an entity or unit of analysis but, rather, about human behavior or social life in urban context. Park's proposed inquiries are of a sociological nature; the city is context. Even if the theoretical contours of Park's agenda were impressively broad from a sociological point of view, the geographic (and historical) perspective is narrowly fixed: human individuals, groups, neighborhoods, suburbs, within the city. The article offers little, then, in terms of a contextual understanding of the city itself or of processes of urbanization: where did this growth come from? There is mention of various cities in the US (Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Boston) and of London but comparative questions are not raised. Historical context is equally absent. The world was at war in 1915 but one would never know it from reading “The city.”

In this chapter, it will be argued that present-day Chinese urbanization bears some fundamental similarities to US urbanization at the time of Robert Park. Indeed, in a different academic culture, China today might have had its “Chicago School” in Shanghai, Shenzhen, or Nanjing. Hence, “The city” can be read as a stimulus to investigate present-day Chinese urbanization from a comparative angle. As such, this chapter counters the peripheral treatment of Chinese cities in current comparative urban debates and the inward-looking and exceptionalist tendencies of Chinese writings.