In 2015, one hundred years passed since Robert Park published his seminal article “The city: Suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the city environment” in The American Journal of Sociology. It provided an agenda for the nascent Chicago School of urban sociology, which came to shape urban research for decades to come. One hundred years later, much has changed, both in the urban world itself and in the urban research that reflects on those changes. Globalization and accelerated urbanization have involved a remarkable transformation in cities around the world, and nowhere as dramatically as in China. Chinese cities have undergone a transition marked by unprecedented scales and speeds, across economic, political, and social systems, and with extraordinary variations from ghost cities to urban villages and megacity regions. As a result, it is the Chinese city that is now under the spotlight—as was the American city a century ago.

In urban research much has also changed. The human ecology approach that Park and others initiated has lost most of its allure, and heated discussions on the parochialism of urban theory have dominated journal pages. Meanwhile, new urban forms, new urban economies, and new urban geographies have instigated new literatures and new research agendas. Enormous changes in China have resulted in a rapidly growing scholarship investigating the “great transformation” of cities in China, as well as the urban experience and the relevant policy responses to the challenges that cities face today. The emergence of this and related literatures on cities in a variety of social and cultural settings has resulted in pleas for a more worldly urban studies, encapsulating the experience of cities extending beyond the “West.”

Against this background, this book invites specialists on urban China to reflect on the relevance of Park's article on “The city” for today—for cities in China, for urban research, and for questions about studying the social life of the city. After all, China's cities, with their unprecedented growth and massive urban–rural migration, today display characteristics that in certain ways are remarkably similar to America's cities like Chicago one hundred years ago. Again, radical urban changes are supported by technological innovations for transport and communication: the Internet, the high-speed train, and global logistics systems.