Speaker: Dr. Tim Oakes, Professor of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder

Friday March 4, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM BJT

Zoom: 937 0063 8649, Passcode: CSCC

Abstract

This talk will explore the ways urban villages (or, ‘villages-in-the-city’ 城中村) have been manufacturing a heritage landscape within a context of precarious existence within the city of Shenzhen.  Heritage has become a powerful line of defense for the preservation of urban villages and their until-recently unheralded contributions to the development of a sustainable urban fabric within China’s rapidly expanding cities.  While we might therefore view these newly-built heritage landscapes as strategic spaces of place branding, they are also important ritual spaces of lineage-based territorial identity. Rather than viewing such spaces as holdouts left over from the rural ways of life that preceded urbanization, I propose we understand them as integral to urbanization itself. Instead of looking for traditional ritual spaces resisting the inevitable onslaught of the city, where the vestiges of a seemingly more authentic and rural landscape persists, we might instead consider these new heritage landscapes of reconstructed urban villages as a new kind of ritual space. This approach then leads us to consider how Shenzhen remains a city of villages and how an increasingly visible landscape of heritage in these villages reinforces their ongoing presence as ritual spaces. Shenzhen’s heritage landscapes blur the divide between rural and urban; they also blur the realms of the secular and the religious. Urban village, then, can be understood as part of a broader landscape of popular religious revival masked as cultural heritage, in which practices of tourism and leisure are blended with those of religion and ritual.

Bio

Tim Oakes is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. His most recent book is Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism (2016). He is also the project director for China Made, an international research collaborative exploring the ‘China Model’ of export infrastructure development.