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This chapter considers the major attributes of modern Chinese cities and explores the making of an urban China. This study focuses on Lanzhou, the northwestern center of camel-caravan trade and the geographical center of China. It argues that while Lanzhou's prosperity is tied to distant markets and its dependency on the regional as well as the national economy, there is no national urban network that patterned itself after a hierarchy. It explains that what the material connections and mobility among the cities had promoted was a mental picture rather than a physical reality of city life as one of continuous and simultaneous activity.

This chapter tours the Western Chinese City. It begins by walking south of the Zheng Yang Gate towards the commercial and entertainment district of Old Peking called the Great Bamboo Fence. The House of the Six Obligations, located near the intersection of Big Bamboo Street and Grain and Rice Street, started its existence as a shop set up in 1530 by six merchants from Shan Xi province. Around the Vegetable Market are a number of historic sites. There is a Chinese Muslim legend that shows how Chinese culture absorbed Islam. The Peking Museum of Traditional Architecture is housed in the Hall of Jupiter, which was first constructed in 1532 and renovated in 1754. By ascending the marble terrace, one may first past through the Hall of Propriety and enter into a vast enclosed courtyard similar to those in the Forbidden City. To the north is the Hall of Jupiter, now housing exhibits on traditional Chinese construction techniques.

In China, political leaders, professional planners and designers, and the public at large typically view the modernization of cities as a matter of ordering them. Many outside observers, awed by the scale and speed of China’s urbanization and the monumental mobilization of labor and resources involved in it, are willing to accept that the drive towards order is both necessary and desirable. This chapter will question dominant official and professional characterizations of what constitutes orderliness, and discuss the actual coexistence of order and disorder in the Chinese urban landscape. In addition, by examining a series of community design activities in the city of Quanzhou, in Fujian Province, between 1993 and 2005, followed by village surveys and some modest design studies in 2007 and 2008, this chapter describes how an official and popular recognition that standardized approaches do not provide answers to the city’s unique conditions led the city’s planning authorities to sponsor an experiment in more incremental and resident-driven urban visioning. While the experiments were limited in their impact, they have served to reveal more clearly the obstacles that community-engaged planning must overcome in China.

This essay addresses Chinese maritime history and investigates a range of topics, including the international nature of research in Chinese maritime history; new archives and recent research in shipping and shipbuilding; maritime trade; ports and port cities; and maritime communities. It also focuses on Mitsubishi-Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) and China Merchants' Steam Navigation Company, two major Chinese and Japanese merchant shipping companies and provides suggestions on future directions of maritime history in East Asia.

This chapter takes a tour in the Eastern Chinese City. It begins by going to Dragon Pool Park in the southeast corner of the former Eastern Chinese city. Here, there is a beautifully landscaped park where the Peking authorities have revived lunar New Year temple fairs. In the middle of the park stands a single rectangular brick structure. The chapter also visits Commander Yuan's grave in a little while at a separate location in this part of the city. By traveling to the west from the Temple of Prosperous Peace, No. 59 Middle School on Wo Fo Si Street can be seen. The Chinese were not the only nation to have an Altar of Heaven. Since Confucianism hugely influenced Vietnamese and Korean culture, the kings of these two countries constructed circular altars for Heaven in Hue and Seoul.

Chapter 3 brings together a wide range of photographs—photojournalism, art photography, and satellite images—that document the economic crisis with images of abandoned homes. These photographs reveal the effects of the boom and bust of the mortgage market on our view of the home. They also raise questions about the politics of representation, especially when the photographer’s ability to enter the home depends on the power of the police to process an eviction. Photographs of empty houses, it suggests, draw on the aesthetics of what Freud termed the Unheimlich—unhomely, uncanny—to register the uncanny power of property. Turning from photographs of single houses to images of abandoned industrial landscapes and empty housing developments, this chapter argues that such images foreshadow a financial crisis to come.