‘Sauté Urbanisation’

Abstract

In the last 20 years of economic reforms, China has embraced an explicit policy of urbanisation. In the literature, space and place-making are often perceived as distinct or conflicting dimensions of urban change, whereby the former is severed from or dominates the latter. By focusing on the multi-ethnic south-western frontier of Yunnan, this paper explores the effects of recent urbanisation on Tai ethnic minority communities in the expanding border city of Jinghong. It suggests that we need to conceptualise urbanisation in dialectic terms rather than as a dichotomy. Drawing on Massey (2005), it analyses space through the prism of ‘multiplicity’, ‘interrelation’, and ‘openness’ and place through its interconnection with the broader power geometries of space. Specifically, the paper argues that urbanisation can produce a two-way dynamic whereby space co-opts place and place permeates space through consensus, in the guise of ‘ethnic modernity’. The resulting ‘sauté urbanisation’ captures these mutually informing practices of space construction and place-making.