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In this article, I seek to combine the two areas of popular cultural studies and urban social history through a study of what I call street culture, including the use of the street as a public arena, changes in the regulation of the street and the popular response to these changes, and the redefinition of street politics during the decades immediately prior to the [Chinese] Revolution of 1911.

This article focuses on the dynamics between migrant street vendors and public security forces and the complex social production of urban public space in Guangzhou. As an answer to daily contestation of public order, security agencies reluctantly open flexible windows of business opportunities to hawkers. Zones and periods of control, ‘soft’ approaches, and categories of ethnic belonging influence everyday governance and accessibility of public space. This results in a transient public space, fluid and continuously changing, which offers a new perspective on openness and functioning of public space in urban China.

China, like many other nations, struggled in the twentieth century with defining an indigenous landscape design tradition. This was particularly true in addressing urban open space design after China implemented the Open Door Policy in the late 1970s, when Chinese garden design traditions became largely neglected. The objective of this study is to determine whether the traditional design approach could still effectively serve as modern design inspiration. Built upon a previous study by Wu (1999), our study is a reflective critique on modern Chinese urban public space design. We compare major types of traditional and modern Chinese urban open spaces. The percentage areas of five landscape variables that Wu proposed (planting, water, rock, architecture and pavement) were quantified using Photoshop and ArcGIS software. Although Wu (1999) compared only scholars' gardens (a traditional model) with modern parks (a modern model), we include imperial gardens (another traditional model) and urban plazas (another modern model). In addition, we supplemented Wu's plan analysis with perspective view analysis (photographs). Our results suggest more similarities between traditional and modern landscapes than previously suggested. This article concludes by suggesting that traditional models can be relevant to contemporary urban public space design in China.

Urban public space is a product of contestations by various actors. This paper focuses on the conflict between local level government and beggars to address the questions: How and why do government actors refuse or allow beggars access to public space? How and why do beggars appropriate public space to receive alms and adapt their strategies? How does this contestation contribute to the trends of urban public space in today's China? Taking the Southern metropolis of Guangzhou as a case study, I argue that beggars contest expulsion from public space through begging performances. Rising barriers of public space require higher investment in these performances, taking even more resources from the panhandling poor. The trends of public order are not unidirectional, however. Beggars navigate between several contextual borders composed by China's religious renaissance; the discourse on deserving, undeserving, and dangerous beggars; and the moral legitimacy of the government versus the imagination of a successful, "modern," and "civilised" city. This conflict shows the everyday production of "spaces of representation" by government actors on the micro level where economic incentives merge with aspirations for political prestige.

After three decades of urban renewal in China, public spaces used by average residents have not been improved proportionally and, in some cases, have even deteriorated. Three problems can be identified. ‘Window-dressing’ prevails in government- developed squares and parks. Their locations and monumentality have made residents less willing to use these spaces. ‘Privatization’ describes how private developers maximize profits at the cost of public life in the urban environment surrounding their projects. ‘Gentrification’, different from its meaning in the West, refers to the tendency to ignore the needs of mid- and low-income residents in public facilities. Not entirely a repetition of the 1950s Western urban renewal, the Chinese cases reflect a society changing from a socialist system to a capitalist one.

This article examines cultural practices and social life in urban public spaces of postreform China, focusing on the everyday leisure, entertainment, and cultural activities spontaneously organized by grassroots residents or groups. It examines performativity in constituting cultural meanings, reproducing everyday identities, and building up mutual engagements, and unravels the ways in which ordinary people devote resources, labor, and energy to keep alive individual or collective identities. Performances of cultural identities in public spaces entail improvised and temporary social relations which emerge from the immediate contexts of mundane spatial practices. Empirical analyses of public performativity in Guangzhou identify three scenarios, namely, the performativity of public teaching, public shows and performances, and the performative displays of cultural difference between carnivalesque dancing and “high-end culture” in public leisure.

Soundscape is about relationships between the ear, human beings, sound environments, and society. Soundscape research is interdisciplinary. On the basis of a series of case studies in Europe and China and an intensive literature review, the soundscape description, evaluation, and creation in urban open spaces are systematically examined, in terms of four basic elements: sound, space, people, and environment. Factors affecting soundscape evaluation in urban open spaces, including acoustic - psychological - social characteristics of various sounds, acoustic effects of space boundaries and elements, social - demographic characteristics of users, and general physical - environmental conditions, are identified, and, consequently, a system for soundscape description is established. Potentials of creating and designing soundscape in urban spaces are then discussed in terms of sound and space.

The article explores relationships among urban form, human activities and socio-economic-cultural features in Danwei compound. With Jingmian compound, a typical Danwei compound in Beijing, as a case study, the researcher studies urban form in open spaces from a socio-economic-cultural perspective. In addition, residents' activities are discussed. The research shows that open space form reflects features and transitions of Chinese society from sociological and economic perspectives. This article also proves the validity of thorough micro space form investigation.

Internal migration within Asian countries and international migration to, within, and out of Asia have been on the rise throughout the past decades. As types and pathways of migration, migrants’ sociocultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and their transnational and translocal trajectories become increasingly diverse, a majority of them move to cities. Diverging power geometries and relations are constantly negotiated and (re)produced in the sociospatial dialectic of the city. Through their individual and collective agency, assets, and knowledge, mobile subjects have become important agents in the (re)production of spaces in cities, whereas the socio-political and physical conditions of spaces frame their livelihoods, opportunities, and agency. Research on migrants’ agency has intensified recently, but the specific modes through which agency operates in the socio-spatial dialectic still need to be conceptualised. We develop a framework that outlines different modes through which agents and space interact. The framework is exemplified through papers on case studies from Dhaka and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) that are part of this special issue. Dhaka and the PRD have been characterised by accelerated growth throughout the past decades, particularly due to the influx of rural-to-urban migrants, but they also receive an increasing number of international migrants. We conclude that through their diverse, multi-sited, and translocal relations and activities stretching beyond the receiving cities in a context of constant transformation, migrants’ practices contribute to the emergence of a specific type of urban spaces that we delineate as transient urban spaces.

This paper examines changing notions of public and private spaces in post-reform urban Shanghai by focusing on the emergence of private gated communities (fengbi xiaoqu) and their impact on the privatization of urban space and social life in the city. While gated communities in Anglo-American literature are typically cast in a negative light (often depicted as the bulldozing of public spaces by private interests), this paper offers a nuanced interpretation by arguing how Shanghai’s gated communities are, potentially, sites where greater household autonomy and personal freedom may be realized away from the hegemonic control of the Communist Party-state. By examining the evolving notions of private life/privacy in Shanghai, this paper contributes to the nascent understanding of the concepts of public and private in a non-Western context.

The existing literature on the social, personal, and health consequences of high density housing is unclear regarding the significance that can be attached to the physical features of housing. The present study, which is based on interview information collected in Hong Kong, is able to control for deprivations and stresses related to "poor housing," and it is also able to distinguish superficial from more severe measures of personal strain. High densities are seen to have very little effect on individuals and families, although there is a suggestion that congestion is a potentially significant stress.

Public space is a topic of great interest for urban scholars and urban planners. Such space, like parks, sidewalks, and plazas, it is argued, can provide the common grounds where the inhabitants of a city meet, exchange ideas, even engage in a variety of cultural performances. This article reports on fieldwork about the use of public space in Shanghai today. We find a great diversity of uses, ranging from vendors who sell their wares to people who engage in heated and extensive political discussions to performers of Beijing opera and ballroom dancing. We also find that the local authorities use a light, and sometimes covert, hand in their oversight of inhabitants in such spaces. Finally, we discover that powerful social differences and inequalities between native inhabitants and working-class migrants, which have emerged during the period of economic reform and market transition, are now actively in evidence in the quality and use of public space in Shanghai. The article puts these findings within a broader theoretical context, concluding in the end that for many—though not all—inhabitants public man is alive and well in Shanghai.