Over the past decades, China has created some of the largest and most rapidly transforming cities in human history. The Chinese metropolis represents a unique urban model: combining entrepreneurial bottom-up energy with powerful top-down planning, it has reshaped the relationship between infrastructure, economy, governance and everyday life.
Progress & Prosperity: The Chinese City as Global Urban Model investigates the rise of the Chinese megacity and its growing influence beyond China’s borders. From Shanghai and Shenzhen to a new generation of emerging urban regions, the book examines how Chinese cities have achieved extraordinary speed and scale—and what lessons, opportunities and contradictions …
Over the past decades, China has created some of the largest and most rapidly transforming cities in human history. The Chinese metropolis represents a unique urban model: combining entrepreneurial bottom-up energy with powerful top-down planning, it has reshaped the relationship between infrastructure, economy, governance and everyday life.
Progress & Prosperity: The Chinese City as Global Urban Model investigates the rise of the Chinese megacity and its growing influence beyond China’s borders. From Shanghai and Shenzhen to a new generation of emerging urban regions, the book examines how Chinese cities have achieved extraordinary speed and scale—and what lessons, opportunities and contradictions this model presents for cities worldwide.
Through essays and interviews with architects, academics, artists and urban thinkers, the book explores the mechanisms behind contemporary urban growth: globalisation, financialisation, cultural production, spatial planning and digital technologies. It reveals a complex urban condition in which prosperity is no longer just the goal, but a foundation for continuous transformation and progress.
Rather than presenting the Chinese city as a blueprint to follow or reject, the book positions it as a critical reference point for understanding the future of urbanisation. It asks how a model developed in China may influence cities across the world—and what a global urban future shaped by Chinese experiences might look like.
Edited by architect Daan Roggeveen and developed with contributions from leading international voices, Progress & Prosperity offers a critical reflection on the forces shaping the twenty-first-century city.
