Editorial

The restructuring of Chinese cities has produced new spatial forms such as glittering and globally-oriented Central Business Districts, iconic architecture, forests of skyscrapers, development zones, shopping malls, suburban villas, university cities, and cultural clusters. Many Chinese cities have launched comprehensive entrepreneurial strategies to boost their role in intense intercity competition. While promoting entrepreneurial discourses, cities are also presenting themselves not only as economic and metropolitan centres but also as “world-class cities”; they have recently begun to discover their local cultural heritage as an asset in pursuing this strategy. Images of “world-class” cities were promoted in particular during special events such as the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008, the World Expo in Shanghai, and the Asian Games in Guangzhou in 2010. According to Ananya Roy, such strategies of “worlding” the cities of the Global South, or more broadly, the twenty-first-century metropolises, go beyond conceptualisations of Third World Urbanism that place the mega-city and its slums at the centre of the creation of urban futures