Global China and Urban Futures: Infrastructures of Power and Imagination

Organizers: Maria Adele Carrai (University of Oxford), Mark Swislocki (NYU Abu Dhabi), Lola Woetzel. (NYU Shanghai) The 21st-century rise of Global China is increasingly visible in urban landscapes worldwide. From Southeast Asia to the Middle East, from East African capitals to the deltas and coastal cities of South Asia, China's overseas investments in ports, railways, special economic zones, and smart-city projects are reshaping urban form and extending China's global reach. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) epitomizes this footprint, through which Chinese state-owned enterprises and tech giants finance and build urban infrastructure abroad. But Global China is only one strand in a wider reordering of what cities are for and who is authorized to imagine them. Three additional pressures — the building of entirely new cities, the reconstruction of cities after war, and the remaking of cities by water — increasingly converge with Chinese infrastructure flows, and with each other, in ways that demand a unified analytical conversation. We propose "infrastructures of power and imagination" as the guiding framework for that conversation. Infrastructures of power encompass the physical and digital systems through which political and economic influence is exercised — roads, railways, ports, fiber-optic cables, data centers, smart grids, surveillance networks — that expand a state's reach and bind others into new dependencies. Infrastructures of imagination, by contrast, are the narratives, visions, and renderings that accompany the steel and concrete: utopian images of green, high-tech urbanism; promises of national renewal; "communities of common destiny in cyberspace." This dual framework directs attention not only to what is being built and by whom, but to what dreams and political visions are embedded in these projects — and to whose dreams are displaced when the bulldozers arrive. Three settings make these infrastructures unusually legible today, and a single conference can productively hold all three in view. First, cities built from scratch. From Saudi Arabia's NEOM to the UAE's Masdar City, from Egypt's New Administrative Capital to Indonesia's Nusantara and China's own Xiong'an, the early twenty-first century has seen a renewed wave of cities built on greenfield or desert sites. These projects are promoted with strikingly similar imagery — glass towers, autonomous vehicles, vertical farms, carbon-neutral districts — and are often financed, designed, or technologically equipped by transnational consortia in which Chinese firms now occupy a central position. New cities are perhaps the purest case of infrastructure-as-imagination: their architecture exists in renderings long before it exists in concrete, and the renderings do real political work. Second, cities under and after war. Reconstruction is no longer the postwar exception but an active urban condition across Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Ukraine, and Sudan. Each of these settings has become a contested arena in which different actors — multilateral donors, Gulf states, Chinese state-owned enterprises, Western consultancies, diaspora networks, local architects and planners — propose competing futures for what the city should become. The question of who is authorized to imagine reconstruction is increasingly inseparable from the question of who finances and builds it. Chinese firms have positioned themselves for reconstruction roles in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere; Gulf capital plays an equally decisive role; the imaginative work projected onto these landscapes is intense, varied, and often opaque. Third, places remade by water. Coastal megacities from Jakarta and Dhaka to Lagos and Alexandria, river deltas across South and Southeast Asia, and water-scarce inland cities from Cape Town to Phoenix are being forced to imagine futures their existing infrastructures cannot support. Indonesia's relocation of its capital from sinking Jakarta to Nusantara, Bangladesh's emerging climate-displacement infrastructure, Egypt's new capital built away from a stressed Nile, the Gulf's desalination empire — all are decisions about which futures will be infrastructurally underwritten and which will be quietly abandoned. Chinese-built water infrastructure (dams, desalination plants, flood-control megaprojects) is one major node in these decisions; climate finance and adaptation aid is another; speculative architecture and "blue economy" branding is a third. These three settings share a structural condition: each is a site where the future of the city is being decided under conditions of uncertainty, displacement, and competing external interest, and where infrastructures of power and infrastructures of imagination are unusually fused. A city built from scratch, a city rebuilt after destruction, and a city being unmade by water all force the same question — what future is being installed here, and on whose authority — and they increasingly involve the same financial, technical, and rhetorical actors. Holding them in one analytical frame is the conference's distinctive contribution. Ultimately, the exploration of Global China through the lens of urban futures addresses urgent questions about how tomorrow's cities are being conceived and constructed today, and what these developments mean for governance, power, and global society. By bringing scholars of Gulf urbanism, China–Africa relations, post-war reconstruction, and climate-displaced cities into a single room, we gain comparative purchase on the infrastructures — material and imaginative — that are shaping the next century of urban life. The conference's distinctive contribution is to refuse the conventional separation between "smart city" futurism, "post-conflict" rebuilding, and "climate adaptation" planning, and to show that these are increasingly the same field of practice, contested by the same set of actors, and answerable to the same urgent question: whose city is being imagined here, and at what cost?