David Bray

The University of Sydney, Sociology and Social Policy, Faculty Member

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David Bray’s research is focused on exploring the inter-relationships between the built environment, governance and social change in contemporary China. Utilising post-structuralist theorisations on power, ‘governmentality’ and spatiality he aims to understand both how the built environment is imagined and planned at a governmental and technocratic level, as well as how its reconstruction impacts on communities and subjectivities at the local level. In particular David is interested in the multifarious ways in which the built environment becomes both a strategic resource for governmental interventions and a site of local resistance to those interventions and to the discourses they embody. China’s rapid urban transformation in recent years is of global significance in its own right, but in a comparative context, it also raises many intriguing challenges to established understandings of modernisation, urbanisation and social change: in this broader context, David’s research seeks to address larger theoretical debates associated with fields such as urban sociology, human geography, social policy, city planning and globalisation.
David Bray is fluent in Chinese (Mandarin) and undertakes regular research trips to China where he is currently engaged in research collaborations with scholars at leading universities including Peking, Tsinghua and Nanjing.

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Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The danwei system from origins to reform

Papers by David Bray

Urban Planning Goes Rural: Conceptualising the "New Village"

A major goal of the national program to Build a New Socialist Countryside is to modernise and urb... more A major goal of the national program to Build a New Socialist Countryside is to modernise and urbanise the rural built environment.
This objective has been bolstered by the extension of state-sponsored urban planning regimes into rural jurisdictions. One
of the implications of this is that every administrative village in China is now required to commission and implement a 20-year “master
plan” for redevelopment. Through tracing the origins and rationale of key policy initiatives, in the first part of this paper I aim to show
how urban planning came to be seen as an appropriate tool for solving a range of intractable rural “problems.” In the second part of
the paper, I present a case study of village redevelopment in order to illustrate how the principles of urban planning have been applied
to the re-making of rural built environments and the transformation of rural life.

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Master Planning the Nation: Elites and the Transformation of China's Built Environment

Elites and Governance in China. London: Routledge, Xiaowei Zang and Chien-wen Kou (eds.), 73-93., 2013

One of the less noted paradoxes of contemporary China is that the decline of the planned economy ... more One of the less noted paradoxes of contemporary China is that the decline of the planned economy has been accompanied by an increase in the influence of town planners, architects and urban designers. The new ‘Urban and Rural Planning Law’ (2008), which mandates formal ‘master planning’ for every scale of administrative territory from the Nation down to the village, underscores the alignment of governmental and professional commitment to purposefully shape the built environment for political, economic and social ends. The elite discourse and practice of ‘master planning’ that has emerged in recent years, then, manifests not only in grandiose mega-projects like the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai Expo; but also in thousands of other development projects across the nation: new ‘CBDs’, urban housing estates, county development zones, ‘new villages’ and so on. Taking examples from various scales of planning this paper demonstrates that in contemporary China, elite discourses of planning are just as likely to affect distant villages or peri-urban suburbs as the heart of Beijing or Shanghai. Moreover, the significance of contemporary ‘master planning’ lie less in discourses of national resurgence, than in a new manifestation of utopian modernism launched by Hu Jintao through his ‘theory of scientific development’: within this paradigm, the key objective of government planners is to re-order and standardise the built environment so as to render communities and economies more transparent and governable.

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Designing to govern: space and power in two Wuhan communities

Urban reconstruction in China over the last decade has resulted in a substantial reconfiguration ... more Urban reconstruction in China over the last decade has resulted in a substantial reconfiguration of spatial structures. New forms of space have emerged in parallel with the rise of new economic, social and cultural formations. In turn, these developments have impacted on how political power is organised in urban China. In particular, two strategic trends reflect this impact: 1) increased government intervention in urban planning and residential design; and 2) the national program to revamp grassroots governance through ‘community building’ (shequ jianshe). Concerned with the problem of how to govern an increasingly complex urban environment, China’s city authorities have realised that attention to spatial order is a vital component of community governance. Acknowledging the extent to which space and power are mutually constitutive, I explore how new urban residential spaces facilitate particular forms of local community governance. Based on socio-spatial fieldwork undertaken in two residential compounds in Wuhan, this article demonstrates the close inter-connection between urban design and the operation of local power.

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Building 'community': New strategies of governance in urban China

Economy and Society, Jan 1, 2006

Under the planned economy China’s urban population was largely immobile and governed through the ... more Under the planned economy China’s urban population was largely immobile and governed through the socialist workunit (danwei). Market reforms begun in the 1980s have culminated in the last decade with a dramatic decline of the state-sector and the emergence of a more mobile, heterogeneous and economically independent urban population. In rendering the old system obsolete, these trends have led the Chinese government to rethink its strategies for urban governance. At the turn of the millennium, a new campaign to ‘build communities’ was launched throughout the nation with the objective of establishing the residential ‘community’ as the new basic unit of urban governance. This paper explores the logic behind this policy innovation and analyzes the techniques adopted to operationalize ‘community governance’.

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Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The danwei system from origins to reform

Urban Planning Goes Rural: Conceptualising the "New Village"

Download

Master Planning the Nation: Elites and the Transformation of China's Built Environment

Elites and Governance in China. London: Routledge, Xiaowei Zang and Chien-wen Kou (eds.), 73-93., 2013

Download

Designing to govern: space and power in two Wuhan communities

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Building 'community': New strategies of governance in urban China

Economy and Society, Jan 1, 2006

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David Bray

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