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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until May 13, 2025

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Uprooting People, Planting Trees: Environmental Scarcity Politics and Urban Greening in Beijing

Kay, Samuel
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1616-4627
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1587652027967202

Abstract Details

2020, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Geography.
This dissertation consists of three studies which collectively address the intersection of politics of the environment and urbanization in Beijing, China. As Beijing responds to environmental challenges such as pollution and climate change, the municipal government has taken what this dissertation argues is a neo-Malthusian approach to urbanization through a suite of policies aimed at dramatically altering the city’s landscape, ecosystem, and human and non-human populations. These include a population cap (announced in 2015), a major afforestation program, the 2016-35 comprehensive plan, a 2017-20 plan for “special action” aimed at rapidly eliminating certain spatial practices, and a 2018-35 plan to turn Beijing into a “forest city.” Organized around the strategically fuzzy goal of “greening” and in hopes of demonstrating an ideal of environment-society relations put forth in China’s state ideology of “ecological civilization,” this policy suite has already wrought significant change in Beijing, most notably—and for the first time in contemporary China—the arrest and reversal of a decades-long trend of migration to Beijing: in the four years leading up to 2015, the number of non-local people living in Beijing had been increasing at an average rate of 201,000 per year; over the next four years, it shrank at an average rate of 193,000 for a total reduction of 770,000 through the end of 2019. This dissertation examines the many and varied effects of the enactment of this policy suite, including how these policies rely on and reproduce differences between people, but also how they reconfigure the relationships between nature, urban spatial practices, and the residents of Beijing. It argues that as the city government’s policies seek to shrink both the footprint of construction and the city’s population, it has “enlisted” trees in the effort to dramatically alter the spatial layout of the city. Based on two and a half years of primarily ethnographic fieldwork from May 2017 through November 2019, this research approaches this suite of policies from the “bottom up.” The research progresses from noting changes in the urban landscape—from the forced closure of “illegal” doorways to the wholesale demolition of informal settlements and the mass mobilization of 100,000,000 trees—to drawing connections to the specific policies that produced these changes. The dissertation seeks to trace the connections among and between the people impacted by these policies, the people tasked with enacting them, the people who formulated them, the ideologies that underpin them, and the built and natural components of the urban landscape that have been mobilized or otherwise altered by them, often in unanticipated ways. As the environment plays an increasingly prominent role in urban policy-making worldwide, this dissertation shows how the concept of environment functions as a potent force for social differentiation and class formation while at the same time opening terrain for new kinds of economic growth and reshaping the urban landscape.
Max Woodworth (Advisor)
Alana Boland (Committee Member)
Becky Mansfield (Committee Member)
Kendra McSweeney (Committee Member)
209 p.
Asian Studies; Environmental Justice; Environmental Studies; Geography; Urban Forestry; Urban Planning
Political Ecology; China; Urban Greening; Eco-Cities; Afforestation; Displacement; Migration; Environmental Justice

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kay, S. (2020). Uprooting People, Planting Trees: Environmental Scarcity Politics and Urban Greening in Beijing [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1587652027967202

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kay, Samuel. Uprooting People, Planting Trees: Environmental Scarcity Politics and Urban Greening in Beijing. 2020. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1587652027967202.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kay, Samuel. "Uprooting People, Planting Trees: Environmental Scarcity Politics and Urban Greening in Beijing." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1587652027967202

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.