Cities on the new silk road: the global urban geographies of China’s belt and road initiative

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, scholarship on China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road, has burgeoned. However, it is only recently that analysis has interrogated the BRI as a driver of global urban transformation. In this paper, we advance an in-depth review of literature generated since 2013 that has critically examined relations between the BRI and urban-scale processes. Based on a categorization of studies into three areas, staging of the urban BRI, the building of BRI cities and living in BRI cities, we suggest that the urban is integral to the scope and impacts of the initiative. As the BRI goes into its second decade, we argue that BRI’s infrastructural spaces can be seen as new landscapes where novel kinds of urbanization are emerging, influencing patterns of socio-spatial contestation, and demanding new narratives of social change to make sense of cityscapes and urban futures worldwide.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban geography
• Belt and Road Initiative
• New Silk Road
• infrastructure-led development
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study has been supported by a Ramon y Cajal Fellowship [grant number RYC2020-028925-I/AEI/10.13039/501100011033] awarded to Elia Apostolopoulou, and the European Research Council funded “GlobalCORRIDOR: Urbanization, everyday life and techno-social differentiation” [grant number 947779] awarded to Jonathan Silver. Meanwhile, Han Cheng’s work was supported by a Max Weber Foundation Research Fellowship and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 42201189].