The expansion of globalising cities into larger city-regions and, most recently, megaregions is posing fundamental questions about how best to plan and govern twentyfirst century urban regions. Nowhere is this challenge more acute than China, yet there is no clear understanding of Chinese megaregionalism. Debunking some inherent assumptions surrounding megaregions in China, this paper broadens our horizons beyond the narrow focus on what people have come to assume are China's megaregions to consider megaregionalism as an always evolving political-economic project. We argue the importance of distinguishing between planning megaregions (as discursive and imagined) and megaregional planning (as concrete and actual).
Studies of the connections between changing urban geographies and studentification have a widening international signature across continents. Yet, to date, the transformative effects of increasing university student populations in China have generally been under-stated within broader theorisations of urban change, despite unprecedented demands for student housing. In this paper our aim is to explore neighbourhood change in Haidianlu, which is adjacent to Peking University in Beijing.With an original focus on both off-and on-campus student accommodation, findings are presented to show that studentification processes are fuelled by socio-cultural predilections to live off-campus and the production of student-oriented rental housing in Haidianlu. The broader significance of our discussion is to assert that in China less-regulated student lifestyles are reinforcing urban geographies of sociospatial segregation and are illustrative of the wider effects of the privatisation of housing and land markets in China. The concept of studentification is pivotal to theorise how cross-cutting relations between neoliberal higher education and housing markets are reshaping Chinese cities to become more exclusionary, and comparative to other geographies of global studentification.
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