Infrastructural China: Urban futures and everyday world-making

This introductory article argues that China’s global urban significance lies in the ways decades of uneven infrastructuring have reorganised urban possibility within and beyond China. It reads this shift through the movement from ‘ubiquitous China’, which captured China’s earlier presence in the global architectural imagination as a spectacular horizon of experimentation, to infrastructural China: an urban condition in which China’s transformation shapes how contemporary futures are imagined and pursued. Drawing on the papers gathered in this special issue, the article develops infrastructuring as the production of an urban condition in which everyday need and collective futures are materially organised, unevenly supported and sometimes displaced. In doing so, it shows how urban China can generate concepts for wider urban scholarship, while moving beyond accounts that locate China’s infrastructurality primarily in formal regimes of transnational infrastructure.