On the Limits of Urban Growth and the Rediscovery of the Countryside
by Harry den Hartog
We’ve almost forgotten the pandemic. The Shanghai lockdown three years ago (https://www.iias.asia/the-newsletter/article/temporary-dystopia-shanghai-absolute-lockdown-contain-omicron-variant) is etched into the collective memory, but no one really talks about it anymore. Yet that intense experience exposed fundamental questions – about urbanization, about food supply, and about the vulnerability of urban systems. Shanghai, China’s flagship of economic progress, came to a sudden standstill, without warning. Perhaps the most important question that emerged was whether there are limits to urban and economic growth, and how the city relates to the countryside. The restoration and redefinition of that relationship is now high on China’s political agenda.
This content is for members only. Please log in to view.
Harry den Hartog
Harry den Hartog is a researcher, urban designer, and founder of the platform Urban Language (www.urbanlanguage.org). In 2006, he published Exurbia: Wonen buiten de stad (Episode Publishers / Jap Sam Books), a book about spatial transformations in the Dutch countryside. In 2010, he followed up with Shanghai New Towns: Searching for community and identity in a sprawling metropolis (010 Publishers), which received both the Best Dutch Book Design (2010) and the Shanghai Culture Fund Award (2013). He has lived and worked in Shanghai since 2009 and has taught urban design and housing at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University since 2012, working with international student groups.
He received his PhD from TU Delft in 2023 for his research on waterfront redevelopment in Shanghai. Since 2023, he has worked as a researcher with the Abe Bonnema Chair in the Spatial Planning and Strategy department at TU Delft, but he spends much of the year doing fieldwork on location in the Yangtze River Delta. His current research focuses on the regional revitalization of urban and rural areas, both in the Netherlands and in China.
