Transactions in Planning and Urban Research is a platform for diverse new inquiries and dialogues on the urban and regional development and planning processes in China. China’s phenomenal and accelerated urbanisation presents an exciting laboratory for researchers to observe economic, environmental, social-cultural, and governance changes and innovations in the contemporary world. For instance, being the world’s largest carbon emitter and the second largest economy means that China’s role in tackling some of the most pressing challenges such as climate change. Despite being the largest carbon emitter, China is also an important site of experimentation in new ways to reduce carbon emissions, including urban energy transitions towards renewable energies and the development of a range of urban green infrastructures such as eco-cities, greenways, and sponge cities. Although urban China may display aspects of uniqueness, these novel features of Chinese cities are not exceptional and nor do they exist in silos disconnected from the rest of the world. Instead, Chinese cities are intricately connected to other contexts and are parts of wider transnational and global processes. At the same time, however, many aspects of China’s urbanisation and its future trajectory are not pre-defined by existing theories and instead require both contextual and comparative research (Robinson, 2016). We therefore believe that urban China can provide fertile ground to critically reflect on existing theories and create new concepts, as well as become a launching pad to establish dialogues with other contexts. As a research field, ‘Urban China’ is growing rapidly and is one of the most active, dynamic, and well-connected. The research field is situated at the conjuncture of China Studies which comes from the tradition of area studies. It is oriented towards historical, cultural, and political contexts and Urban Studies which treats Chinese urbanisation as part of political, economic, environmental, and social-cultural changes of the (de-)globalising world. Whilst both research traditions have contributed greatly towards a better understanding of urban China, we felt that there is a need for a journal that can bridge the two and treat Chinese urbanisation in a holistic, reflexive, grounded way without being confined to historical and cultural specificities. As such, it is time to introduce a journal that pays particular attention to recent developments in China and their policy implications, while situating this research in comparative perspectives within wider urban processes. Submit your manuscript today at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tup .
