The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World, by Visiting Professor Dr. Thomas Campanella of the GSD Department of Urban Planning and Design, was recently publishedby Princeton University Press.
The book surveys aspects of rapid urbanization in China during the post-Mao era, exploring the driving forces behind the great Chinese building boom. Concrete Dragon also traces the historical precedents and global flows of ideas and information that are fusing to create a bold new Chinese cityscape. Historian Jonathan Spence has called The Concrete Dragon “a fascinating and timely book that sets the scene for any further discussion of China’s explosive urban growth across the last twenty years.” British urbanist Sir Peter Hall writes, “Anyone interested in contemporary cities, anyone interested in contemporary China, has to read it.”
Thomas J. Campanella is associate professor of urban planning and design at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has also taught at MIT and Nanjing University in China, and was a Fulbright fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His previous books include Cities from the Sky (2001) and Republic of Shade (2003), winner of the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.