Among many others, phenomenal urbanization taking place in many emerging economies such as China has presented new challenges to academics, planners, policy makers, and business people alike. China’s rapid urbanization in an enormous scale and incredible speed over the recent decades has been described by scholars as a “telescoping urban transition”—dramatic urban transition is taking place in a much shorter time frame in China than earlier transitions in the developed societies in Europe and North America.  It took over 90 years for England and Wales to increase its level of urbanization from 20 to 60 percent, but it has now taken less than 40 years for China to accomplish the same task.  The American economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz singled out China’s urbanization as one of the two most powerful global forces, along with US technological innovation, that are shaping world development in the 21st Century.  This is not difficult to understand as urbanization of such a large scale and high speed would pose huge challenges to human race in a wide spectrum of issues ranging from food and water supply to energy consumption, housing and transportation, resource and environmental management. From a scholarly point of view, the great urban transformation taking place in China and other emerging economies has offered a rare and valuable opportunity for those of us working in urban studies and governance and inclusive development to critically evaluate and interrogate many of the concepts, models, and theories derived from the experiences of the advanced economies for their (ir)relevance. 

I applaud the forward-looking vision and global perspective of the University of Amsterdam through the introduction of distinguished public lecture series, and I sincere hope that this will become a new beginning for further scholarly enquiry and international collaboration in the studies global interdependent development in the years to come.

George Lin 

George Lin is Chair Professor of Geography and Associate Dean (Research) of Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of several authoritative books on China's transformation, among others Red Capitalism in South China: Growth and Development of the Pearl River Delta, Developing China: Land, Politics, and Social Conditions, China's Urban Space: Development under Market Socialism. He also published over 90 articles in internationally refereed journals on similar topics. Lin visited the Centre for Urban Studies mid December 2014 to give a special lecture on "China’s Continuing Urban Transformation: State Power Reshuffling, Land Commodification, and Uneven Urbanization".