The Friends of Tufts Libraries Wednesday afternoon hosted an author talk with the Chair of the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Weiping Wu, who spoke about her newest book, "The Chinese City."
Laura Wood, the director of Tisch Library, started off the event with a presentation of the Maxine Newberg Gordon Book Prize.
Wood explained that the prize is given out in honor of Gordon (J '70), a math major who died after losing a battle with breast cancer in 1999. Gordon was passionate about both mathematics and literature, and the award is given to a current student who shares her passion.
"Her family, friends and colleagues established a special endowment to honor her," Wood said. "The endowment is used to purchase literature for the library. In addition to supporting the collections for the benefit of the Tufts community, the endowment includes an annual book prize."
Robinson Professor of Mathematics Todd Quinto followed Wood with remarks on this year's prize recipient, junior Thomas Snarsky. Quinto explained the uniqueness of the award and the difficulty of combining two different fields of study.
"The math majors I've seen over the years who get this award are all very special because they do combine two fields that don't always go together, but with these students, they go together in a wonderful way," Quinto said.
He explained that Snarsky is double majoring in mathematics and philosophy, and that he has succeeded in some of the Department of Mathematics' most challenging courses. Quinto also said that the award was a book of the recipient's choice.
"Through the generosity of the Gordon family, each recipient of this prize chooses a book, a copy of which is given to the library and another copy [which] is given to the recipient," Quinto said. "Tom selected 'Imperial' by William Vollmann."
According to Quinto, the book discusses 20th century totalitarianism and blends both critical journalism and literary fiction.
"The most remarkable feature of his work is his pervasive sense of justice," Quinto read aloud from a statement written by Snarsky. "He doesn't just write about the needy. Instead, he writes about the dazzling moral complexity of human life and the human condition at both its best and its worst."
Snarsky told the Daily after the event that he felt very grateful for the prize.
"It's really a great honor," he said. "I got to speak with the family who funds it and, you know, it's a privilege in [and] of itself that they fund the award at all. To receive it means that I was picked out in some meaningful sense from the rest of the math majors and the rest of the folks who study literature."
After Snarsky received his award, Wood returned to introduce Wu, whom she said has been a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Wu has served as a consultant for both the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, according to Wood, and has published six books.
"She has steadily produced books," Wood said. "Her research explores the impact of migration on cities, the role of planning and policy development on urbanization and linkage between higher education and industry."
Wood and Wu agreed that "The Chinese City" is different than her previous publications. Wu said that she and co-author Piper Gaubatz, a professor at the UMass Amherst, wrote the book to discuss the transformation of China.
"When Piper and I started writing this book, especially because we were targeting a larger audience, we thought understanding a Chinese city offers a lens into understanding the Chinese transformation in the last 40 years," she said. "We also wanted to speak to the audience like you ... we refrained ... from making really large statements and judgments about Chinese cities."
Wu explained that urbanization in China can be divided into two categories: the migration to cities and the changes within the cities. Marketization, decentralization, industrialization, migration and globalization were the factors Wu listed as contributing to this rapid growth of cities.
"These factors coming together in a really short period of time ... very few countries have had this sort of intermingling of these large forces at work over that short period of time," she said. "That intermingling, in many ways, is the driving force of this rapid urbanization of the country."
Urbanization is not constant across the country, however, as Wu said that it is almost entirely concentrated in the eastern half of China.
"If you draw a line [through China], 40 percent of the land area is to the east and 60 percent is to the west," she said. "But guess how much of the population lives to the east? Ninety-five [percent]. We're seeing that cities, particularly the large ones, are on the east coast ... So China's geography also indicates a very problematic human-to-environment relationship."
The way in which Chinese cities have formed is also different than in other developing countries, according to Wu. She said people tend to concentrate in one large city in most developing countries, but that in China, people are spread throughout many large cities.
"Urban primacy exists everywhere in developing countries, except in the very small ones or some unique exceptions," she said. "One of the exceptions is China ... You don't actually have a [dominate] city. You have several cities. You have Beijing, Shanghai and then, by sheer administrative districting, you have Chongqing."
She attributed this even distribution to Chinese migration policies.
"Most countries allow market forces to shape migration," Wu said. "China, much like the former Soviet Union - in fact even more strict than the former Soviet Union - has had a system of household registration that links your place of residence to the provision of a set of public or social benefits ... Up until 1983, you were born in a place and you ... would be fixed in that place."
However, Wu noted that policies are changing and that China is developing a real estate market. She said that while employers used to provide housing - she herself grew up living nearby her parent's coworkers - that is no longer the case.
"That really fundamentally changed the Chinese residential landscape within cities and created the increasing role of real estate development and the cessation of work unit compounds," she said. "[That has resulted in the] less walkable cities that we've seen today."
Wu concluded her lecture with a summation of China's recent changes.
"In many ways, China and particularly urban China is becoming more stratified both within and across cities," she said. "Regionally, cities on the east coast are certainly doing better."
She cautioned, however, that both the debt of local governments and environmental problems could regress previous growth.
"In the end, what is going to potentially undo all of the progress of not only urban China, but China as a whole, could very well be the fragile human and environmental relationship," she said.
After her lecture, Wu took questions from the audience on the potential for reverse migration and on the country's management of agricultural land.
"I think it's difficult to see how much reverse or return migration is going to take place because the projections is another 300 million people are going to move to cities," she said.
Wu explained that China's desire for food security has played a role in the patterns of urban development.
"China does not have food security," she said. "However, the central government does have the determination or the goal of achieving some degree of self-sufficiency, so that actually has been playing out in urban development. There is a system that restricts local governments' continuous use of agricultural land ... development is leap frogging around [farm land]."
