The time-geographic approach in research on urban China’s transition

This chapter provides a critical overview of how the time-geographic approach has been introduced and applied to urban China transition research. It presents a brief history of time-geographic research in China, with a focus on its development stages. The chapter provides review of applications of time-geography to empirical research and planning practices to understand the transformation process and mechanism of Chinese cities. It argues that time-geographic research offers a new perspective for understanding the complexity and diversity of human behavior patterns during the large-scale spatial and institutional transition in Chinese cities. The chapter focuses that while the techniques and tools used in the visualization of individual path and space-time activity patterns in China have caught up with those in the West, the theoretical development of the time-geographic approach and the empirical studies based on the key concepts of "project" and "pockets of local order" still lags behind.