%0 Journal Article
%T Happy town: Cultural governance and biopolitical urbanism in China
%A Tim Oakes
%J Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
%@ 1472-3409
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0308518X17693621
%X This paper explores the cultural inscription of urban space in China as a technology of government. Based on a three years of fieldwork, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation, the paper examines the case of one city¡¯s campaign to increase its ¡°happiness index¡± by creating an ethnic culturally themed built environment. The paper examines the city¡¯s happiness campaign as a project of biopolitical urbanism, and finds that while urban Chinese governmentality bears some striking resemblances to liberal approaches that view the city as a machine for experimenting with, and producing, certain kinds of (governable) citizens and social relations, the happiness campaign should also be understood as a deliberate effort to reinforce state power at the local level. The happiness campaign, in other words, aims to reproduce a sovereign mode of state power even as it speaks a language of neoliberal governmentality. Thus, the colonization of culture by biopolitical urbanism in China today suggests a complex combination of disciplinary and discursive modalities of sovereign power rooted in the paternalistic legacies of Chinese statecraft
%K Governmentality
%K biopolitics
%K eudemonia
%K cultural governance
%K policy mobility
%K creative industries
%K urbanism
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X17693621