Jia-Ching Chen

Drawing on archival research and fieldwork in China and Angola, we examine how master planned satellite new towns have become a major pathway for channeling state-controlled capital flows to shape particular pathways of urban development and national economic structure. Analyzing the dynamic entanglements of official development with land dispossession and commodification, the political economy of construction and volatile global markets, we argue that urban space and residents’ lives are shaped as much through ellipses—deliberate omissions in policy, planning and expert knowledge—as through “master planning.” We foreground these dynamics as a form of transnational urbanization, and an argument for relational and multi-sited research approaches.