Focused on exploring the inter-relationships between the built environment, governance and social change in contemporary China. Utilising post-structuralist theorisations on power, ‘governmentality’ and spatiality he aims to understand both how the built environment is imagined and planned at a governmental and technocratic level, as well as how its reconstruction impacts on communities and subjectivities at the local level. In particular David is interested in the multifarious ways in which the built environment becomes both a strategic resource for governmental interventions and a site of local resistance to those interventions and to the discourses they embody. China’s rapid urban transformation in recent years is of global significance in its own right, but in a comparative context, it also raises many intriguing challenges to established understandings of modernisation, urbanisation and social change: in this broader context, David’s research seeks to address larger theoretical debates associated with fields such as urban sociology, human geography, social policy, city planning and globalisation
