Tibetan and Himalayan Library - THL

Description: Creator's Description: Urbanization in Tibet is contentious but poorly understood. We reexamine data on urban growth in Lha sa in light of ongoing conversations about the urban scale in China. Historically, a city/countryside dichotomy was not a key mode of organizing Tibetan conceptual and material landscapes. Thus urbanization is not just a technical matter of increased density of buildings and people, but also the imposition of a new grid of legibility and ordering of space. With the valorization of urban status as a measure of development, rural townships have been promoted to the administrative rank of urban towns, their populations and land areas boosting Lha sa’s urban totals by 30 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, Han in-migrants have concentrated in the city center, dominating urban occupations. Though Lha sa remains small compared with other provincial-level capitals, the extreme concentration of urban population in this one Tibetan city corroborates other evidence of uneven development. Emerging patterns of socio-spatial life in Lha sa suggest a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization toward a westward-expanding Han China.

Means of availability: Also available as a PDF at http://texts.thlib.org/static/reprints/jiats/04/yehJIATS_04_2008.pdf