PhD Spotlight: Yimeng Yang

At the edges of city growth

I grew up in a major Chinese city during a period of accelerated urban development. Like many in my generation, I benefited from the expansion of highways, metro systems, high-rise housing, and modern public services. The city appeared efficient, dynamic, and increasingly “green.” Yet this experience also planted a persistent question that has shaped my intellectual trajectory: if the city is celebrated as a site of progress, what happens beyond its borders? What kinds of spaces and forms of dwelling are absorbed into city growth, and which are left out, unsettled, or rendered invisible?

My research interests have therefore consistently focused on the political economy of the “non-city,” referring to those spaces not fully incorporated into dominant regimes of urbanization. I have studied historic districts awaiting redevelopment, urban villages subsumed into metropolitan expansion, and, more recently, peri-urban settlements negotiating their position at the urban-rural interface. They reveal the frictions, negotiations, and resistances that accompany contemporary urbanization, particularly amid highly state-capital-intensive urban development approach.

“I approach urbanization not as a linear developmental trajectory but as a dialectical process unfolding through uneven development and inherent contradiction.”

Urbanization as contradiction

Intellectually, I am deeply influenced by Marxist critical geography, political ecology, and urban theory. Building on the work of David Harvey, Jason Moore, and Neil Brenner, among others, I approach urbanization not as a linear developmental trajectory but as a dialectical process unfolding through uneven development and inherent contradiction. This perspective enables me to critically reflect on the appropriation, dispossession, and displacement of the non-city as constitutive dimensions of urban expansion rather than as its external consequences.

In my doctoral research, municipal waste infrastructure serves as an empirical entry point into these broader questions. By examining the expansion of waste-to-energy systems, I investigate how urbanization intensifies metabolic throughput (growth and regimes of discard) while simultaneously restructuring hinterlands through new forms of socio-ecological displacement, and how these dynamics constrain, yet also give rise to, possibilities for more sustainable and potentially degrowth-oriented urban processes.

The interdisciplinary environment of the Policy School, its openness to critical scholarship and its commitment to real-world questions, provides an ideal setting for pursuing this line of inquiry.

Truth in practice

Looking ahead, I hope to continue pursuing critical scholarship while engaging in public-facing intellectual debates and collaborative knowledge productions that advance comparative and situated readings of urbanization and socio-ecological transformation. In the current academic climate, such commitments feel particularly urgent.

At the same time, spaces of hope must be forged through practice. For me, one emerging site of engagement lies in distributed, socially participatory infrastructural initiatives, with composting currently serving as my key focus. These initiatives offer alternative possibilities to top-down, capital-intensive models of city growth. Yet I remain attentive to the need to avoid methodological localism by situating such practices within cross-scalar and global dialogues, contributing to broader intellectual solidarities and shared critical inquiry.