Building the City

Mark Jayne is a Professor of Human Geography and Deputy Dean of the International School of Geography at Sun Yat-sen University, the People’s Republic of China. Mark is an urban social and cultural geographer who has published eleven books and over 100 journal articles, book chapters, and official reports. Mark is the author of Cities and Consumption (Routledge, 2005), co-author of Alcohol, Drinking, Drunkenness: (Dis)Orderly Spaces (Routledge, 2011), Childhood, Family, Alcohol (Routledge, 2016) and Building the City: Everyday Lives of Migrant Workers (Routledge, 2025). Mark has also edited City of Quarters: Urban Villages in the Contemporary City (Routledge, 2004), Small Cities: Urban Experience Beyond the Metropolis (Routledge, 2006), Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities (Routledge, 2012), Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2016), and Chinese Urbanism: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2018).Wu Siying is a doctoral student in the Institute of Geography at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland whose critical interests include mobilities, migration, affect, decolonising geographical imaginations and archives. Siying’s research is focused on Anglo-Chinese relations and the post-Second World War forced deportation of Chinese seafarers from Liverpool.Wu Chenhui is a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Tourism Management at Sun Yat-sen University, the People’s Republic of China. Chenhui’s scholarly endeavours are focused on heritage, migration, and maritime studies with papers published in journals including Social & Cultural Geography, and Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space.

• 1. Introduction 2. Building context: territorial, relational, comparative 3. Traversing precarity 4. Mundane (im)mobilities 5. Undoing manual labour 6. The labour of love 7. Embodied, emotional, and affective counter-topographies 8. Consumption, pleasure, and leisure 9. Fashioned and sexual identities 10. Digital lives 11. Epilogue