Building Shanghai in the Borderlands: Restructuring the Uyghur City

In China, spatial transformations and urbanisation in its eastern and coastal regions have received a great deal of attention. This talk investigates the relatively little explored urban development in China’s Northwestern Uyghur homeland of XUAR (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2010 and 2017, the talk highlights the ways in which Uyghur urban middle-class citizens negotiate ethnicity, social status and the relation to the state through architecture. Uyghur ethnic belonging used to manifest visually in urban spaces through mosques, Muslim cemeteries or low-rise mud-brick buildings. In recent decades, such structures have been gradually demolished and replaced with Chinese style urban landscapes such as high-rise residential compounds, riverside promenades or large central squares. This leaves a void for Uyghur ethnic self-identification through forms of the built environment.

The speaker is Madlen Kobi, social anthropologist and assistant professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and scholar…