Nick R. Smith

Nick R. Smith is a scholar of urban transformation and planning. His work explores the city as an institution and planning as a process of institution building. Combining the perspectives of new institutional economics, development anthropology, and urban sociology, Smith investigates how urbanization inscribes the “rules of the game” into the space of the city. Using a combination of ethnography, spatial analysis, and archival research, he primarily pursues these processes through investigations of peri-urban villages—contexts of instability, liminality, and rapid change where new forms of urbanization are produced and contested.

Over the past decade, Smith’s work has focused on peri-urban China, where he has conducted extensive research on the development and planning of village communities. His recently published book, entitled The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China, investigates an epochal shift in Chinese urban policy that aims for the near-total urbanization of China’s territory and population. For decades, social justice in rural China has been based on the nation's urban-rural divide and the egalitarian redistribution of rights and resources within each village. The new urbanization program promises to rewrite this social contract, uprooting existing village institutions and integrating rural people more tightly into state-led processes of urban transformation. However, the reshuffling of urban-rural relations also creates openings for village actors to contest the party-state’s hegemony. The book investigates these differing visions for the just ordering of Chinese society as they intersect in the urbanization of an experimental village in Chongqing.

In his current research, Smith is investigating Shekou, one of the first industrial zones to be established during China’s post-1978 reform era. Used as a laboratory for testing and adapting international approaches to urban development and governance, Shekou offers an opportunity to understand the origins and logics of widespread Chinese development and planning practices. Smith's research traces these experimental practices through an international network of planning and policy exchanges across the Sinosphere, offering a new narrative of China's early reform era in which marketization, urbanization, and democratization were all tightly intertwined. Smith is also pursuing related research that follows the proliferation of planning knowledges and practices in Southeast Asia during the twentieth century.

Smith is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Prior to joining Barnard, he was a founding member of the Urban Studies faculty at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. At Barnard, he teaches a variety of courses in the Architecture Department and the Urban Studies Program, including Urban Elsewheres, Urbanizing China, and Key Debates in Urban Planning and Policy.

Smith received his A.B. (East Asian Studies), A.M. (Architecture), and Ph.D. (Urban Planning) from Harvard University. He has also held visiting positions at Oxford University (Oxford China Centre), Chongqing University (Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning), and Renmin University (History). Smith’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (USA), the Fulbright Scholarship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Kaifeng Foundation, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Ministry of Education (PRC), and the Ministry of Science and Technology (PRC). In 2011 and 2012, Smith served as Secretary of the International Association for China Planning. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Urban China Research Network and serves on the editorial boards of Transactions in Planning and Urban Research and Dialogues in Urban Research.