Nick R. Smith

Nick R. Smith is an interdisciplinary scholar of global urban studies with a focus on the spatial politics of development and planning in Asia. His research approaches urbanization as a process of collective problem-solving arising from the co-inhabitation of space: cities are where people figure out how to live together, with all the opportunities and challenges that the sharing of resources and experiences entails. Using a combination of ethnography, archival research, and spatial analysis, his work explores experimental zones, model towns, and other sites of experimentation and innovation that do not fit easily in existing patterns of urbanization. Through deep engagement with these atypical cases, Smith’s research critically re-engages with dominant theoretical paradigms in urban studies. 

China’s urban–rural relations and the urbanization of its villages has been one of Smith’s primary research interests. His first book, entitled The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (University of Minnesota, 2021), 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. At the same time, the reshuffling of urban–rural relations also creates openings for village actors to contest the party-state’s hegemony. The End of the Village investigates these differing visions for the just ordering of Chinese society as they intersect in the urbanization of an experimental village in Chongqing.

Smith’s current book project, entitled The Shekou Ethic and the Spirit of Chinese Urbanization, revisits the origins of China’s reform era through a history of the Shekou Industrial Zone from 1978 to 1992. The first place in China to open up to the outside world after 1978, Shekou served as a ‘test tube’ for experimenting with new practices of development, planning, and governance—in short, to figure out how the abstract idea of ‘reform’ could be concretized into societal transformation. Through an investigation of Shekou, the book argues that the dramatic changes of the early reform era were rooted in a shared feeling that the zone’s pioneers referred to as the ‘Shekou ethic’. As people in Shekou worked together to try to nurture and sustain this new way of relating to each other and the world, they created new spaces and institutions that have become hallmarks of the reform era. Thus, China’s reforms did not just produce urbanization, they also originated in an urban process of community-building. At the same time, Shekou reveals how this process was inherently unequal, excluding and exploiting certain groups of people even as the zone offered hope for a better future. The Shekou Ethic shows how affect and urbanity have acted as generative forces in the realization of China’s reforms and in the production of societal change more generally, including the trenchant inequalities and systemic contradictions that still challenge contemporary China.

Related to these projects in China, Smith is also pursuing new, comparative research in other parts of Asia, including on village urbanization in Jakarta and industrial zone urbanism in Singapore. 

Smith is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a faculty affiliate at the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute. 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 The City, Urban Elsewheres, Urbanizing China, The Just City, The Global Urban Research Lab, and Urban Revolution.

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, the Fulbright Scholarship, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In 2011 and 2012, Smith served as Secretary of the International Association for China Planning, and from 2023 to 2025 he was a PIP Fellow at the National Committee on US–China Relations. He serves as a member of the Advisory Board of the Urban China Research Network and sits on the editorial boards of Dialogues in Urban Research, Transactions in Planning and Urban Research, and the China City Planning Review.