Calvin King Lam Chung

Geographical scholarship has paid increasing attention to the rise of so-called green industries. To evolutionary economic geographers, the development of such green industries represents a distinctive, ‘green’ form of path creation. Although green industries can significantly reconfigure socio-ecological relations, studies of green path creation tend to shy away from examining what green means and how green matters for green industries to take off. To address this research gap, this study examines the development of a battery recycling firm in Shenzhen by integrating perspectives from evolutionary economic geography and political-industrial ecology. We unpack the creation of a green development path in the battery recycling industry as a process of bargaining and interactions among actors who view used batteries differently. By doing so, this study enriches existing scholarship on geographies of waste, green path creation, and nature-society geography.

China’s environmental turn is diversifying the country’s urbanisation trajectories. Previously abstracted and exploited as a vast land reserve for urban expansion, the countryside of China now captures the imagination of a growing crowd of green-loving urbanites with its ecological and cultural resources, propelling a new, environmentalised form of urbanisation. In the Pearl River Delta, the development of rural greenways has driven this urbanisation, in which rural lives and landscapes have evolved in response to their encounters with urban users of the greenways. Based on the late John Friedmann’s multidimensional understanding of China’s urbanisation, this paper unpacks four aspects of changes brought about by greenway-driven urbanisation in the Pearl River Delta’s countryside since the 2010s, namely, economic diversification, institutional adaptation, physical reconfiguration, and sociocultural transformation. These changes underscore the need for research on China’s urban-rural relations to pay more attention to the growing centrality of the environment in the politics and practices of urbanisation.

Responding to the culture of exceptionalism in urban China studies, our article ‘Theorising with urban China’ proposed different ways of leveraging urban China cases to develop a more global urban theory. Such an approach is ambitious and requires further clarification. The generous accounts of four commentators generated big questions and reflections on two fronts: first, on the relationship between theorising and theorising with urban China, and second, on the practicalities of cross-border collaboration in urban China research. This response argues that theorising urban China and theorising with urban China are two sides of the same coin; and that the complementarities between empiricism and theorisation can be fulfilled through collaborations across the Chinese border.

The emergence of green industries has been considered from multiple social science perspectives. Economic geographers view green industries as unevenly distributed firms forging green development paths. Sustainability transitions scholars view green industries as niche sectors struggling to mainstream green technologies in existing socio-technical systems. Political ecologists view green industries as metabolic actors whose development shapes and is shaped by the environment. Conceptualizing green industries as the interplay of green firms, socio-technical systems and the environment, this article proposes an integrative framework that synthesizes the three aforementioned perspectives for a research agenda of the geographies of green industries.