Urban development as a polyrhythmic project: Reimagining multiple urban futures in the era of slow growth

Temporal imagination of urban transformation in Asian cities is predominantly occupied with spectacular rapidity and high density. This singular representation neglects its messy but generative polyrhythmic assembling process and how previous patterns and recurring growth shape imaginations of multiple futures, which inhibits appreciation of the emerging slow growth. This paper employs a rhythmanalytical lens—particularly its repetition-with-difference and polyrhythmic elements—with a focus on density/densification, to examine the shifting development paradigms in Rushan, a small coastal Chinese city struggling to reconfigure its polyrhythms in the slow-growth era. Rushan once witnessed annual repetition of urban growth through selective housing densification capitalising on trans-local investors’ desire for lower-density coastal living, driven by the housing capital rhythm and a pro-growth coalition. Shrinking housing demand and national strategies promoting compact development, however, ushered in a (different) slow-growth period. The rhythms of seasonal investor-residents and tourists, and the transient density they entailed, became key sites for accumulation. Yet their seasonal and fragmented urban engagement produced incomplete and slow(er) development. Two contested futures emerged polyrhythmically: one seeking to fix the slowness through resuscitating housing capital, the other embracing it and the associated transient density, alongside new manufacturing industries’ remedial temporalities of consistency and stability. In so doing, we extend rhythmanalysis beyond repetition, patterning, and everydayness to emphasise difference, impermanence, and emergence, unravelling its co-constitutive relationship with the density-making process. We also call for foregrounding a polyrhythmic logic in dissecting post-growth urban development and re/imagining urban futures through heterogeneous spatio-temporal modality and innovative polyrhythmic reassembling in China and across Asian cities.