Locating Zhuhai between land and sea: a relational production of Zhuhai, China, as an island city

Despite an abundance of representations that focalize Zhuhai’s island and coastal features in both academic and popular discourses, serious engagement with the lived sociogeographic realities of the ‘city of a hundred islands’ are few and far between. As a critical reaction, this paper seeks a relational production of Zhuhai, China as an island city with specific urban island spatiality. The focus/locus problematic is deployed within the wider context of the relational turn in island studies. First, representations that bring Zhuhai’s islandness into focus are categorized and analyzed. It is questioned whether these discourses have constructed for the city an organic collective self that identifies with island and marine values. In an effort to de-focus Zhuhai’s island and coastal geographies and re-produce them as locus, a series of place-specific relational issues pertinent to urban island studies are addressed, such as the relationship between island spatiality and city formation, land-sea configurations, and the nature of urban public space between land and sea. It is argued that the island city of Zhuhai’s imaginaries and the concretization of its island and coastal possibilities follow a trajectory that is island conscious and mainland unconscious. To propose alternative theoretical models for a more nuanced understanding of the lived realities of the island city of Zhuhai and island cities in general, the paper concludes by re-contextualizing the focus/locus dichotomy within the wider theoretical framework of the relational turn in island studies.