Making concessions in Tianjin: heterotopia and Italian colonialism in mainland China

Between 1860 and 1945, the Chinese port city of Tianjin became the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions, functioning side by side. Ruth Rogaski has argued that Tianjin's distinctiveness deserves the appellation ‘hyper-colony’, a term which reflects Tianjin's socio-political intricacies and the multiple colonial discourses of power and space. This article focuses on the representations of the ex-Italian concession in Tianjin, a site which is currently renegotiating its identity between reinvention of the past (1901–45) and property-led regeneration. The article employs the concept of heterotopia to explore ‘semi-colonial’, ‘hyper-colonial’ and ‘globalizing’ representations of Tianjin's built form.