Infrastructuring urban nature in contemporary China: Walking, lighting and platformised practice across borders

This paper examines the infrastructural configuration of urban nature in contemporary Chinese cities, approached through relocation of Chinese international students to Manchester, UK (2021–2022). Drawing on social practice theory and qualitative methods with fourteen students, the research traces how relocation disrupted nature engagement across three infrastructural registers: the social infrastructure of urban nature walking embedded in family routines and friendship networks; the material infrastructure of nighttime lighting enabling gendered evening mobility; and the digital infrastructure of platforms like Xiaohongshu, which produce landscapes of fear and desire and sustain platformised leisure culture across borders. The relocation reveals infrastructural configurations that Chinese eco-urbanism has normalised as markers of urban modernity and liveability. The paper’s central contribution is to demonstrate that nature practices do not travel intact across contexts: the materials and meanings that constitute them are anchored in place-specific infrastructures, while transferable platform-enabled competences tend to reproduce familiar, platform-mediated modes of nature engagement abroad. The paper reframes planning as the configuration of practice, with implications for lighting, platform visibility and support for mobile populations.