Tales of territoriality: the urbanisation of Meifa village, China.

Territorial place is the most open and inclusive of places. At the same scale the terrifying abstractions of deterritorialisation can be seen to be a negotiated stand-off between different territorialisations. In other words, the deterritorialisation thesis of Deleuze and Guattari, the state project thesis of James Scott, and the dislocation thesis of postmodernists need severe modification. That modification is carried out by ethnography and local history, here by a case study of a Chinese village that is in the process of being urbanised. What is revealed when this is done is that so-called deterritorialisation is a pair of territorialisations, of state projects and of capitalist ribbon development and the nodes of its economic institutions and functions. At this scale they are brought into negotiation with reappropriations of territorial place by local actors.