Small city big thinking: the making of China’s coffee capital

By looking beyond the physical size of a city, this paper aims to highlight an alternative appreciation of the smallness of small cities as a relational flexibility of rescaling. Specifically, we take the coffee industry of Pu’er in Southwest China as an epitome of demonstrating the process. Pu’er’s looking for a unique natural and cultural niche based on coffee, we argue, reveals the general struggles for repositioning between thinking big and keeping small of small cities. The question then reorients to how smallness is redefined and repackaged with “alternative bigness” of the small cities themselves. As such, Pu'er's urbanity of being a small city through thinking big as China’s Coffee Capital is more than a story about Chinese small cities. Rather, it goes further to flesh out the elasticity of small cities in repackaging and repositioning themselves in the intersection among spatiality of small urbanity, practices of cultural economy, the state interventions to city-regionalization, and the global market economy. Hence, the smallness of small cities has been the mechanism triggering their relational flexibility of rescaling for strategically and elastically shuttling between being small and thinking big.