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The unprecedented pace of urbanization and modernization of China in the last three decades has led to a huge restructuring of the pre-existent urban fabrics and the progressive reshaping of the city form, its inner structure and urban landscape, by promoting the growth of many new high-rise residential superblocks and suburban commercial, industrial, and business districts built around major Chinese cities. Famous for the UNESCO protected urban gardens, Suzhou has over 2,500 years of history. Like in many Chinese cities, the low-rise urban landscape of the old city clashes visually with the verticality of the contemporary built environment, especially evident in the new residential urban zones of Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP). Focusing on four selected case studies of large-scale housing projects in SIP, the paper explores how these new residential communities have engaged the themes of verticality and high-density living to create extensive constellations of modern but uniform high-rise urban communities. It also considers how and comment about the contradictions within this acontextual modern urban landscape, which mirror to some extent a larger trend in Chinese and other East Asian cities, in a phase of exceptional urban development and economic growth at the turn of the 21st century.

The impressive urban growth of China in the last few decades has been largely based on a sustained and state-sponsored economic development which by financing infrastructure development, fostering industrial and manufacturing production, and promoting an aggressive campaign to modernize the country, has deliberately pursued economic and social policies aimed at concentrating activities and people and reshaping and redesign many urban areas of the cities, with the result that the urban landscapes are changing rapidly, with mixed results, but at the cost of neglecting the safeguarding of the genuine spirit and still valuable features of the local places. Reflecting on the recent urban transformation in Suzhou, the paper intends to stress the importance of re-learning the lessons taught by a few highly influential architects and planners, and how the rediscovery of their theses and principles could be a precious resource to look at in order to initiate a different discourse on the design of vibrant, meaningful and beautiful urban spaces more in tune with the local identity.

The article reports the results of a Mokken Scale Procedure (MSP) developing a hierarchical cross-national scale gauging attitudes toward illegal immigration, and a subsequent qualitative cross-national assessment of this scale. Responses to a 20-item Likert-type-scale were collected in two national representative surveys in the Netherlands and New Zealand. The MSP analysis yielded a cumulative scale with the same four items for each with an acceptable 'scalability' in both samples, of H >.40. This cross-national four-item scale was evaluated by means of in-depth interviewing nine participants in the Netherlands and 15 participants in New Zealand. Analysis of the interviews shows that individually ranking the items of the scale is similar to the rank order generated by MSP, but the individual evaluation of the degree of negativity of items strongly depends on the way illegal immigrants are framed by subjects. The contribution of a mixed methods approach is discussed. It is suggested that the present quantitative measuring instruments measure a general average attitude, which may be likened to a measure of the average temperature of a country at a certain moment, while qualitative evaluations vary with the way illegal immigrants are framed by individuals, like variations in local temperature. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

The article reports the results of a Mokken Scale Procedure (MSP) developing a hierarchical cross-national scale gauging attitudes toward illegal immigration, and a subsequent qualitative cross-national assessment of this scale. Responses to a 20-item Likert-type-scale were collected in two national representative surveys in the Netherlands and New Zealand. The MSP analysis yielded a cumulative scale with the same four items for each with an acceptable 'scalability' in both samples, of H >.40. This cross-national four-item scale was evaluated by means of in-depth interviewing nine participants in the Netherlands and 15 participants in New Zealand. Analysis of the interviews shows that individually ranking the items of the scale is similar to the rank order generated by MSP, but the individual evaluation of the degree of negativity of items strongly depends on the way illegal immigrants are framed by subjects. The contribution of a mixed methods approach is discussed. It is suggested that the present quantitative measuring instruments measure a general average attitude, which may be likened to a measure of the average temperature of a country at a certain moment, while qualitative evaluations vary with the way illegal immigrants are framed by individuals, like variations in local temperature. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.