Framing transition in China’s High-Tech Zones: Advances in Visual Grounded Theory

The article illustrates an ongoing research on the perception of the transition landscapes of two high-tech zones in China. Through this research, the authors attempt to broaden the scope of Grounded Theory (GT) to embrace urban and environmental phenomena by employing GT to explore the processes related to these phenomena by using visual data. The value of the research exceeds the ethnographic relevance of the case studies to interrogate what could be called “transitions’ framing strategies,” in which seeing and the visual – considered in an ecological perspective – couple with attitudes and the senses, thus generating and mediating different kinds of knowledge(s). In particular, the paper compares Visual and non-visual GT and discusses the practical differences among them.