Policies, Practices, and Imaginaries: Urban Regeneration in China - Chengdu as a Case

Against the backdrop of China’s very recent urbanisation boom - urbanisation rate has tripled during the last thirty years - as well as the roaring real estate market mirroring its market-oriented reform, Chinese cities have been undergoing rapid and extensive regeneration at the same time. Such ever-growing rebuilding processes are taking place regularly in almost every city, not only large metropolises; in a way, urban regeneration has become a hegemonic project at all levels of public administration. Despite its strong yet debatable explanatory power in late-capitalist societies, the dominant neoliberal approach of using economic logic to explain the city (re)development underestimates the role of the state, overlooks other motivations and mechanisms behind the process of city making, and cannot fully grasps the complex entanglement between the state, the market and society in Chinese urban settings where notably, instead of being downgraded, state power is reinforced by deploying market instruments. This research therefore aims to problematise and contribute to the discourse of the study of urban regeneration by focusing on the social and cultural dimensions of the process. By doing so, this research contextualises the issue of urban regeneration in the broader process of societal transformation and also examines the role of urban regeneration in this broader process. Combing over one hundred interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, supplemented by policy documents and news reports, this research aims to explore key mechanisms and power relations in making and remaking urban space at the neighbourhood level in small-scale urban renewal projects in Chinese cities, with a focus on the city of Chengdu. If the early two decades of property-led redevelopment were primarily about economic growth, the recent ten years’ practice has been a social-cultural project to reconfigure urban governance, re-stabilize the turbulent society in the wake of rapid socio-economic transformation of urban China, re-integrate heterogeneous and fragmented urban population, and rebuild a common cultural identity after the continuous ruptures and growing disparities. The data collected from the two parts of the study – interviews relating selected cases and ethnographic research – form an intertext that tells two dimensions of the same story, namely that the regeneration of the physical space of the city is only scratching the surface of a social engineering project that is transforming people, and the way society as a whole is organised.