ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Secondary cities in the regional re-scaling process: three new challenges emerging from Chinese Mega-regional governance

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 04 | GOVERNANCE

Speaker

Dr Yizhao Du (Delft University Of Technology)

Description

Intra-regional unevenness has become a bottleneck to the vision of regional sustainability. In response, a variety of governance tools have been adopted to rebalance the relations between regional core cities, which face an over-concentration of population and industry resulting in severe socio-economic development pressures, and secondary cities, which are smaller-sized and less valued in the regional system and face the challenge of brain drain and industrial decline (Du et al., 2023; Wu, 2016). In China, this leads to an emerging process of regional spatial re-scaling: mega-regionalization. Mega-region is a coordinated regional governance unit centered around one or a few core cities with solid leadership that brings together smaller neighboring secondary cities. Until today, 19 statutory mega-regional plans have been approved for further regional governance. This study focuses on this uneven relation between core and secondary cities, aiming to understand how mega-regional governance affects this re-scaling process, and whether it brings opportunities or challenges for secondary cities. (Mega-)regional governance has always been regarded as a panacea for promoting regional cohesion across administrative boundaries, alleviating the conflict between intra-regional competition, and coping with common regional crises as a basis for spatial governance (Purkarthofer et al., 2021). However, through this study, we find that the story is different to chinese secondary cities as they are facing greater challenges in such a governance system.

We begin with three essential processes of regional re-scaling in China: territorialization, metropolization, and townization. Scholars have widely explored these three processes as characterizing Chinese regional development and simultaneously bringing significant impact to secondary cities (Yeh & Chen, 2020). First, territorialization tends to restructure the territorial boundaries according to a highly hierarchical structure. In this process, core cities are more capable of developing their surrounding territorial hinterlands. And because of environmental and ecological considerations, these territories become a burden for the growth of secondary cities. Second, there has also been widespread "metropolization" of secondary cities, but only in administrative boundary adjustments, with little real integration to forge stronger entities to play a more critical role in the regional system (Ma et al., 2024). Third, townization has led to extensive urbanization by encouraging small enterprises and industrial clusters, resulting in the rise of many small towns and posing the challenge of industrial homogeneity and low competitiveness, especially in secondary cities (Guan & Rowe, 2016).

Mega-regional governance is a planning imaginary that can coordinate these challenges, hoping for a more integrated urban system (Harrison & Gu, 2021). Thus, the expectation of a core city's driving capacity, the optimization of metropolitan structure, and industrial upgrading based on inter-city cooperation are promising responses to the three challenges. However, our observation and interpretation of the implementation process of this re-scaling process reveal that these challenges have not been resolved, but instead, new dilemmas arise. First, the authorities' confidence in the value of the core city as a driving force led to unrealistic ambitions to incorporate too large a territorial scope into a singular system. Second, the mega-regional encouragement of metropolization allows core cities to expand their dominance in the region, and the emphasis on satellite towns and industrial new towns of the core further peripheralize other secondary cities. Third, industrial upgrading in the context of mega-regionalization-initiated restrictions on resource- and labour-intensive industries. Coupled with environmental governance policies, secondary cities face difficulties upgrading their industries. Our study contributes new perspectives on regional governance, exemplified by secondary cities in China's mega-regionalization. We argue that top-down regional governance and a development path relying excessively on core cities have hindered the potential of secondary cities, informing future optimization of re-scaling process and governance practices in smaller cities (Bayirbağ, 2010).

References

Bayirbağ, M. K. (2010). Local Entrepreneurialism and State Rescaling in Turkey. Urban Studies, 47(2), 363–385. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009349022
Du, Y., Cardoso, R., & Rocco, R. (2023). Towards Coordination of Spatial Relations: Understanding Chinese Mega-Regionalization from a Secondary City Perspective (SSRN Scholarly Paper 4678795). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4678795
Guan, C., & Rowe, P. G. (2016). The concept of urban intensity and China’s townization policy: Cases from Zhejiang Province. Cities, 55, 22–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.03.012
Harrison, J., & Gu, H. (2021). Planning megaregional futures: Spatial imaginaries and megaregion formation in China. Regional Studies, 55(1), 77–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2019.1679362
Ma, H., Zou, J., Cai, H., & Zhang, L. (2024). Administrative division adjustment and environmental pollution: Evidence from City-County Mergers in China. China Economic Review, 84, 102141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2024.102141
Purkarthofer, E., Humer, A., & Mäntysalo, R. (2021). Regional planning: An arena of interests, institutions and relations. Regional Studies, 55(5), 773–777. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2021.1875128
Wu, F. (2016). China’s Emergent City-Region Governance: A New Form of State Spatial Selectivity through State-orchestrated Rescaling. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(6), 1134–1151. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12437
Yeh, A. G.-O., & Chen, Z. (2020). From cities to super mega city regions in China in a new wave of urbanisation and economic transition: Issues and challenges. Urban Studies, 57(3), 636–654. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019879566