ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Narrative Arc of Planning Experiments: An Exploratory Study of Micro-regeneration in Shanghai

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 09 | URBAN FUTURES

Speaker

Dr Jingyi Zhu (University of Glasgow; University College London)

Description

Since around 2015, Shanghai, representative of Chinese cities that had entered a more developed and advanced stage, started to see the proliferation of the so-called micro-regeneration projects. While paradigmatic urban regeneration in China often featured ‘mass demolition and reconstruction’, micro-regeneration emerged as an experiment in planning outside the statutory system and as a community-based urban regeneration approach that was more sensitive to the existing built and social fabrics and directly responsive to local residents’ needs for space quality and function upgrade. One aspiration of micro-regeneration was to bring different stakeholders together and to enable local communities to play a more active role in regeneration initiatives. Consistent with the policy focus at the time to promote quality- and people-oriented urban regeneration, micro-regeneration was also seen to manifest the people-oriented ideal and signify a major step towards ‘collaboration, participation and common interest’ in urban governance. To date, micro-regeneration has evolved into many forms with diverse initiatives enabled by different mechanism having been carried out across China, but a key feature binding these experiments together, at least nominally, remains that micro-regeneration enables the close collaboration between government actors and other social forces, simultaneously empowering local communities in place-making and community building.
Research on micro-regeneration in Shanghai and elsewhere in China has largely focused on introducing model projects, generalising planning and design strategies and governance models, and analysing situations of stakeholder involvement and participation. While many studies based on analyses of delivered projects have shown how realities of participation, collaboration and empowerment contrast with the aspirations, less has been written about micro-regeneration and its inherent power dynamics from the angle of narratives. This research perspective is much needed as micro-regeneration has generated much public interest since its conception and, as a new urban regeneration paradigm to be promoted, micro-regeneration and its key ideas and projects have been circulated widely in different media channels. Such narratives, especially those delivered through state-censored outlets, inevitably convey normative ideals for micro-regeneration regarding the framing of the urban context and the different urban actors’ respective powers and responsibilities.
This paper reports an exploratory research that draws on the idea of narrative arc to explore how various aspects of urban development in contemporary China have been problematised and how micro-regeneration has been rationalised as an effective response. By analysing a collection of state media reports of various micro-regeneration initiatives, the research identifies the narrative arc for micro-regeneration, comprising of exposition, rising act, climax, falling out and resolution, that is constructed and conveyed through not one single media article but a large body of narrative pieces collectively. Analysing each element of the narrative arc, the research summarises how the urban challenges at the time were framed to justify the adoption of micro-regeneration, how specific projects dealt with specific problems, and how the future of micro-regeneration and urban regeneration of Shanghai was envisioned. The research also analyses the way the stakeholders have been interwoven in the narratives to discuss the extent to which different groups were involved or able to influence the micro-regeneration project processes and outcomes. While such an analysis of the narratives of micro-regeneration does not necessarily reflect the realities of how projects have been delivered, it reveals key power relationships and norms for practices that are expected to be circulated and accentuated with these narratives, which in turn can influence the transformative potential of micro-regeneration as a planning experiment on the ground.