Speaker
Description
The actor constellation plays an important role in urban studies. Understanding actors’ power resources and mindsets is of fundamental importance in explaining their behaviours and actions in historic urban district conservation, renovation, and redevelopment as well as urban issues on a wider scope. This paper aims to offer a panoramic description framework and also reflections regarding the power resources, interrelations, institutional organization, mindsets, and action logic of key actors, exemplified by the Chinese historic urban district renovations. Referring to a bounded-rational hypothesis and Michael Mann’s power network theory, the paper provides a theoretical framework in actor-institution analysis and summarizes the complex, chaotic, and intertwined connections among actors in the real world into four main institutionalized socio-spatial networks of power: political network, everyday-living network, economic network, and expertise network. The paper will further describe the power source and organizational structure of each network and how the networks, to a certain extent, have shaped the mindset and behaviour of the actors. In the end, the study will point out the challenges for historic urban district renovation in the Chinese context from an actor-institutionalism perspective such as the imbalanced power distribution and party-state authority fragmentation. The theoretical framework on actor power networks can be referential to a wide range of global urban studies related to actor mindsets and behaviours beyond China and the reflections can be insightful for context understanding regarding contemporary urban renovation cases in China.
| Keywords | Actor; power network; institution; historic urban district; Chinese urban renovation |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
