Speaker
Description
Urban regeneration policies convey the ideas about what the policymakers conceived as the primary issues (among others) in the local areas. It is commonly accepted that such ideas are shaped by the interactions of local social context and global ideological trends (Lees et al., 2015; Leary & McCarthy, 2013). In China, however, the hierarchical national governance structure and ambiguous state-society relations add to the complexity. On the one hand, urban regeneration policies in China are largely local-based policy exploration without a national policy framework; on the other, local governments are obligated to follow and implement policies from the upper-tier governments and show their royalty in various aspects (Zhou, 2022). That blurs the driving forces of urban regeneration policy evolvement at the local level. Taking the recent ‘Future Community’ policy initiative (introduced in 2019) in Zhejiang Province, China as one of the latest progresses in this field, this study tries to address the question ‘how are the evolving urban regeneration policies in China shaped by the interplays of local contexts, global ideology trends and national governance structure’. Relevant policy documents released by local governments at all levels within Zhejiang Province are collected; content analysis based on BERTopic modelling is conducted to unravel the components of the evolving ‘Future Community’ policies, based on which further discussions revealing the roots of and governance structure beneath and achieved through the policy initiative are provided.
Primary findings include: i) the ‘Future Community’ initiative forms a part of the continuous government organizational restructure associated with the project-based governance approach, which has been proven good practice in other fields of public goods provision; ii) the local government noticed the significance of ‘community’ as a possible unit of regeneration practice, showing a ‘social’ turn of urban policy, but the technocentric ideas and pursuing of the productiveness of all kinds of resources suggest the remaining neoliberal ideas; iii) the community’s powers of ‘co-build’ and ‘co-govern’ are given and secured by the collaboration of multiple local government offices, the community per se, however, does not constitute a source of power in the governance structure; iv) as a local urban policy, ‘Future Community’ policies response not only to the global trends and local issues but also national and upper-tier governments’ policy agenda, therefore, to what extend the ‘Future Community’ policy is really community-sensitive is questionable.
References
Lees, L., Shin, H. B., & Morales, E. L. (Eds) (2015) Global gentrifications: Uneven
development and displacement. Policy Press.
Leary, M. E., & McCarthy, J. (2013) The Routledge companion to urban regeneration. London: Routledge.
Zhou, Xueguang (2022) The logic of governance in China: An organizational approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
| Keywords | urban regeneration; policy; national governance; global-local interaction |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
