Speaker
Description
Introduction and research problem
Micro-regeneration offers a compelling promise for historic neighbourhoods: improving their physical environment while retaining buildings, supporting everyday life and allowing residents to participate in change. Yet the preservation of a neighbourhood’s appearance provides only a partial basis for assessing the security of its future. Residents, public authorities and commercial operators may seek different kinds of continuity, and the arrangements that make a regeneration project viable can leave important questions about everyday use and decision-making unresolved. This paper examines these tensions through micro-regeneration in urban China.
Bringing together research on Yongqingfang and Pantang Wuyue in Guangzhou and Moshikou in Beijing, the paper asks how local governments coordinate conservation and development, and what these arrangements imply for whose uncertainty is addressed. Its central proposition is that certainty about project implementation and certainty about everyday neighbourhood life need to be assessed separately. A project can establish clearer investment conditions and an achievable delivery programme while leaving residents with limited influence over the changes surrounding them. This distinction connects the institutional organisation of regeneration to the everyday politics of remaining in, using and shaping places.
Conceptual framework
The research draws on state entrepreneurialism, which understands planning centrality and market instruments as connected elements of urban governance (Wu, 2018). This approach directs attention to the ways public authorities organise market activity to pursue political and developmental objectives. Wu’s (2020) account of the state acting through the market further informs the analysis of how commercial operations become part of governing neighbourhood change. Conservation requirements, investment arrangements and public authority can therefore be examined within the same analytical framework.
Strategic compliance provides a more specific account of implementation. Liu and Wang (2026) identify three mechanisms through which local governments align territorial requirements with development pressures: protection–operation coupling, phased incrementalism, and role and funding reallocation. This paper extends that framework by asking what each mechanism makes more predictable, for whom, and over what period.
Everyday uncertainty is used here as an analytical lens for examining people’s ability to anticipate changes to the places and relationships on which they depend, and to influence decisions about those changes. The analysis distinguishes the uncertainty of delivering and operating a project from uncertainty concerning residential continuity, neighbourhood services and meaningful participation. These dimensions can interact without moving in the same direction. Following Arnstein (1969), participation is assessed through the influence available to residents, including whether their concerns can alter priorities and decisions. The resulting framework connects implementation arrangements with questions about whose expectations receive durable institutional support.
Methods
The research develops a comparative synthesis of two published qualitative studies (Wang et al., 2024; Liu & Wang, 2026). The Yongqingfang research involved fieldwork between 2017 and 2022. The Moshikou and Pantang Wuyue study reports intermittent fieldwork between 2018 and 2025. Their evidence includes interviews, observations and documentary analysis.
The synthesis brings their findings into dialogue around conservation, implementation, responsibility and participation. It retains the distinct research designs and histories of the cases, making no assumption that they constitute a uniform dataset or successive stages of a single policy trajectory. The purpose is to develop an interpretation of how institutional arrangements address different uncertainties. Reported changes in neighbourhood life are distinguished from the further questions raised by this interpretation. The evidence supports an analysis of governance mechanisms and their implications, while systematic measurement of household experiences and longer-term outcomes remains a task for subsequent research.
Findings and comparative interpretation
Yongqingfang demonstrates why a project’s temporal boundaries matter. Micro-regeneration followed earlier demolition and relocation, and its implementation drew on properties already brought under government control. The neighbourhood’s commercial transformation brought disruption to remaining residents, replacement of everyday businesses and limited resident influence through consultation (Wang et al., 2024). Assessing the later intervention alone would consequently obscure conditions inherited from preceding redevelopment.
The finding suggests that claims about reduced disruption should be evaluated against the longer history of a place. For planning research, an important question concerns the starting point from which continuity is judged. An intervention may appear modest when assessed from its approval date while belonging to a much longer process of residential and institutional change. Treating that history as part of the analysis makes it possible to ask whose continued presence has already been secured, negotiated or lost before a new regeneration programme begins.
Moshikou and Pantang Wuyue show different institutional arrangements for combining preservation and operation. Moshikou allocates construction and resettlement responsibilities to a state-owned enterprise and commercial operation to a private company. Pantang Wuyue uses a district public institution to manage public properties, with cultural tenant selection and rental concessions supporting operation. Its incremental approach also allows remaining residents to stay alongside housing repairs and infrastructure improvements (Liu & Wang, 2026).
Read through the uncertainty framework, these arrangements highlight the importance of examining how public commitments are translated into operational decisions. The question is how conservation, residential use and commercial viability are specified and reconciled when particular choices arise. Protection–operation coupling directs attention to the terms governing what activities can occupy preserved space. A useful extension is to examine whether commitments to everyday neighbourhood needs are given comparable clarity and whether residents can influence their interpretation. Formal protection of buildings and provision for social continuity require their own criteria of assessment.
Phased incrementalism raises a related question about time. Dividing implementation into smaller interventions can create opportunities for adjustment, but the distribution of those opportunities deserves scrutiny. Authorities and operators may be able to revise plans as information emerges. Residents’ capacity to adapt depends on whether they receive timely information and can influence subsequent decisions. This interpretation treats the pace of regeneration as politically consequential. It invites examination of who can decide when to proceed, what counts as adequate feedback, and which unresolved concerns are carried into the next phase.
Role and funding reallocation brings responsibility into focus. A division of tasks may clarify delivery obligations while creating a more complicated institutional landscape for people seeking responses to everyday problems. This is an analytical possibility to investigate across the cases, rather than an assumed consequence of organisational complexity. The relevant questions concern who can make binding commitments, who has resources to fulfil them, and where residents can seek a remedy when conservation, operation and residential needs conflict.
Together, these interpretations identify a relationship that warrants closer investigation: making a regeneration programme more manageable does not by itself establish how secure neighbourhood life becomes. The comparative value of the cases lies in connecting this question to specific decisions about property, timing, operation and participation.
Discussion and conclusion
The research contributes to debates on planning under uncertainty by connecting institutional coordination with the everyday capacity to anticipate and influence change. It proposes that evaluations distinguish whose uncertainty is being addressed, which decisions become more predictable, and which concerns remain open. This provides a way to examine improvements in project delivery alongside their implications for people living within regeneration areas.
Theoretically, the argument develops strategic compliance towards a closer engagement with neighbourhood experience. State entrepreneurialism supplies the account of how public authority and market instruments are organised. An uncertainty perspective adds questions about the consequences of those arrangements for different actors and across different timescales. The proposed connection is intended to guide further empirical investigation of residents’ experiences, including differences between owners, tenants and business occupiers.
For planning practice, the analysis supports evaluating regeneration through explicit commitments to everyday use, participation and accountability. Relevant measures include accessible information about implementation stages, resident influence before operational decisions become fixed, and clear responsibility for addressing disruption. Assessment should also consider whether essential services and opportunities to remain are sustained as projects develop.
Micro-regeneration offers opportunities for adaptation and conservation. Understanding its transformative potential requires attention to the conditions under which people can continue to inhabit and shape the changing neighbourhood. The paper therefore advances an agenda for examining how the governance of regeneration can support greater predictability and effective participation in everyday life.
Keywords: micro-regeneration, everyday uncertainty, strategic compliance, state entrepreneurialism, public participation
References
Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225
Liu, S., & Wang, M. (2026). Manoeuvring under territoriality: Strategic compliance in China’s micro-regeneration. Transactions in Planning and Urban Research, 5(1–2), 88–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541223251399072
Wang, M., Zhang, F., & Wu, F. (2024). “Micro-regeneration”: Toward small-scale, heritage-oriented, and participatory redevelopment in China. Journal of Urban Affairs, 46(10), 1953–1970. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2022.2139711
Wu, F. (2018). Planning centrality, market instruments: Governing Chinese urban transformation under state entrepreneurialism. Urban Studies, 55(7), 1383–1399. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017721828
Wu, F. (2020). The state acts through the market: ‘State entrepreneurialism’ beyond varieties of urban entrepreneurialism. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(3), 326–329. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620921034