Writings on Culture and Cities
Writings on Culture and Cities
This paper delves into the evolving governance dynamics of urban villages in China through a case study of the heritage-rich Nantou urban village in Shenzhen. Drawing on the Rancierian politics of aesthetics, the study examines the government’s repositioning of urban villages as cultural and aesthetic assets. The research highlights the state’s emerging approach to urban village redevelopment which combines aesthetics regime and cultural governance. The intricate interplay between consensus construction and dissensus destruction reveals the fluid and porous boundaries between policing and politicization. The findings contribute to a more dynamic approach to analyzing urban village governance in China, expanding the frameworks for understanding the diverse possibilities inherent in urban redevelopment.
KEYWORDS: Politics of aesthetics; police; the political; urban village; China
In the built heritage studies, the intricate web of social and selective processes that define heritage is evident. These processes are, in many cases, intertwined with the notion of scale, examplified through the production of heritage sites at the local, national, and transnational scales. While heritage and geography scholars have articulated the role played by scale in heritage-making and argue against a rigid, fixed, and hierarchical understanding of scale, they highlight the constant reproduction of scale. There is, so far, limited explanation of how the perception of scale gets reproduced and how crucial actors manipulate scalar power and resources for heritage making and the reproduction of scale. To fill this gap, this paper delves into mainland China’s heritage-making, using the southern Anhui historical villages as an example. Based on intensive 5-month field research, this paper has three findings: 1) The nomination process for a World Heritage Site is notably influenced by politics and selectivity; 2) Diverse stakeholders are pivotal in shaping heritage narratives; 3) Individual contributions to heritage creation directly interact with, and subsequently reshape, ‘scale’, an entity that is simultaneously discursive and tangible. By integrating the notion of ‘scale’ into heritage discussions, we illuminate two concurrent processes: creating hierarchies through rule assimilation by interpreting the UNESCO standard internally and evolving socio-spatial dynamics via the manifestation of individual agency with resource manipulation, scale jumping, and reproduction of scale. This approach aligns with the material orientation in human geography and repositions ‘scale’. Here, it’s not just an epistemological framework but also a tangible force that steers individual perceptions and actions and yields measurable material impacts.
Keywords Heritage, Scale, China
How to capture, represent, and materialize public interest in urban planning has gone through multiple rounds of experimentation, crystallizing a number of regulatory regimes of planning in different historical and political-economic contexts. However, how to define the “public” and capture the public interest in urban planning remains problematic in both planning practices and democratic theory. Therefore, drawing upon Dewey and Habermas’s view of the public sphere, this paper introduces a scale perspective to examine the subjects in planning and the power framing process in defining the public in urban regeneration policymaking. First, this paper revisits the current debates on the concept of public interest and identifies three interpretations of public interest materialization: utilitarian, unitary, and communicative. Second, this paper illustrates the institutionalization process of public interest in China’s urban planning system. We critically examine the evolving mechanisms of public representation in China’s urban regeneration policymaking since 1949. The institutionalization of public interest in China shows distinguished trajectories from the Western countries. These differences are caused by different values that define the scale of “public” in different socio-political contexts. Given the emerging communicative turn in China, we found a hybrid norm of public interest as reflected in the recent “co-production” model of urban regeneration. The contribution of this paper is threefold: 1) highlights the validity of the public interest concept by introducing a scale sensitivity to analyze the subjects in planning; 2) complements public interest typology by identifying a hybrid norm in China that weaves between unitary and communicative interpretations; 3) revisits Dewey’s democratization theory by conceptualizing the institutionalization of public interest in semi-authoritarian China that is determined across the scales of subjects in planning, the ever-changing political-economic contexts, and the planning application in established rules. : urban regeneration, public interest, scale, communicative planning, representative democracy
Co-production of films entails a variety of transborder mobility and trans-local production networks, which are further complicated by state intervention through co-production treaties or arrangements. This paper unravels the process of Mainland China–Hong Kong film co-production that has been explosive after the promulgation of ‘Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement’ (CEPA). Drawing on the information of all Mainland–Hong Kong co-produced films between 1998 and 2017, we chart the collaborative networks of studios and creative staffs and examine the commercial and artistic performances of co-produced films to illustrate the impact of regulatory reform on the evolution of cross-border film co-production. We argue that CEPA is among the series of national regulatory reforms to enable marketisation of the film industry and, further, to construct an imagined new identity of Chinese culture at the supranational scale. However, the cultural goals have been given way to the commercial interests of co-production with the implementation of CEPA policies.
Key words: co-production; film; network analysis; Hong Kong; China; CEPA
Eurasian Geography and Economics,
1–23.
China has long positioned itself as the ancient civilization of the Far East, which only makes geographical sense through the lens of the West. The literature on China resonates with this geo graphic illustration, about which, critical scholars have cautioned against the imperial hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge. In this paper, we attempt to answer the call for a Global East through the situated agency of the others in the geopolitics of knowledge circulation. The circulation of knowl edge foregrounds transnational flows in a multifaceted and multidirectional process, and mimicry calls for attention to political/soft subversions beneath the camouflaged behavior of coping. By investigating scholarship on the particular topic of shanzhai, we probe into two layers of knowledge production: how the variegated scholarly citation behaviors reflect the situated agency that bears the effects of asymmetric power relations formed through multiple flows of people, idea and capital, but nonetheless demonstrates an endeavor of autonomy.
KEYWORDS: Politics of knowledge; mimicry; circulation of knowledge; China; shanzhai
Geoforum,
106, 349–357
Chinese rock, premised on an identity of dissenters, has always been underground symbolically and literally, in a pattern of spatial fluidity in the city. The introduction of live house might offer a solid material base for political subjectivation of the community. This spatial action of subjectivation in forms of “guerrilla warfare”, encounters the growing passion for cultural city making by Municipal Governments. Through the study on transformation of rock space in Shenzhen, we aim to reflect on scholarship on post-political forms of urban governance in China. By probing into the antagonistic actions of the police and the political, we call for attention to territorial strategies used by both sides to consolidate the existing order and to assert a new order respectively. The double side of partition revealed by Rancirian conception of politics of aesthetics allows the governing side to pick and co-opt particular producers and live houses while collapse and/or policing others to re-consolidate spatial orders. Guided by expert-formed consensus, citizen entitlement and citizen participation programmes convert cities to be propaganda sites where state-sanctioned aesthetics is delivered to and experienced by subjectcitizens.
Keywords: Politics of aesthetics Politicization and policing Subculture Cultural city China
Subculture is the new chic in town From to Shanghai to Chennai, a new virtue of subculture chic is in the making, gaining popularity across and among city mayors, corporates, entrepreneurs and mass consumers. This evolving trend is bringing previously unknown and unseen practitioners of subculture popularly regarded as dissenters and wanderers (Gelder & Thornton, 1997) – into whirlpools of urban activities and development plans. This evolving trend is also foregrounding two entangled attempts of worlding practices: subcultures' attempts at carving habitable spaces in cities, and in return cities’ attempts at experimenting with subcultures to establish a new niche for themselves in the urban world order (Roy & Ong, 2011; Wilson & Connery, 2007). Under these circumstances, three scholarly questions merit further interrogation. First, what are subcultures, in reference to mainstream culture? Second, what do the processes of territorialization of subculture entail? And third, how to understand the variegated worlding practices exercised by both subcultures and their hosting cities in a dynamic process?
After being showcased during Shanghai EXPO2010, Dafen village has been put forward as an example of “best practice” governance that has transformed a backward urban village into an art cluster. Behind this glorified image is a continuously re-constructed social landscape. In this study, we adopt the approach of state territorialization, drawing insights from the Foucauldian concept of governmentality as disposition of things—in particular people and their relations to land. At issue here is how the dynamic process of territorialization, combined with the Chinese version of moral citizenship, serves the remaking of subjects, landscape, and their relations. In Dafen village, the experiment of fabricating conditioned welfare within China’s welfare system conjures up a new hukou arrangement and new forms of inclusion and exclusion. By exercising the technology of self-regulation, the state seeks temporal and fragile alignments with selected social groups. The outcomes are contingent and frequently take the form of new configurations of power.
KEYWORDS Territorialization; governmentality; moral citizenship; cultural cluster; China
Cities,
141, 104462.
Drawing upon recent post-political critiques on ineffective participation and urban planning, this paper reflects on the challenges facing participatory and collaborative planning in China’s latest neighborhood regeneration practices. In 2017, Guangzhou launched a new micro-scale neighborhood regeneration program that shifted the discursive emphasis on participatory planning while China strives to create a new national image of a “people’s city”. This paper critically examines the implementation of old community renovation policies in 32 Chinese provinces and 776 neighborhood regeneration projects in Guangzhou. By examining the objectives and outcomes of legitimate power over participation, we uncover institutional conditions, implementation issues, and local responses in different participatory planning configurations. We found that a “co-production” model emerged in China, highlighting the role of institutionalized participatory planning activities. The conclusion is threefold: 1) Shared objectives in the emerging neighborhood regeneration discourse constitute legitimate power over participation in China’s neighborhood regeneration; 2) The outcomes of legitimate power over participation are reflected in the local responses to the “co-production” activities; and 3) The “co-production” model—to produce planning schemes through co-design and joint-negotiation among multi-scalar actors including planners and residents—performs as an alternative to immature collaborative planning in China. Local governments can skillfully avoid direct confrontations with residents by introducing the function of community planners. These institutional arrangements of “co-production” have profoundly impacted the reshuffling of the state-society relationship in post-political China. While the implementation of China ’s latest neighborhood regeneration policy shows post-political risks in terms of depoliticized narratives, instrumentalized planning strategies, and technicized planning tools, we find “co-production” to be fruitful in promoting substantive participation and stimulating the accumulation of local knowledge.
Keywords: Neighborhood regeneration Participation Post-politics Collaborative planning Conflict-consensus debate
This study examined the resurgence of public housing provision in China since 2007 by situating it in a broad welfare regime analysis. Based on insights from Productivist Welfare Capitalism (Holliday, 2000) and Graduated Sovereignty (Ong, 2006a), we have sought to shed new light on the productivist approach through a study on Chinese cases. Using the examples of Chongqing and Nanjing, we argue in the study that the proactive action of the state to further commodify labour power has led to the flexible de-articulation and re-articulation of welfare and citizenship in an on-going process of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation of various segments of the population that own parcels of land. Another aspect of flexibility in the welfare regime is the double segmentation of population and territory, which is also contingent on, and subject to, alteration upon government decision.
Key words: social housing, social welfare, productivist, graduated sovereignty, China
Cities,
29(6), 369–378.
Cities,
26(2), 57–66.