Urbanism with Chinese Characteristics and the Right to the City : The Regeneration of Urban-Villages in Guangzhou, China
The aim of the thesis is to describe and evaluate the transformation of urban form in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), China, with a particular focus on the relations between social processes and spatial forms in the context of the regeneration of urban-villages in Guangzhou. Referring to in-depth interviews with key practitioners and actors in the regeneration process, this thesis explores three specific relationships and/or processes. -- First, it examines the discursive and structural conditions surrounding the ’’production" of governmental regeneration programmes relating to the urban-villages, within a restructured and increasingly neoliberalized system. I develop the argument that it is through this production that the concept of urban-village is defined and deployed by government to label and problematise places which may not be problematic in the ways defined. Second, this thesis discusses the development and implementation of institutional reform policies that are at the heart of government-led regeneration projects in Guangzhou. As I argue, in seeking to develop a more coordinated approach to urban-village regeneration, local government officials, and other power-brokers, have created new subjects/objects of intervention that are structurally, discursively and deliberately excluded from the dominate discourse of what urban regeneration is or ought to be. Third, I examine local people’s reactions to urban-village regeneration, and I develop the argument that they are not as powerless as has often been suggested by the dominant society. Instead, in exerting control over their lives and actively shaping their relationship to the so-called "dominant society", they are engaging in a variety of strategies and deploying various tactics to resist and/or alter a range of policy decisions.
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