Institutionalization of public interest in planning: Evolving mechanisms of public representation in China’s urban regeneration policymaking

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. © The Author(s) 2023.