The production of space

: neighborhood governance in Shanghai

Abstract

Rapid urbanization and socio-economic reforms since the 1980s have significantly changed the governing dynamics in neighborhoods in urban China. On the one hand, neighborhoods are exploited as the important governance platform through which the state delivers social welfare and services and maintains social control of the most local level of urban society. Base-level governing entities, like the street office and the residents' committee, have been reinvented to restore a governable urban society. On the other hand, neighborhoods are the place in which discontented homeowners, whose property rights are infringed by the developer or their management agents in a not yet mature market, form collective actions to defend their rights against the powerful. This project intends to explore the process of a new spatial order being produced by the two driving forces in Shanghai's neighborhoods. Neighborhood politics in urban China are mainly examined from three perspectives: state-society relations, community power, and contentious politics. The existing perspectives, however, only focus on power dynamics within specific neighborhoods. None of them have gone deep enough to explore how neighborhood governing dynamics are produced by underlying political, economic, and social forces of wider urban context. Drawn on Lefebvre's critical urban theory of the production of space, this project not only examines the governing dynamics of neighborhood space, but also intends to identify the underlying driving forces that produce the existing spatial order. As personal ties lose validity under rapid social transformations, the emphasis of neighborhood governance has been put on constructing the visions of governable and ordered neighborhoods. Discourses and policies help enhance the legitimacy of state's intervention into privatized neighborhood space. The state visions, however, are constantly negotiated and resisted by citizens according to their actual living experience. Three kinds of homeowners' rights consciousness – material-based property right, the right to civic organizations, and the right of political participation – are identified and considered as important contributors to neighborhood activism. Moreover, by referring to Taipei's experience, the author makes an effort to relate the governing dynamics in specific neighborhood to the political economy and the wider urban context. This research has implications for public participation and civil society building in urban China.

Date of Award	14 Feb 2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Ngai Ming YIP (Supervisor)