City-region

Key references

Abstract: This article examines the emergence of city-region governance as a specific state spatial selectivity in post-reform China. The process has been driven by the state in response to the crisis of economic decentralization, and to vicious inter-city competition and uncoordinated development. As part of the recentralization of state power, the development of urban clusters (chengshiqun) as interconnected city-regions is now a salient feature of ‘new urbanization’ policy. I argue in this article that the Chinese city-region corresponds to specific logics of scale production. Economic globalization has led to the development of local economies and further created the need to foster ‘regional competitiveness’. To cope with regulatory deficit at the regional level, three mechanisms have been orchestrated by the state: administrative annexation, spatial plan preparation and regional institution building, which reflect recent upscaling in post-reform governance.

Changing state spatial selectivity in China: a conceptual framework. From the paper above.

Abstract: This article analyzes the emergence of the so-called urban strategic development plan in China during inter-city competition and new entrepreneurial governance. Driven by market-oriented development and globalization, the local government attempts to overcome the constraints of conventional statutory planning to promote a visionary city plan. Through case studies of Guangzhou and Hangzhou, we argue that the strategic plan is more or less a mission statement of the local political leaders and thus has a narrow social foundation. The emergence of the strategic plan reflects the overall shift of city planning towards being an important instrument for enhancing economic competitiveness.

Relevant studies

Abstract: Recent studies have applied the explanatory framework of state rescaling to interrogate China’s emergent city-regional governance. Much of the extant literature has concentrated on either the centrally driven city regionalism from above or local efforts on cross-boundary cooperation from below. Rather than simply abstracting the multi-dimensional and multi-scalar dynamics in the rescaling process around one singular state project, this paper moves forward to explore the co-existence and co-functioning of variegated rescaling processes contributing to regional governance by deploying assemblage as a heuristic approach. This paper examines an inter-jurisdictional development zone – Beijing-Tianjin Zhongguancun Tech Town in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region to provide a relational and processual understanding of scalar politics on the ground. Our analysis demonstrates how discrete and fragmented spaces and actors are assembled within a specific entity through various rescaling processes. The interplay of local, regional and national actors with different motivations gives rise to a new inter-scalar and inter-jurisdictional regulatory regime for regional industrial integration with relative coherence. This emergent governance regime is sustained and embedded in both topological and territorial political relations. This article furthers the understanding of China’s city regional governance by analysing a situated assemblage. It provides an applicable perspective for investigating other trans-local projects and city regionalism.

Assembling state power through multi-directional rescaling processes in BTZGCTT. From the paper above.

Abstract: The past decade has witnessed a variety of city-regional projects across the world. However, the geopolitical motivation or regional coalition alone cannot fully explain the actual mechanism of city-regionalism in the Chinese context. Drawing on the governance framework of state entrepreneurialism, this article distinguishes between the processes of centrally orchestrated regional imaginary and regional cooperation through multi-scalar alliances in the making of Chinese city-regions. By tracing the latest national strategy of the Yangtze River Delta regional integration and three different cases with concrete practices, this paper suggests that the recent rise of city-regionalism reflects the dynamic development of state entrepreneurialism beyond the urban scale.

Abstract: The state remains central in contemporary environmental politics and policies, although environmental governance increasingly involves neoliberal and non-state mechanisms. Environmental management in China holds features of an ‘environmental state’ and has been undergoing continuous restructuring, manifested by a recent city-regionalism turn. Informed by the theories of eco-state restructuring (ESR) and eco-scalar fix, this paper investigates air pollution management in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region by tracing the practices of environmental and territorial governance over the past decades. Through the analysis of parameters of the eco-state, this paper conceptualises the air pollution governance in China into three phases, namely pollutants emission control (the 1990s–2005), campaign-style regional governance (2006–2012) and city-regionalism in air quality governance (2013 onwards). We find that the central state plays proactive but different roles in each phase, characterised by state strategic selectivity, adjustments of state apparatus, deployment of a set of policy instruments, and enhanced state capacities for monitoring, control and legitimation. In this context, the city-regional level has become the key scale at which environmental regulations are targeted and the economic and environmental realms are being (re)formed. This state-led eco-scalar fix process to cope with urgent environmental issues explains the underlying rationality of building up the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region as a new national strategic project.

Abstract: China has witnessed the orchestration of city-regionalism and two different regional-scale mechanisms have influenced this integration and cooperation: the top-down state-mandated process and the bottom-up process initiated by local governments. However, this has not been a smooth process and it is shaped by the internal politics generated by China’s state configurations. Using the Yangtze River Delta as a case study, this paper argues that China’s territorial administrative divisions are a historical configuration that is essential to understand the efforts to construct city-regions as well as to understand the failure to create a new sub-national state space.

Conceptualizing city-regionalism in divergent contexts. From the paper above.

Abstract: China has recently seen the proliferation of regional plans. This paper tries to understand the development of regional plans from the perspective of state restructuring and changing regional governance. In contrast to conventional wisdom, which predominantly describes China’s decentralization, another aspect of ‘recentralization’ is highlighted here. The paper focuses on a case study of Yangtze River Delta Regional Plan. It is argued that the latest regional plans are used by the central government to coordinate diverse local interests to achieve a more balanced development. However, complex politics between different levels and divisions of government make this plan an impossible project to deliver central regulation on contemporary city-regions.

Abstract: This paper draws on a series of interviews with urban planners and government officials to examine the changing regional governance in the Yangtze River Delta. It finds that integration and collaboration are emerging and the growing economic benefits of intercity cooperation serves as a driver for local government to change from hostile competition to collaboration. Nevertheless, regional governance is far from established. Instead, regional transformations reflect the local politics of economic devolution and urban entrepreneurialism. Currently, there is no formal regional institution or coalition and the regional agenda is economic oriented and project based. Policies are formulated by individual cities rather than through multilateral negotiation between cities. The primary motive underlying the initiatives for cooperation is regional economic competitiveness rather than regional integration. Hence, the paper argues that emerging collaboration is far from being a substantial departure from inter-jurisdiction competition in the earlier phase of regional governance.

Abstract: Urban entrepreneurialism and intensive inter-city competition prevail in post-reform China, which has been extensively documented in the literature. However, decentralization is not the only characterisation of China’s changing central–local relationship since 1978. Since the 2000s, economic development and agglomeration in China have created more scope of and need for collaboration. Regional collaboration is valued and driven by both central and local government. The aim of this research is to present various types of ‘regionalisation’ initiatives and examine the development of regional governance in China. It is found that there are two main actors leading the current regional practices, that is, the central government (the top-down mechanism) and local government (the bottom-up mechanism). Nevertheless, in terms of institutional arrangement, there has been no formal regional institution or informal regional coalition for either of the mechanism thus far. Moreover, both bottom-up and top-down regional governance initiatives lack substantial participation and multilateral negotiation between cities. There are essentially two different readings of the rationale of regional governance. While the bottom-up collaborative development is envisioned by the local entrepreneurial government to use regional competitiveness to promote local development, the top-down national and regional agenda is used by the central government to tackle discretionary local development. Therefore, the emerging regional governance in China is hybrid and complicated. With reference to the Western theoretical perspectives of state spatiality, state rescaling and politics of scale, this study argues that the emerging regional practices in contemporary China represent another round of changing statehood after governance downscaling to the urban level. This is in response to the territorial problems such as administrative fragmentation and excessive competition caused by earlier decentralisation and localism. It is held that, however, the state rescaling process is not a straightforward process but ridden with conflicts and tensions. Different actors at different spatial levels are articulating their vested interests at the regional scale. The building of regional governance is hence contested by complex inter-governmental politics, especially the division of central–local power and responsibility.

Changing state spatiality from 1949 to the present. From the paper above.