Rethinking China’s Model of Urban Governance

China’s phenomenal urbanisation is of world-historical significance and imposes profound theoretical and policy challenges. This ground-breaking project will rethink China’s model of urban governance through grounded and multi-scalar investigations ranging from neighbourhoods and cities to regions. For neighbourhoods, it unravels the interface between state and society in everyday living space, migrant social agencies and the self-governance of homeowners’ associations under urbanisation and housing marketization. For cities, it interrogates the development strategies and governance of migrant and ecological urbanism as well as the implementation of projects through financial instruments and the land market. For regions, it uncovers entangled state–market relations which redistribute population and economic activities across cities and produce the city-region. The research will be conducted through six cases: Shanghai, Wuhan, Dali, Xiongan, Jing-Jin-Ji (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei), and the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area, based upon grounded ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews and close engagement with Chinese researchers and policy makers across different types of neighbourhoods and cities of varying sizes in coastal, central and western regions, and recent national strategic projects. The project is timely for China to implement a UN-endorsed new urban agenda and rethink its model in the face of trade tensions. It will change how we think of China and its governance and be the first of its kind to explicitly consider indigenous perspectives on Chinese urban transformation. This innovative and contextually sensitive research will contribute to entrepreneurial urban governance theories and will offer a theoretically nuanced and grounded explanation of state entrepreneurialism in China, with six workshops organised within China as integral parts of knowledge production as well as a series of publication outputs.