An analysis of patterns of public engagement in China's community micro-rehabilitation projects: A case study of Guangzhou

Abstract

With the development of inventory planning and the contradiction between land supply and demand, urban renewal development has been gradually replacing reconstruction in China's community redevelopment projects. Such projects need multiple stakeholders' engagement. However, China's patterns of public engagement with top-down governance are different from those in developed countries with bottom-up initiatives. This fact also indicates that such developed patterns are not suitable for the context of China. Meanwhile, research on micro rehabilitation is relatively new and requires further analytical work on development pattern analysis. Therefore, the protagonist status of different stakeholders and allowing them to participate in redevelopment projects are social issues that need to be solved urgently. This paper explores patterns of public engagement in community micro-rehabilitation projects in China. Eleven communities in Guangzhou are taken as cases through participatory observation, document analysis, and interviews. This paper analyses opinions and comments from different stakeholders and summarises their information delivery paths. The findings indicate four present patterns: single-threaded, representative feedback, property involvement, and external party service patterns. Through comparative analysis, the study highlights that the participating stakeholders in the four patterns involved the projects to different degrees. However, they are all still in the "Tokenism" degree, which is in the middle category of the ladder of engagement. Furthermore, an appropriate and sustainable pattern is put forward to provide a reference and research basis for improving public engagement in community micro-rehabilitation projects in China.