Planner-led collaborative governance and the urban form of urban villages in redevelopment: The case of Yangji Village in Guangzhou, China

Abstract

While urban redevelopment has been a global phenomenon for many decades, the redevelopment of urban villages (villages-in-the-city or chengzhongcun) in China has attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. However, few studies focus on urban planning forces and their impacts on the redevelopment of urban villages, especially the transformation of open spaces. This paper therefore examines how urban planning transforms the space of urban villages through a case study of Yangji Village in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province. The large increase in public spaces related to the transformation of Yangji results from collaborative governance driven by trends in urbanization and the work of urban planners. The latter are empowered by their strategic use of state support, professional knowledge and public interest incentives. However, in the Yangji redevelopment, as a state-hegemonic project, such planner-led collaborative governance remains limited in scope amid the exclusion of migrant tenants from decision-making. Although rarely regarded in the literature as playing a key role in redeveloping urban villages, this paper highlights urban planners as a salient force in the morphology of urban villages. Without challenging the hegemonic substance of urban village redevelopment, planners can coordinate with and occasionally manipulate other stakeholders to legitimate and facilitate negotiation during physical planning. Hence, redeveloped urban forms, rather than stakeholders' economic profits in short-term redevelopment, may influence urban lives in the long term due to planners' efforts.