The CO‐City: Sharing,Collaborating, Cooperating,and Commoning in the City

This article introduces an innovative, experimental, adaptive, and iterative approach to creating legal and institutional frameworks based on urban polycentric governance to foster commons‐based urban policies. First, the theory of urban/local governance is introduced, based on an urban co‐governance matrix. A new type of regulatory system is then described that aims at transforming people in distributed nodes of collective action. Citizens and institutions can be myriad nodes of designing and problem solving in the public interest. Urban co‐governance aims at taking advantage of this galaxy of networks. I then examine design principles and a methodology to implement the urban co‐governance matrix. The concluding question concerns the need for a new research methodology to investigate the ongoing process of state transformation and institutional genesis at the urban level.     

Debating the State in Private Housing Neighborhoods: The Governance of Homeowners' Associations in Urban Shanghai

This article examines the transformation of state power in urban China by investigating how the state governs a newly emerging type of neighborhood organization connected with housing privatization, the homeowners' association (HA). Based on a series of extensive field research visits in Shanghai from 2006 to 2012, it analyzes the contradictory rationales behind HA policies in Shanghai, and elaborates the debates between state actors and non‐state actors on the boundary of state intervention. It finds that the state in Shanghai has engaged multiple goals in its governance of the HAs: regularizing the real estate market, promoting self‐organization at the neighborhood level, and channeling homeowners' participation in urban politics. The neoliberal rationality of governing through subjects' autonomy and a tradition of the socialist discourse on party leadership co‐exist in the state's toolkit for governance. But the state's capacity to coordinate these different governing techniques varies across fields. I highlight the dilemma a non‐liberal state confronts in cultivating self‐organizing and self‐responsible individuals. This contrasts with some of the studies on ‘China's neoliberal state’, which argue that the bureaucratic system has been resilient in coping with the contradictions and imbalances inherent in neoliberalism.     

中国社会转型时期城市土地资源治理多元化模式选择

城市土地是一种公共资源,在我国社会转型时期将"公共治理"理论引入城市土地资源管理中,对于实现其公平、有效配置和永续利用具有重要的意义。本文采用文献资料法和定性分析法,阐述城市土地资源治理多元化的内涵,分析当前中国城市土地资源管理模式的实质、问题及成因,分析城市土地资源"治理多元化"适用性的社会条件,在此基础上构建城市土地资源治理为政治结构一元化框架内的科层政府、市场机制和市民社会的共同作用的多元化模式,并提出城市土地资源治理多元化模式的实现途径。     

Demolishing the Present to Sell off the Future? The Emergence of ‘Financialized Municipal Entrepreneurialism’ in London

This article introduces a new mode of urban entrepreneurialism in London through a study of the state‐executed, speculative development and financialization of public land. In response to an intensifying housing crisis and austerity‐imposed fiscal constraints, municipalities in London are devising entrepreneurial solutions to deliver more housing. Among these ‘solutions’ can be found the early signs of the state‐executed financialization of public housing in the UK with the use of speculative council‐owned special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that replace existing public housing stock with mixed‐tenure developments, creating ambiguous public/private tenancies that function as homes and the basis for liquid financial assets. Drawing together parallel literatures on the financialization of urban governance and housing, and combining these with original empirical research, we situate these developments in contrast to earlier modes of governance, identifying a distinct mode of entrepreneurial governance in London: financialized municipal entrepreneurialism. The local state is no longer merely the enabler—limited to providing strategic oversight of the private sector—but financializes its practice in a reimagined commercialized interventionism, as property speculator. This article concludes that while the architects of this new mode of entrepreneurialism extol the increased capacity and control it provides, any such gains must be set against longer‐term financial, democratic and political risks.     

转型期的中国城市发展与地方政府企业化

改革开放以来,随着中国社会、经济、政治等方面的剧烈变迁,我国地方政府的行为模式发生了深刻的变化,并对城市发展产生了深远的影响.结合国外地方政府转型研究和中国的政治、经济、社会背景,提出了"地方政府企业化"的概念,以指代现阶段中国地方政府在转型中普遍表现出的以追求经济利益为目标的行为模式.并将之与企业化政府、企业家城市、城市经营、城市管治等概念进行辨析.最后通过与西方地方政府转型的比较,分析了中国地方政府企业化的主要特征.     

Privatizing the commons: reforming the ejido and urban development in Mexico

Few studies worldwide have analysed how to manage equitably the process whereby ‘customary’ or ‘common’ land can be incorporated into future urban development, particularly in so far as this might be achieved through privatization and deregulation. This paper focuses upon Mexico and the 1991–2 reforms of Article 27 which dramatically changed the tenure codes and political relations covering the widespread customary land sector — called ejidos. It is argued that, in effect, the reforms constitute deregulation of former tenure relations rather than outright privatization, and that rather than being radical in content, the reforms are subtle redefinitions of past practices in which the balance of administrative power over ejidal land has shifted significantly, away from the Agrarian Reform Ministry towards the Social Development Ministry and local (city) government. Deregulation appears to offer three principal scenarios for public and private sector ejido land development: Urban Development Companies, Joint Ventures and Extension to the ‘Urban Zone’, yet to date there is little evidence that any one has proven sufficiently attractive to be pursued intensively, and the paper suggests that illegal alienation of ejido land is likely to continue and may get worse. However, the latest Urban Development Program 1995–2000 identifies ejido land deregulation and urban development as one of its principal strategies, tied to President Zedillo’s New Federalism project, which seeks to strengthen municipal and state government capacity and effectiveness. This profound shift in the structure of political managerial authority and responsibility offers the increased likelihood that land regularization practices and urban planning of the now deregulated ejidos will become more significant in the future.     

China's Emergent City‐Region Governance: A New Form of State Spatial Selectivity through State‐orchestrated Rescaling

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.     

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Heterogeneous Governance,Claims Making and Forced Eviction in a Megacity

Residents of informal settlements worldwide face challenges defending their land tenure. In contexts with overlapping systems of governance these challenges are even more complex and claims to land tenure more precarious. How do heterogeneous systems of governance, a characteristic of some global South megacities, affect evictions? This article presents an in-depth case study of the informal Otodo Gbame waterfront settlement's struggle to defend its customary land tenure through multiple authorities in Lagos, Nigeria. The analysis reveals how a heterogeneous system of governance disempowers citizens by obscuring the locus of power and creating confusion when communities make claims on the state. Communities find themselves claiming rights to the city that receive varying degrees of recognition from the many authorities within the heterogeneous system. In Lagos, the state weaponizes this heterogeneous system in pursuit of modern development and urban growth.     

China's Urban Speed Machine: The Politics of Speed and Time in a Period of Rapid Urban Growth

China's urban transformation since 1978 is notable for both its scale and speed. Focusing on the dimension of speed, we propose the concept of the ‘urban speed machine’ to assess its role in shaping the politics and political economy of Chinese urbanization. We argue that in China speed must not be understood merely by means of measurable outcomes of change, but rather that speed is an essential and vital element embedded within China's specific processes and mechanisms driving urban growth. In this sense, speed is constantly at the forefront of local cadres’ considerations, since moving fast to achieve urban growth is an expression of political imperatives and pervasive city‐based accumulation strategies. The Chinese urban speed machine, as we conceive it, mainly involves three state‐dominated institutional arenas: the Communist party's personnel review system, the planning mechanism and local finance. We also discuss regional variability vis‐à‐vis the nature of speed in urbanization and in the differing responses to problems of fast‐city growth in recent years. This article's core contributions are to clarify the paramount importance of speed in the political economy of urban growth and illuminate a relational understanding of the politics of speed in China's urban change.     

Land Tenure in the Changing Peri‐Urban Areas of Ethiopia: The Case of Bahir Dar City

Ethiopia's urban expansion and development strategy has been based on the acquisition of land by government from adjacent peri‐urban areas. The land in the peri‐urban areas is predominantly agricultural in nature, and it has been held by local farmers or landholders. This article aims to examine the nature of urban expansion and development from the perspective of the land rights of the local peri‐urban landholders. To achieve this purpose, it has employed a case‐study approach. As urban territory extends into adjacent peri‐urban areas, the land rights of local landholders are expected to be automatically cancelled and transferred to people who can pay for a lease. This shows that very little attention is paid to the land rights of local landholders in peri‐urban areas in the process of urban expansion and development. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine that local landholders in those areas have a prevailing sense of insecurity about their land.     

Seeing Like a City‐State: Behavioural Planning and Governance in Egypt's First Affordable Gated Community

Haram City is Egypt's first ‘affordable’ gated community, hosting both aspirational middle‐class homeowners and resettled poor urban residents. Amidst legal ambiguity during Egypt's 2011–2013 revolutionary period, the management team of this public–private partnership was tasked with creating a ‘fully self‐sufficient’ city. While Haram City is the product of top‐down ‘seeing like a state’ master planning (Scott, 1998 ), the day‐to‐day resolution of class vulnerabilities and disputes over ‘reasonableness’ in city life requires forms of interpersonal adjudication otherwise addressed through local urban law—‘seeing like a city’ (Valverde, 2011 ). This article uses ethnography of management techniques aiming to ‘upgrade behaviour’ to theorize that a private entity, in a strategically indeterminate relationship with the state, reconciles future‐oriented planning and storied prejudices by merging two visions of governance. Imitating the repertoire of urban law, managers plan the very realm of bottom‐up decision making. They then adapt top‐down urban planning to bottom‐up dispute resolution to spatially consolidate the ‘consensual’ outcomes of a rigged game. Evoking both colonial Egyptian vagrancy laws and neoliberal paternalist welfare, ‘seeing like a city‐state’ governance amounts to authoritarianism that conceals itself within custom, appearing neutral so as to plan streets, codes and inner lives at once.     

Accumulation without Dispossession? Land Commodification and Rent Extraction in Peri‐urban China

The urbanization of rural China is increasingly achieved not through physical land grabs but the strategic enrolment of rural communities in the commodification of land via speculative rentiership. This article critically examines this shift in approach from the deployment of extra‐economic force in state‐led land expropriations toward an increasing reliance on market mechanisms in land development. A case study, the construction of a financial district in peri‐urban Guangzhou, shows that the enrolment of village communities is achieved through their cooptation as corporatist market players in regimes of rent‐based accumulation. While the apparent use of voluntaristic market exchange has reduced the need for coercion, however, the commodification process has at the same time created new terrain for dispossessory practices whereby value is illicitly extracted and seized by elites through rent relations. The shift from overt land grabbing to more covert mechanisms of value appropriation has important implications for rural class relations and contentious politics.     

Playing with the Rules of the Game: Social Innovation for Urban Transformation

Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with neoliberal ideas, conventional notions of innovation—like its capitalocentric counterparts, enterprise and entrepreneurialism—may promise higher productivity, global competitiveness and technological progress but do not fundamentally change the ‘rules of the game’. In contrast, an emerging field reimagines social innovation as disruptive change in social relations and institutional configurations. This article explores the conceptual and political differences within this pre‐paradigmatic field, and argues for a more transformative understanding of social innovation. Building on the work of David Graeber, I mobilize the novel constructs of ‘play’ and ‘games’ to advance our understanding of the contradictory process of institutionalizing social innovation for urban transformation. This is illustrated through a case study of Liverpool, where diverse approaches to innovation are employed in attempts to resolve longstanding socio‐economic problems. Dominant market‐ and state‐led economic development policies—likened to a ‘regeneration game’—are contrasted with more experimental, creative, democratic and potentially more effective forms of social innovation, seeking urban change through playing with the rules of the game. I conclude by considering how the play–game dialectic illuminates and reframes the way transformative social innovation might be cultivated by urban policy, the contradictions this entails, and possible ways forward.     

Local Growth Coalition: The Context and Implications of China’s Gradualist Urban Land Reforms

China’s urban land reforms are being implemented within a framework of general economic reforms which are gradualist in nature. Thus, the urban land reforms are moving step by step towards the establishment of a land market. This gradualism is developing in association with a redefinition of central-local intergovernmental relations in the reform era, and with the advent of localism. In this context, gradual urban land reforms have become an implicit programme to nurture local enterprises and developers, a means of fostering local government-enterprise coalitions and an instrument to strengthen local government’s position in local development. During the systematic transition toward a socialist market economy, booming Chinese cities are formulating informal local ‘urban regimes’ to compete for local growth by capitalizing on financial gains derived from a dual market of urban land and property development. — Les réformes du sol urbaines en Chine sont mises en oeuvre dans une structure de réformes économiques générales de nature incrementaliste. Ainsi, les réformes agraires urbaines vont pas à pas vers l’établissement d’un marché de la terre. Cet incrémentalisme se développe en association avec une redéfinition des relations intergouvernementales centre-région pendant les réformes et avec l’arrivée du localisme. Dans ce contexte, les réformes du sol urbaines se sont implicitement transformées en un programme de support pour les entreprises et les promoteurs locaux, un moyen d’encourager les coalitions locales entre le gouvernement et les entreprises et un instrument de renforcement de la position du gouvernement local dans le développement local. Durant la transition systématique vers une économie de marché socialiste, les villes chinoises en plein essor élaborent des ‘régimes urbains’ locaux officieux pour améliorer la croissance locale par une capitalisation des gains financiers dérivés et du double marché du sol urbain et du développement immobilier.     

Financing China's Suburbanization: Capital Accumulation through Suburban Land Development in Hangzhou

China's rapid urbanization has resulted in substantial suburbanization over recent decades. However, limited research has been conducted into how land‐based capital is mobilized, accumulated and circulated within the circuits of the capital accumulation process, or how land‐based capital is used to finance massive investment in suburbanization by China's local governments, especially since the trend in land commodification during the 2000s. We examined the capital switching experience in the city of Hangzhou and our findings indicate that local governments have attempted to simultaneously strengthen housing development and industrial growth. In contrast to experiences of suburbanization in Western countries, a real estate boom during the early days of suburbanization in Hangzhou was not necessarily the result of diversion of excess capital from over‐accumulated investments in the manufacturing industry. Rather, it was a consequence of capital accumulation facilitated by land‐reserve systems and land‐based financing of infrastructure orchestrated by local government. Local governments and their affiliated land‐reserve centers and local investment platforms have acted as entrepreneurs by using profits from suburban property development to subsidize industrial investments and fund the infrastructure‐supported expansion of outer suburbs. These findings highlight the potential risks of land‐centered accumulation and provide important reflections upon the theory of David Harvey in the context of urban China.     

快速城市化背景下的土地问题述评

改革开放以后,我国迅速进入到了快速城市化阶段,而快速城市化与快速经济增长互为因果,成为我国转型发展的主要动力。土地制度的改革是三十年来我国经济体制改革的重要组成部分,也是我国城市快速扩张及工业高速发展的重要动力。但是,我国城市化进程中的土地问题也非常突出:一方面,土地生产要素的紧缺已成为我国东部沿海发达地区最大的"门槛",耕地保护因此面临巨大压力;另一方面,土地资产的暴涨也引致了房价暴涨等严重的社会不公问题,"以地生财"的土地财政成为社会关注的焦点。因此,土地制度的改革仍然是我国经济体制改革的重点,而建立统一的城乡土地市场、改革"土地财政"、强化城市增长管理、抑制城市蔓延则是土地制度改革的重点。     

Recentering Southeast Asian Cities

For nearly two decades now, scholars have been heralding the arrival of new urbanisms. One debate in rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asia concerns the convergence of Western and Asian urban processes, and the riposte that interaction between globalizing processes and the historical momentum of local and regional forces make for complex Asian urbanisms. In recent years, attention has been drawn to the impact of decentralization, with consequences for the reorganization of the developmental state and the growing importance of private capital and urban social movements in driving urban processes and politics. This symposium offers the fresh lens of ‘recentering’ to discuss the urbanisms emerging from decentralization and the triangulating state–capital–social movement politics of the new urbanisms. Drawing on recent discussions of Manuel Castells' (1983) The City and the Grassroots, we seek to expand the conception of urban activism not just by considering non‐Western cases in the newly democratizing states of Southeast Asia, but also by considering cities as co‐agents of activism. We see the recentering of Southeast Asian cities as referring to political actions that take the city not only as site and repository, but also reflexively as identity in itself to be fought with, for and over.     

基于城市化进程中城市土地供应运行机制的分析与思考

城市化和工业化进程的高速发展,城市土地供应的重要性越来越突出,分析现行城市土地供应机制,土地资源的供应与社会需求之间矛盾日益尖锐并且呈失衡的发展态势,城市土地利用率低下以及城市用地盲目扩大与大量闲置土地并存,社会经济发展对土地需求的增长性与土地资源的稀缺性之间的不协调性备受社会和相关学者关注。合理引导控制城市化进程中城市土地供应,优化城市土地利用结构,探讨研究城市土地供应运行机制显得十分重要。     

Facilitative Leadership and the Challenge of Renewing Local Democracy in Italy

Participatory arrangements have become a popular way of addressing modern challenges of urban governance but in practice face several constraints and can trigger deep tensions. Facilitative leadership can play a crucial role in enabling collaboration among local stakeholders despite plural and often conflictual interests. Surprisingly, this style of leadership has received limited attention within debates linking urban governance and participatory democracy. We summarize the main insights of the literature on facilitative leadership and empirically develop them in the context of participatory urban governance by comparing recent participatory processes in two Italian cities. Whereas in one city facilitative leadership gradually emerged and successfully transformed a deep conflict into consensual proposals, in the other city, participatory planning further exacerbated pre‐existing antagonism, and local democratic culture was only later slowly reinvigorated through bottom‐up initiative. These diverging pathways explain how facilitative leadership is: (1) important for making things happen; (2) best understood as situated practices; (3) an emergent property of the practices and interactions of a number of local actors and (4) a democratic capacity for dealing with continuous challenges. Key to this style of leadership is understanding participatory urban governance as an ongoing democratic process.