ENTREPRENEURIAL URBANISM ... WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS? A CASE STUDY OF GOVERNANCE RESTRUCTURING IN JIYUAN, CHINA

Abstract

This thesis examines the contribution of entrepreneurial urbanism theory to the explanation of urban governance in China. Two major themes run throughout this analysis. First, to fully understand the contemporary strategies and practices of local economic and political actors in China requires an appreciation of the effect of the link between state rescaling and business politics on the issue of peasant citizenization. Second, geography matters to the formulation and management of entrepreneurial urbanism. Entrepreneurial urbanism theory was initially developed to capture a particular reorientation of urban political economy in North Atlantic countries. It rested upon three central claims over the changes underway in Baltimore: public-private partnerships increasingly worked alongside local governments to boost local economies; the design and delivery of these partnerships were entrepreneurial and went beyond the territory-based redistributive policies; and these partnerships fed into a fiercer inter-urban competition. Entrepreneurial urbanism theory stresses the inevitability of such changes to urban governance in the macroeconomic shift of Keynesian Fordism, despite some case-study materials suggesting otherwise. This thesis presents a genealogy of entrepreneurial urbanism theory, including its migration to and mutation within China. It then seeks to build an analytical framework that develops the key contributions of entrepreneurial urbanism theory while also navigating the investigation of urbanising governance in China. The empirical focus of this thesis is the municipality of Jiyuan. Since the 1990s, this small emerging city has built up a robust local economy based upon heavy industry, despite its disadvantageous location in Henan, one of the biggest agricultural provinces in China. However, the past decade has exposed the city to unprecedented economic and ecological challenges. Via the 'waves of crisis-driven urbanisation' concept, the status quo of Jiyuan is considered first in the shifting broader space economy and overlapping effects of previous urban policies over the past four decades. Through contrastive case studies of different public-private partnerships and rural collective economic shareholding cooperatives, using semi-structured interviews with key policymakers and practitioners, the institutional constellation assembling the urban process is mapped. I argue that entrepreneurial urbanism theory relocates the research foci of city governing, but the theory users tend to underspecify the role of state rescaling within the local-global nexus, hollow out the urban-rural dialectic, and thus foreclose alternative urban process by presuming North Atlantic ethnocentrism unnecessarily.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Cecilia Wong (Supervisor) & Kevin Ward (Supervisor)