Real Estate Developers and the Urban Renewal of Shenzhen’s Urban Village
Abstract
Over the past two decades, the ultimate social buzzword of urban China is chaiqian, the physical representation of urban renewal in China, often known for its forceful actions and social grievances. Chai means to demolish, and qian means to move or relocate something. Together, chaiqian is used both as a noun and sometimes a verb in Chinese. Across China, great stadiums, “new towns” and new CBDs were mostly built on chaiqian land under various slogans of urban renewal. Shenzhen’s urban renewal placed particular emphasis on the urban villages. This paper provides an overview of the urban renewal processes in Shenzhen’s urban villages. It will analyze the strategies and perspectives of the urban villagers and the real-estate developers during the urban renewal process and its chaiqian phases. In Shenzhen, the real estate developers have essentially become the vanguards of the urban renewal process with local government backing. On the chaiqian ground of the urban villages, fierce struggles are being waged between urban villagers and the real estate developers both as partners and as competitors.References
Charles Booth Online Archive. LSE library. Retrieved from: http://booth.lse.ac.uk/static/a/index.html
Duan, J. (ed.) (2009) Space, Power, and Resistance: The Spatial Politics of Illegal Construction in Urban Villages. Nanjing: DongnanDaxueChubanshe. (In Chinese)
Engels, F. (1971) The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gemdale Group (2013) Group Introduction, Retrieved from: http://www.gemdale.com/AboutGemdale/Group_Introduction.aspx?Menu=1
Harvey, D. (1985) The Urbanization of Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Harvey, D. (2009) Social Justice and the City. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.
Harvey, D. (2008) The Right to the City. New Left Review, 53: 23–40.
Howard, E. (1898/2007) Garden Cities of To-morrow. Retrieved from: http://archive.org/details/gardencitiestom00howagoog
Hsing, Y. (2010) The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hu, T. (2012) Crisis of Lack of Usable Land: Shenzhen Planning to form a Land Management Bureau) Retrieved from: http://house.people.com.cn/n/2012/1114/c164220-19576948.html (In Chinese).
Le Corbusier (1964) The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-age Civilization. trans. P. Knight, New York: Orion Press.
Liu, J. and Liu, Z. (eds) (2013) Researches on Real Estate Topics. Beijing: FazhiChubanshe. (In Chinese)
Jacobs, J. (2011) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Modern
Scott, J. C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shenzhen Municipal Government (2009) Methods on Urban Renewal. Shenzhen Municipal Government Document, no. 211, Shenzhen. (In Chinese)
Shu, Y. (2010, February 1) Shenzhen Urban Villages Creating Rich Barons. Tsingdao Daily. (In Chinese)
Vanke Group (2013) 2012 Annual Report: the First Step toward ROE Internationalization. Retrieved from: http://www.vanke.com/newstext.aspx?id=1484&u=NewsNav. (in Chinese)
Wang, X. (ed.) (2013) Disputes over Demolition and Relocation: Confirming Rules and Using Power. Beijing: FazhiChubanshe. (In Chinese)
Weber, M. (1986) The City. New York: Free Press.
Ye, F. (2010) Gangxia Super Nail. Southern Metropolis Daily.24 November, p. AII 07. (In Chinese).
Zhang, G. (2009) Building War. Southern Metropolis Daily, December 16th, p.A 05, Shenzhen. (In Chinese)
Zhao, T. (2010) Chenhua: Creating the Tallest Building in Shenzhen with 5 Billion Yuan) Times Entrepreneur, 41: 34–37. (In Chinese)
- The contributor(s) (authors) warrant that the entire work is original and unpublished; it is submitted only to this Journal and all text, data, figures/tables or other illustrations included in this work are completely original and unpublished, and these have not been previously published or submitted elsewhere in any form or media whatsoever.
- The contributor(s) warrant that the work contains no unlawful or libelous statements and opinions and liable materials of any kind whatsoever, does not infringe on any copyrights, intellectual property rights, personal rights or rights of any kind of others, nor contains any plagiarized, fraudulent, improperly attributed materials, instructions, procedures, information or ideas that might cause any harm, damage, injury, losses or costs of any kind to person or property.
- The contributor(s) retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- The contributor(s) are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- The contributor(s) are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
- Geography Research Forum may disseminate the content of the publications and publications’ Meta data in text, image, or other print and electronic formats to providers of research databases (e.g. EBSCO, GeoBase, JSTOR) to facilitate publications' exposure.
