Abstract
This paper attempts to answer the question: How can community micro-regeneration projects in Chinese cities be situated and contextualised as particular kinds of practices to build sustainable communities? The research discussed in this paper focuses on Beijing Old City. It situates state-led regeneration practices engaging various actors in historic residential community spaces within a global discourse of community resilience. Community resilience has been implied in micro-regeneration projects in Chinese cities since it emphasises the process of exercising agency and combining community strengths to thrive in changing circumstance (Berkes and Ross, 2012). Micro-regenerations based on public participation increasingly are viewed as mainstream practices in historic district regeneration projects at the community level (Sha et al., 2019). This strategy allows small community spaces to become the object of renovation while using local resources and empowering local residents. The research analyses the tendency in Chinese urban regeneration practices focused on participatory design and co-production of places through a resilience-focused perspective. This paper discusses the potential similarities and differences between the East and West resilience and co-production discourse. Over the last forty years, Chinese cities' rapid urbanisation and social transformation have been broadly discussed and researched. The speed of the process and its orientation on the creation of China as a modern, future-oriented, urban nation put the historical parts of Chinese cities at the risk of being neglected and unwanted. As a representative among these cities, Beijing has removed long-time Old City residents from other marginal districts and replaced many historical houses with new skyscrapers. However, the rapid urbanisation focused on the creation of the contemporary urban fabric causes questions and controversies. The process is criticised for leading to inequality, social injustice and marginalisation of poorer and older states of Chinese society. In order to address this situation, the Chinese government has implemented its new historic cities conservation plan (Measures for the Protection of the Historical and Cultural Landmark of Beijing, 2021). This document proposes an approach described by Chinese academics as a 'micro-regeneration strategy' (Hou, 2019) to conduct incremental regeneration and promote community resilience. In that context, state-led co-production, collaborative governance, and 'commoning' (means a transformational process concerned with the sharing of resources and ways of doing) become the tripartite instrument that aims to enable the residents of Chinese cities to build resilience and address the social and economic problems of historic district regeneration. This paper explores the resource/social network and collaborative governance during and after the co-productive micro-regeneration process and resituates the community resilience discourse through the lens of space and the notion of the commons. The focus is on transforming Chinese historic conservation planning policies, governing and practice networks, construction processes, and citizen engagements in a state-led co-productive micro-regeneration project. One example of the co-produced micro-regeneration project located in Beijing Old City will be presented and discussed. The data has been collected and interpreted primarily in the framework of (constructivist) grounded theory. This study resituates the community resilience conceptual framework to allow for a new understanding of the Chinese government's shift towards co-production and collaborative governance between the government and the public, which combines elements from both traditional Chinese understanding of 'the commons' and western rooted resilience theory.
