State rescaling and large-scale urban development projects in China: the case of Lingang New Town, Shanghai

Abstract

Large-scale urban development projects have become the main vehicle by which targeted interventions for place- and scale-specific state initiatives unfold, triggering a series of processes that are associated with the rescaling of state space. This study aims to understand the place-specific conditions, pathways and strategies whereby states’ spatial and scalar restructuring takes place in urban development projects (UDPs) within China’s political economic contexts, and in turn how UDPs act as critical lenses for viewing the changing nature of state spatial strategy in China, through a case study of the Lingang New Town in Shanghai. The major findings are: UDPs in China function as tools not just for land value extraction but also for scale-making to cater to the state’s pursuits of place-specific competitiveness in the global economy; the restructuring of the state apparatus and regulatory frameworks is driven by place-specific tensions and crises triggered by earlier rounds of state rescaling; the state chose state-agents rather than market-agents to reinforce its power, and thus the state space expands through development of UDPs; through developing UDPs, China’s spatial strategies have explicitly and officially engaged with the discourse of globalisation while implicitly engaging with geographically variegated practices of neoliberalisation. At the theoretical level, this article facilitates an investigation of how China’s state spatial strategy, characterised by geographically and chronologically variegated engagement with neoliberalism, is actualised through UDPs. It also demonstrates how, despite being a socialist polity, pragmatic market measures and downscaling are taken as transient measures in times of need.