Time and Date  

: 

3 October 2007, 11.00 am - 1.00 pm

Venue  

: 

Conference Room, Department of Architecture, SDE1 Level 3, School of Design and Environment, NUS   

Student's Name 

: 

Li Ze

Title of Thesis   

: 

Urban Development in Changshoujie, Shanghai: An Institutional Analysis     

Abstract 

: 

China’s economic reform since 1978 has brought urban development into a new era along with the profound institutional change and organizational transformation. The distinctive spatial patterns shaped by centrally planned institutions are now giving way to the new urban forms. At the core of China’s urban transformation is a new development process, which is articulated through actors with different roles, interests, and interplays as well as various rules and regulations. The research investigates the impact of institutional change on China’s urban development.

The gradualist economic reform had generated dynamic forces for the rapid urban development. Urban spatial patterns evolved in the context of dualism which was the co-existence of the outgoing planning regime and an incoming market system. On one hand, urban development was controlled by planning forces. A multi-centric urban structure proposed in master plan was established preliminarily. On the other hand, urban development began to be shaped by the land and property market mechanisms. Introduction of the land value helped the “capital-rationing” land use restructuring. Through this analysis, the link between institutional change and urban development is built. The research showed that a new path of land and property development was reproduced and pushed by the self-reinforcing mechanisms cultivated by the interest groups. Taking a leading role in the urban development process, three major interest groups, namely, local governments, danweis and developers, evolved in the dynamic institutional context. Driven by the common development interests, a new form of pro-growth coalition was formulated among the three interest groups. The pro-growth coalition caused by the self-reinforcing mechanisms was fundamentally different from the one in the US political context. I argued that the transitional institutions of ambiguous property rights and the discretionary urban planning had greatly contributed to hasty urban development. The self-reinforcing mechanisms had locked-in the path of institutional change to an inferior way. Short termism and rent-seeking behaviors prevailed in the real estate market due to the incomplete institutional change.

This dissertation contributes to the institutional analysis of urban development in general and to the understanding of urban development in transitional China in particular, by making an explicit link between the changes in the built environment and the underlying institutional dynamics. The theoretical framework which integrates the institutional change, the mode of urban development and their impact on the built environment can be applied to other research contexts. The empirical findings on the roles and interests of the actors and their interplay (i.e., the pro-growth coalition) on shaping urban space are an addition to the urban development models developed on the basis of research findings from the US cities. The focus on incomplete property rights, discretionary urban planning and their impact on the specific mode of Chinese urban development leads to a showcase of the role that a central institutional mechanism plays in shaping the physical form and underlying processes of space formation in urban China.

Keywords: urban space, urban development process, institutional change, transitional economy, dualism, pro-growth coalition, ambiguous property rights, discretionary urban planning.