Mapping China: Urbanisation - 3 Urban Renewal: Bottom-up Urban Renewal Projects

Bottom-up urban renewal projects are diverse in scale and mechanism. The successful renewal of Tianzifang, a neighbourhood of traditional urban housing and labyrinthine alleyways in the centre of Shanghai that was turned into an arts and crafts enclave with boutique retail stores, bars and restaurants, encouraged practices of a similar kind. Such projects usually involve a strong local agency that mediates among different stakeholders. In Tianzifang, the local agency was first represented by a famous artist who successfully turned the government’s relocation plan against Tianzifang into a rezoning scheme, and later by a former resident of the area who played a key role in inspecting vacant spaces and reaching out for new tenants.

Bottom-up urban renewal projects are usually smaller in scale than the planned examples, and cases are mostly found in the more developed regions – Redtory in Guangzhou, Kuanzhai Alley in Chengdu and 798 in Beijing, to name but a few. These cases usually start with the transformation of land uses. As a result, support from the government becomes an inevitable element of such practices.