Restructuring urban space through urban mega-projects in transitional Chinese cities: The case of Pudong New Area, Shanghai

A lunch lecture by Assistant Professor Yawei Chen (Delft University of Technology). Lunch is provided; registration is required.

Prestige mega-projects are used in Chinese cities as powerful urban interventions to enhance city’s competitiveness, project cities with a new image, improve the urban environment and to help create new city visions. However, managing a mega-project is not an easy task as mega-projects are complex, take a long time, involve diverse stakeholders and face various political, economic, financial and social uncertainties, both before and during the realisation period.

The Pudong New Area in Shanghai has become a place in which global and local forces, the state, a growing market and an emerging new society interact, and have been interacting since 1990. In the early 1990, an obsolete urban area mixed with farmland and industries on the east side of the Huangpu River was used as a buffer zone to experiment with economic reform as a ‘Special Economic Zone’ and later on to host the main venues of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. My research examines how, in the last three decades, different global and local forces have interacted in shaping the urban development strategies for the development of the Pudong New Area, from the creation of the Lujiazui Financial Centre (starting in the a 1990’s) to the urban transformations post-2010 .

Through these mega projects, Shanghai aims to restructure its urban space to accommodate and facilitate new economic functions and urban activities. The development process of mega-projects helps us elucidate the dynamics of multi-scalar strategic relations that determine the process and outcome of urbanization. The key question addressed is: What is the logic behind the formulation of vision, urban development strategies and governance in Chinese urban mega projects?

Yawei Chen is Assistant Professor Urban Development Management at Delft University of Technology. Before she took this position, in 2008, she was a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (2001-2007) where she wrote her doctoral dissertation Shanghai Pudong: urban development in an era of global-local interaction (IOS Press, 2007). She developed a special interest in and expertise about the complexity of urban mega-projects in the context of industrial transition and globalization processes in Europe and China. Her research creates insight into complex urban development processes, development strategies, governance in changing global-local contexts and issues pertaining to a sustainable urban environment in the context of urban mega-projects. She is involved in academic research, education and valorisation projects that link the management of urban mega-projects to governance, planning, development strategies, economic transition, energy transition and the circular economy.

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About IIAS Lunch Lectures

Every month, one of the IIAS affiliated fellows will give an informal presentation about his/her work-in-progress for colleagues and others interested. Lunch lectures are sometimes also organised for visiting scholars.

IIAS organises these lectures to provide the research community with an opportunity to freely discuss ongoing research and exchange thoughts and ideas. Anyone with an interest in the subject matter at hand is welcome to attend and join the discussion.