China’s extended urbanization driven by the “consumption city” in the context of financialized ecological civilization

Abstract

This article seeks to address current debates on ongoing China’s urban development and makes a theoretical proposal that links financialization and ecological civilization through the perspective of the increasing role of consumption in today’s transition to an upgraded domestic economy. While both financialized land value capture and the role of quality are now fundamental to the construction of the built environment in Chinese cities, we argue that the “consumption city” refers to an economic and urban production process as well as to a societal transformation. First, the economic upgrading has gone along with a greater mobility of people travelling ever longer distances who spend their income or invest in the places they travel to rather than necessarily their places of residence or of work. To attract these consumers, whether they are residents, tourist or property investors, the quality of the living and consumption environments play a dominant role in the complex urban production and in governance, beyond the classic model of development based on the city as a production place. Simultaneously, the rising role of financialization by external households as investors raises the issue of how and to what extent the construction of consumption places has been a way for the state to further enhance the land value capture in (new or not) cities. Second, as the latest government strategy, ecological civilization is part of a social engineering process aiming to shape people’s lifestyles in terms of both their everyday consumption practices and their mindsets. The current transition aims to “civilize” citizens by enlarging the scope of urban consumers beyond the upper and middle classes to people from rural areas who are encouraged to become urban. Ecological civilization promotes a better quality of life for all, together with new outdoor and experiential activities, although this comes with a high ecological footprint.

Planning centrality, state-oriented growth, and the spatial evolution of development zones in urban China: The case of Wuhan’s Optics Valley

“…Instead, they are multifunctional and include many urban functions including residential, commercial, and leisure land uses (Cheng et al, 2017; Chien, 2008). The motivation to develop multifunctional development zones is to generate economic growth through both industrial development but crucially also through urban consumption (Theurillat and Graezer Bideau, 2022). In addition to driving economic growth, development zones now also need to meet extra-economic objectives set out by the national government (Zhang and Gao, 2022).…”

City-regional governance under state entrepreneurialism in China

“…Wu (2016) interprets the development of city-region governance through state rescaling, which involves three major instruments: regional planning, administrative annexation and the development of soft regional institutions. Moreover, scholarship highlighted the ‘politics of scale’ in urban and regional planning and cross-border infrastructure coordination (Yang, 2006; Yang, et al, 2021; Yeh and Xu, 2008) and extended urbanisation under financialization and spatial fixes (Shen et al, 2020; Theurillat and Bideau, 2022).…”

Positioning China’s state entrepreneurialism in structural coherence and multiple logics

“…However, it is unsustainable in multiple ways. The changing conditions of economic globalisation and geopolitical disputes (Rolf and Schindler, 2023) pose further challenges to the role of export and investment in driving economic growth (Theurillat and Graezer Bideau, 2022). In this sense, financialised state entrepreneurialism conflictingly performs innovative market approaches to achieve some strategic goals while generating crises that potentially impede others.…”

“…As the real industrial economy was weakened due to the adverse global economic conditions for export, funds leveraged by the stimulus package entered fixed-capital investment (Pearson et al, 2021; Wu, 2023a), i.e., infrastructure and housing. Meanwhile, the fiscal and political costs for land acquisition rose due to social resistance (Wang and Wu, 2019; Zhang and Gao, 2022), ecological unsustainability (Theurillat and Graezer Bideau, 2022; Zhang and Wu, 2022), and arable land loss (Shao et al, 2020) which challenged the land-centric finance scheme. Driven by these challenges, a financialised urban development model characterised by land mortgages and local government finance vehicles (Wu, 2021) was adaptively formed.…”

“…The crises of declining competitiveness of export industries and dropping marginal revenue of land-centric finance would not disappear without the GFC. Other undermined elements of the world factory model include the demand for an economic structural upgrade, the increasing significance of the knowledge-based economy (Shen, 2022) and consumption (Liu and Yau, 2020; Theurillat and Graezer Bideau, 2022), and an emerging ‘middle class’ (He, 2022). In fact, financialised state entrepreneurialism is conjunctural with the historical ‘moment’ of the growing global financial capitalism since the late 1970s (Peck, 2017b).…”