Local stakeholders’ narratives about large-scale urban development: The Zhejiang Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City

Abstract

The development of high-tech industrial parks has transformed the urban landscape in China. However, little is known of the perception of these changes by those affected by their planning and implementation. In order to shed light on this issue, we conducted a study of the Zhejiang Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City, informed by field research on the environmental and socioeconomic status of the area and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (residents, workers and government representatives). The data was collected and analysed using a grounded theory approach and modelled via a structural topic model (STM) to identify the most significant issues that people raised in relation to the development of the high-tech industrial park. The main finding of the study is the clear and shared perception of growing prosperity, associated with the improvements to both economic and social infrastructure and the attendant employment and business opportunities. Stakeholders also highlighted improvements to the area’s landscape quality. Nonetheless, stakeholders also identified a set of concerns centred on the threat to cultural identity, the reduction of agricultural land and the diminishing of diversity and flexibility of pathways to urban development. It is these concerns that, in their view, should serve to frame future phases of the Future Sci-Tech City construction.

Adding new narratives to the urban imagination: An introduction to ‘New directions of urban studies in China’

“…The development of high-tech parks, or more recently science and smart cities, illustrates the aspiration to modernity. Through the narratives of local people, we can begin to understand mega-urban projects such as Zhejiang Hangzhou Future Sci-tech City as state modernisation projects (Anzoise et al, 2020). Recently, China has tried to transform single function industrial parks into mixed-use new cities with extensive public realms and amenities.…”

Planning behind Closed Doors: Unlocking Large-Scale Urban Development Projects Using the Stakeholder Approach on Tenerife, Spain

“…They "do not have a formal contractual bond with the project" [78] (p. 3), although they might have an influence, and will certainly feel the impacts of the megaproject. This is a fact that many scientific contributions neglect [79] (p. 63); [80]. There are a growing number of studies, though, that focus on these secondary stakeholders in their analysis [46,81,82].…”

China’s urban development in context: Variegated geographies of city-regionalism and managing the territorial politics of urban development

“…For example, when compared with their North American counterparts (see Garreau, 1991), edge-city high-tech zones in China have developed in unique ways, not only exercising growing economic influence regionally and nationally but also reshaping the territorial-political status of large rural areas. A case in point is the Zhejiang Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City (Anzoise et al, 2020), where local stakeholders – firms and residents alike – attribute increasing significance to the place-making characteristics of urban development, such as the quality of the local environment and landscape, social diversity and supportive living and working conditions. As China’s post-suburban regions continue to expand – supported in no small measure by the amalgamation of suburban and rural administrative areas into larger city-regional territorial entities – so countervailing geopolitical processes are set in motion that tend to counteract the dominant centralising tendencies within the Chinese state (Li and Jonas, 2019).…”