govErnanCE: A New Form of State Spatial Selectivity through State-orchestrated Rescaling

This article examines the emergence of city-region governance as a specific state spatial selectivity in post-reform China. The process has been driven by the state in response to the crisis of economic decentralization, and to vicious inter-city competition and uncoordinated development. As part of the recentralization of state power, the development of urban clusters (chengshiqun) as interconnected city-regions is now a salient feature of ‘new urbanization’ policy. I argue in this article that the Chinese cityregion corresponds to specific logics of scale production. Economic globalization has led to the development of local economies and further created the need to foster ‘regional competitiveness’. To cope with regulatory deficit at the regional level, three mechanisms have been orchestrated by the state: administrative annexation, spatial plan preparation and regional institution building, which reflect recent upscaling in post-reform governance. introduction The concept of urban clusters (chengshiqun) has recently resurfaced in China. The notion has existed in Chinese geography for a long time, mainly originating from the study of urban systems (see e.g. Yao et al., 1992), but recently it has been picked up in government policies either to build stronger coalitions for regional competitiveness or to solve the over-concentration of growth in large central cities. For example, in an effort to find solutions for the problems of smog and population over-concentration, in 2014 the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for a regional approach to the future development of Beijing in the capital region, known as Jing-Jin-Ji, which led to immense interest in city-region governance. In March 2015, the central government approved the outline of the Jing-Jin-Ji Collaborative Development Plan, which indicated that the notion of the urban cluster had become an official term in governance and had become popularized. In May 2016 the State Council approved the Yangtze River Delta Urban Cluster Development Plan. However, the term chengshiqun is used quite flexibly and is only vaguely defined in Chinese. Another concept, that of the metropolitan interlocking region (MIR), initially proposed by Zhou (1991), has not been used much. While MIR is similar to the mega-region or megalopolis (Gottmann, 1961), chengshiqun in practice refers to the city-region within the larger MIR. Thus, the city-region consists of the core city and its surrounding areas, such as its suburban areas and outskirts. Several adjacent city-regions then form an extended urbanized area such as the MIR. In China, these two scales are closely related: the Jing-Jin-Ji, the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) are highly populated areas of an MIR with interlocking city-regions. In short, the Jing-Jin-Ji, the YRD and the PRD themselves are not a single city-region but rather a cluster of city-regions situated adjacent to each other. The development of Chinese city-regions seems to echo a new spatial form of city-region in advanced capitalist economies (Scott, 2001). Originally, city-regionalism is mainly regarded as having emerged as a result of globalization and consequently of the global economy. However, some scholars (Jonas and Ward, 2002; 2007; Jonas 2012; This research has been supported by UK ESRC research project ‘Governing the Future City: a Comparative Analysis of Governance Innovations in Large Scale Urban Developments in Shanghai, London, Johannesburg’ (ES/ N006070/1).