NUPE 2024 Workshop. Helsinki, Finland. 25/09/2024-26/09/2024.

Prof. Fulong Wu gave a presentation with the title ‘Governing China’s urban development: state entrepreneurialism’. The talk depicted an overall picture of China’s urban governance and introduced the concept of state entrepreneurialism that captures the salient feature of Chinese urban governance. Related to this concept, it discussed relevant theoretical literature on neoliberalism, post-politics, and mega-urban projects, illustrating a new way of governing urban development in contemporary and late capitalism. The talk also introduced the debate over neoliberal governance and its recent shift under austerity urbanism and financialised governance. The talk expanded the scope of the varieties of urban entrepreneurialism, especially the recent municipal statecraft, and then introduced the concept of state entrepreneurialism. It illustrated state entrepreneurialism with examples of China’s large-scale development projects — new towns in the metropolitan peripheral areas.

Prof. Fangzhu Zhang gave a presentation with the title ‘Green state entrepreneurialism: Building the park city in Chengdu, China’. This presentation was based on a paper published on the journal Transactions in Planning and Urban Research. The paper uses the perspective of state entrepreneurialism to explore China’s environmental governance. The perspective illustrates how the Chinese state maintains its centrality, combining environmentalism and developmentalism while deploying flexible market development tools. This paper examines the Chengdu park-city model, an exemplar President Xi Jinping endorsed and widely emulated in China. The model combines the development of industrial and ecological spaces. It aims to deliver the central government’s vision for ecological civilisation and the local government’s economic development strategy. The development tools include land consolidation, financial mobilisation and an economic strategy that attempts to introduce ‘urban scenes’ into ecological spaces. This ecologically oriented development approach is more state-centred, contrasting with the neoliberal green growth machine.

For more details for this workshop, please visit the website of NUPE here.

Source: LinkedIn Post by Özlem Çelik, here.