Pro- and Contra-Coalition: Governing the Rise and Fall of Creative Industrial Parks in China

Abstract

A great number of creative industrial parks (CIPs) have emerged in the past two decades in China as a critical and popular approach to the adaptive reuse of abandoned industrial land in cities. However, a few vibrant CIPs have been closed in the past few years, and the sites are set to be demolished and redeveloped in a property-led manner, suggesting the fragility of CIPs as a land reuse approach. This article aims to elaborate on the institutional rationale behind such a phenomenon. Cases in Shanghai and Guangzhou are examined and presented. The key arguments include: (a) in the industrial land redevelopment process, public and private actors flexibly establish pro-coalitions and contra-coalitions to foster and close CIPs, with strategies to overcome institutional obstacles and to implement land redevelopment-pursued regulatory plans, respectively; (b) key actors forming the two coalitions overlap, such as the local government and the state-owned enterprise land occupiers, and their positions shift subject to specific circumstances; and (c) the finding of the two coalitions echoes the existing argument that there are forces beyond the growth machine driving China’s urban development and provides further insight into the explicit framework of the dual forces underneath.