The collaborative turn in Chinese urban regeneration in the digital era: power dynamics and the role of planners

Abstract

Urban regeneration in China has increasingly adopted collaborative approaches to address the social, economic, and political complexities of transformation. In many cities, collaborative approaches have been institutionalized through mechanisms like community planners and digital platforms. While these approaches promise inclusiveness and consensus-building, how power shapes collaboration remains insufficiently understood. Drawing on case studies from Beijing, Shenzhen, and Chongqing, it reveals how collaboration is shaped by unequal distributions of authority, resources, and discursive power across both formal institutions and informal, digital arenas. The findings show the processes and productive outcomes of the collaboration. It also reveals how obvious, hidden and covert mechanisms of power operate within collaborations. The latter two power types consolidate state control and contribute to elite-driven heritage redevelopment. The study also examines the extent to which planners—acting as mediators or activists—can reconfigure these relations. The study advances collaborative planning debate in three ways. First, it develops an integrated power framework that distinguishes sources and arenas of power, highlighting informal and covert power mechanisms. Second, it theorizes digital collaboration as a techno-institutional hybrid, where social media simultaneously enables powerless' voices and reinforces institutional control through process design and content filtering. Third, it offers a differentiated account of planner agency, demonstrating how community planners and planning activists navigate institutional constraints, strategically deploy digital tools, and selectively expand spaces for participation and contestation. The study challenges Western-centric assumptions of pluralistic collaboration and offers a context-sensitive understanding of power, planner agency, and digital governance under Chinese conditions, with broader implications for collaborative urban governance globally.