China's urbanization is undergoing profound neoliberal shifts, within which urban redevelopment has emerged in the forefront of neoliberalization. This study aims to understand China's emerging neoliberal urbanism by examining the association between urban redevelopment and neoliberalism. Rather than a deliberate design, neoliberalization in China is a response to multiple difficulties/crises and the desire for rapid development. The neoliberalization process is full of controversies and inconsistencies, which involve conflicts between neoliberal practices and social resistance, and tensions between central and local states. Nevertheless, China's neoliberal urbanism has a responsive and resilient system to cope with the contradictions and imbalances inherent in neoliberalism. Meanwhile, neoliberal urbanism is more tangible at the sub-national scale, since the local state can most effectively assist neoliberal experiments and manage crises. This study not only contributes to the understanding of China's neoliberal urbanism, but also has multiple implications for neoliberalism studies in general. First, in examining the interrelationship between the state and market, it is the actual effect of legitimizing and facilitating market operation rather than the presence (or absence) of the state that matters. Second, a new nexus of governance has formed in the neoliberalization process. Not only the nation state but also the local state is of great significance in assisting and managing neoliberal projects. Third, this study further validates the importance and necessity of scrutinizing neoliberal practices, in particular the controversies and inconsistencies within the neoliberalization process.

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:  Urban redevelopment in China has experienced great transformation. Government‐backed redevelopment has been replaced by privately funded and property‐led redevelopment. This article discerns the impetus of ongoing property‐led redevelopment. A case study of the Xintiandi project in Shanghai reveals how property‐led redevelopment actually works. Pro‐growth coalitions between local government and developers are formed. Despite its role as capital provider, the private sector is still regulated by the government due to its negligible influence on local governance. The government controls the direction and pace of urban redevelopment through policy intervention, financial leverages, and governance of land leasing. Property‐led redevelopment is driven by diverse motivations of different levels of the government, e.g. transforming urban land use functions, showing off the entrepreneurial capability of local government, and maximizing negotiated land benefits. Driven by profit seeking, some thriving urban neighborhoods are displaced by high‐value property development, and suffer from uneven redevelopment.

In Shanghai, globalised urban images and a well‐functioning accumulation regime are enthusiastically sought after by urban policy, and explicitly promoted as a blueprint for a civilised city life. The city is celebrating its thriving neo‐liberal urbanism by implementing enormous new‐build gentrification, mostly in the form of demolition–rebuild development involving direct displacement of residents and landscapes. This study aims to understand demographic changes and the socioeconomic consequences of new‐build gentrification in central Shanghai. The paper first examines demographic changes between 1990 and 2000 in central Shanghai, i.e. the changing distribution of potential gentrifiers and displacees. It then looks into two cases of new‐build gentrification projects in central Shanghai, to compare residents' socioeconomic profiles in old neighbourhoods and new‐build areas. This study also examines the impacts of gentrification on displacees' quality of life and socioeconomic prospects. Because the enlarging middle class and the pursuit of wealth‐induced growth by the municipal government are turning the central city into a hotspot of gentrification, inequalities in housing and socioeconomic prospects are being produced and intensified in the metropolitan area. This study thus emphasises that critical perspectives in gentrification research are valuable and indispensable. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Against the backdrop of higher education expansion, studentification refers to a particular type of urban sociospatial restructuring resulting from university students’ concentration in certain residential areas. Over the last decade, studentification has evolved into different forms and has spread to different locales. This study aims to provide a contextualised understanding of this distinct phenomenon in China so as to decode the complex dynamics of urban sociospatial transformation in the Chinese city. In this paper, I present a line of empirical evidence based on fieldwork in Xiadu Village and Nanting Village, two studentified villages close to university campuses in Guangzhou. These two villages exemplify different consumption and spatial outcomes of studentifcation, owing to different institutional arrangements, types of studentifiers and roles of villagers. Yet, in both villages, studentification has profoundly transformed the economic, physical, social and cultural landscapes. Notably, rather than the spatialisation of compromised and marginalised residential choices by higher education students, studentification in China is better interpreted as the spatial result of students’ conscious residential, entrepreneurial and consumption choices to escape from the rigid control of university dorms, to accumulate cultural and economic capital, as well as to actualise their cultural identity. In the Chinese context, studentification provides a useful prism to understand a unique trajectory of urbanisation: re-urbanising the ‘villages in the city’ through bringing in urban living/urban consumptions. In the long run, studentification could provide a potential solution to sustain and upgrade the villages in the city.

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Since market‐oriented economy reform, China has experienced significant changes in urban landscapes and the internal structure of cities. Recent studies have provided some insightful understanding into urban changes at a macro‐scale, e.g. social and spatial segregation, the division between rural migrants and urban households, changes in land uses. To a lesser extent, urban changes are understood at the microscopic level of the neighbourhood. Urban (re)development has created many new urban landscapes. Meanwhile, traditional old urban areas still constitute a significant proportion of Chinese cities, and normally contain large concentrations of marginal population. Possessing the particular characteristics of long developing history, high population density, and low housing quality, traditional urban areas have also experienced different changes in the post‐reform period. This study, based on a field survey of three traditional urban areas in Nanjing, attempts to reveal the built environmental and socio‐economic changes which can be partly attributed to different levels of urban redevelopment. More importantly, the study highlights the significance of neighbourhood‐based social interaction to marginal population. Against the backdrop of massive urban displacement and rapid redevelopment, it is argued that the effect of dismantling neighbourhoods could be detrimental to a sustainable urban society and the positive social objectives should be seriously considered in the process of urban redevelopment.

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