The (Re)Making of Polycentricity in China's Planning Discourse: The Case of Tianjin

Abstract

Polycentricity is promoted as an ideal urban form to achieve sustainable and balanced development, and it has been widely adopted by planners in China, especially in large cities. However, the rhetoric about polycentricity has rarely been interrogated in planning research in terms of scales, contextuality, power and rationality. To fill this gap, we carried out a Foucauldian discourse analysis in our research to interpret the nature of polycentric practice in City Master Plans, using Tianjin as a case study. Through an analysis of how the discourse of polycentricity is being deployed in planning documents, we develop two principal arguments in this article. First, the conceptual substance of polycentricity evolved alongside the urban transition process in China, and its discursive practice involved multiple scales and spatial elements. Secondly, rather than being mere technocratic practice, the production and legitimation of distinct discourses of polycentricity is an articulation of multi‐scalar power involving various stakeholders, which is disguised and justified by the planning profession.

Rethinking China’s urban governance: The role of the state in neighbourhoods, cities and regions

“…Hence, we need to interrogate the intentional politics of the state and its governance strategies. These strategies may include multi-scalar state collaborations (Xian et al, 2015; Yang et al, 2021; Zhang et al, 2020, 2021), deployment of a new discourse of polycentric urban structure (Wang et al, 2021) and coordinated development to achieve a national development vision. Inter-city competition led to broken roads and an unconnected transport infrastructure.…”

“…Besides being an economic development strategy, the polycentric metropolitan structure is used to address these practical problems of infrastructure coordination (Yang et al, 2021) and growth pressure and climate change. The discourse of polycentricity reflects the multi-scalar and competing power of stakeholders (Wang et al, 2021). The idea of polycentricity in China comes from planning input (Harrison and Gu, 2021) and the role of the central government (Dong and Kübler, 2021) rather than being an outcome of ‘market’ forces as may be seen in enclave urbanism in the West.…”

Manufacturing urbanism: Improvising the urban–industrial nexus through Chinese economic zones in Africa

“…In the late 1980s, the Shenzhen ‘flagship’ development story gave way to other forms, including Economic and Technological Development Zones and High and New Technology Industrial Development Zones (Chen, 1995). The later economic zones did not follow the exact model of Shenzhen, and some cases such as the Tianjin Economic and Development Area have been associated with urban fragmentation (Wang et al, 2020). However, while levels of urban–industrial integration vary, the overriding story is one of relative coherence between the urban and industrial policies, reflected in at least two aspects which are missing from many African contexts and from formal efforts at ‘policy transfer’.…”

Mapping the Spatial Conditions of Polycentric Urban Development in Europe: An Open‐source Software Tool

“…Urban polycentricity has become a key concept in urban and regional studies. Although the concept’s genealogy is still being written (Van Meeteren 2020), in recent years, it has increasingly been adopted as an organizational framework for conducting empirical research (e.g., Taubenböck et al 2017; Bartosiewicz and Marcínczak 2020) and as a normative territorial development goal (e.g., Rauhut 2017; Wang and Wang 2020). The concept’s increasing popularity comes with a cost: surveying the literature using scientometric methods and content analysis, Van Meeteren, Poorthuis, and Derudder (2016) observe that urban polycentricity has evolved into a stretched concept causing Babel‐like confusion in the scientific debate—details on which are provided below.…”