| Summary: | China has experienced more than three decades of dramatic urbanisation. The process is associated with the expansion of urban built-up areas into formerly rural areas. Urban villages, a kind of slum-like informal settlement, are formed when farmland is requisitioned, with the rural residential land left on which indigenous villagers construct and rent large houses with substandard conditions for low-income rural migrants. Since urban villages have created many problems and urban development faces a lack of land supply, these villages are listed on the government’s agenda for regeneration. The practice of urban village redevelopment has proven to be controversial. It soon caused more social problems and attracted attention from academia. This research seeks to understand and analyse how different groups of stakeholders interact with each other in the process of property requisition and compensation, how decisions are made and how conflicts are generated and resolved. The research focuses on stakeholders’ practices at a micro-level. The case study approach is selected, and the case is an urban village in Xiamen, China. Qualitative methods, mainly semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis, are used to generate data. Qualitative analysis is adopted to analyse data and a social capital framework is applied to theorise the findings. Empirical findings from the case suggest that there are two major factors influencing the processes and dynamics of urban village redevelopment. The first is competing interests among different groups of stakeholders arising from the policies formulated by the governing authorities. The second is villagers’ misinterpretation of the development process and policies, due to villagers’ lack of proper education and the limited participation mechanisms within the redevelopment programme. A democratic reform is needed in such programmes that require requisition and demolition approaches in the future to reduce the conflicts and enable them to be addressed more effectively and justly.
|
|---|
