The Governance of Spatial and Economic Restructuring: Informal Dynamics of the Maturing Mega-City

主要目标是探讨在中国的转型过程中，作为对正在形成的非正式特大城市动态理论的补充贡献，作为实体重建和经济升级政策的相互作用的城市重组过程的治理。城市治理方法的重点是分析广州和深圳正在进行经济和物质重组的场馆的政策。随着珠江三角洲地区日益发展成为我们所称的“成熟的超大城市区域”，这些领域的重要性与日俱增。目前，这个成熟的超大区域正经历着一个巨大的转变，从单纯关注增长和空间扩展，转向重组现有的城市结构和经济结构，从廉价的劳动力密集型生产转向更以知识为基础的经济。这种政策转变已经持续了几年，但由于全球金融危机的后果，这一转变得到了巨大的推动。在这方面，其目的是将结构调整政策纳入差异化城市治理的更广泛的解释框架，特别注重城市非正规性的作用和随时间变化的各个方面。此外，将从地方一级扩大结果，并将其与巨型城市发展的正式和非正式动态进行比较，特别侧重于珠江三角洲和达卡的城市治理环境。由此，我们最终的目标是为关于城市非正规性和全球变化的作用的理论辩论做出贡献。

The main objective is to explore the governance of urban restructuring processes as an interplay of physical redevelopment and economic upgrading policies of various stakeholders in the course of China’s transition as complementary contribution to a theory of informal mega-urban dynamics in the making. The urban governance approach is focused on the analyis of policies of arenas which undergo economic and physical restructuring in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. These arenas are of growing importance as the PRD is more and more developing into a region we call “maturing mega-urban region”.This maturing mega-region currently witnesses a massive shift from a mere focus on growth and spatial expansion towards restructuring of the existing urban fabric and its economic structures away from cheap labour-intensive production towards a more knowledge-based economy. This policy shift has been going on for some years already, but got a massive push due to the consequence of the global financial crisis. In this context, it will be aimed to imbed the restructuring policies into a wider explanatory framework of differentiated urban governance with special focus on the role of urban informality and aspects of changes over time. Further, the results will be scaled up from the local level and compared to formal and informal dynamics of mega-urban development with a special focus on urban governance settings in the PRD and Dhaka. Derived from this we finally aim at contributing to the theoretical debate about urban informality and the role of global change.