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

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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.