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

本文的主要目标是探索城市结构调整过程的治理，作为中国转型过程中各种利益相关者的实体再开发和经济升级政策的相互作用，作为对非正式超大城市动态理论的补充贡献。城市治理方法侧重于分析广州和深圳经历经济和物质结构调整的区域的政策。随着珠三角日益发展成为一个我们称之为“成熟的特大城市地区”，这些领域变得越来越重要。这个成熟的超级区域目前正经历着巨大的转变，从单纯关注增长和空间扩张，转向调整现有的城市结构及其经济结构，从廉价劳动密集型生产转向更加以知识为基础的经济。这种政策转变已经持续了好几年，但由于全球金融危机的后果，它得到了巨大的推动。在这方面，其目的是将改组政策纳入一个更广泛的解释框架，说明不同的城市管理，特别注重城市非正式性的作用和随时间变化的各个方面。此外，研究结果将从地方层面扩大，并与特大城市发展的正式和非正式动态进行比较，特别关注珠三角和达卡的城市治理环境。由此，我们的最终目标是促进关于城市非正式性和全球变化作用的理论辩论。

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.