Struggling for an adaptive strategy? Discourse analysis of urban regeneration processes – A case study of Enning Road in Guangzhou City

Over the last two decades, China has experienced urban redevelopment at an unprecedented scale and speed. The state-sponsored property-led redevelopment pattern has been widely deployed as dominant urban regeneration strategy in many Chinese cities. Meanwhile, more and more attention has been paid to the protest and resistance of civil society to the tremendous demolition and eviction during the implementation of such strategies. Investigating the process, content and context of urban regeneration strategies in China provides fertile ground to understand the public participation process, specific plight and challenge of decision-making in urban regeneration in China. This reflects the logic and trend of urban governance in China within existing regulatory practices and institutional settings during the transformation period. As the understanding of strategy and problem are concomitant to each other, problem framing in urban regeneration is pivotal to understand urban regeneration strategies. Starting from this point, the object of this paper is to explore what the problems are, how they are defined and perceived by different actors, what strategies are promoted as solutions, and how they are legitimated or excluded. As problem framing is social construction through discourse by different actors, such close relationship of discourse and problem proves the necessity of undertaking discourse analysis as research approach to understand problem framing, also the process, content and context of urban regeneration strategies.To understand specific problems and challenges of urban regeneration strategies implemented in China’s inner cities, this study inquires a controversial and well known redevelopment project called Enning Road, which has been the first “pioneer” in terms of comprehensively redeveloping old town areas in Guangzhou since the last decade. This project has received tremendous criticism, and it can be characterized by a continuous adjustment of the unstable strategies that were applied and a frequent stagnation due to social resistance from 2006 to 2015. It will demonstrate how different discourse coalitions are formed by the government, scholars, journalists, residents and NGOs and other stakeholders. For this purpose, the paper will discuss their shared interests, beliefs or rationalities and the way they use storylines to frame problems. In this context, a lot of local knowledge and expert knowledge is activated and utilized to construct those storylines. The urban regeneration process of Enning Road involves continuously changing problem definitions and continuous experimentation, translating into emergent adaptive strategies. It also shows the interplay between different ways of problem framing, and the complex interaction between problem framing and strategy promotion.