Public participation in China’s urban planning: A communicative turn in policies and practices?

Abstract

Public participation is increasingly popular in China’s planning policies and practices in recent years, although technical-rational planning is the prevailing urban planning paradigm in today’s China. This dissertation aims to better understand the communicative turn in urban planning in the Chinese context. It analyses the policies and practices regarding public participation in China’s urban planning from various perspectives. We firstly investigate how power relations change in urban planning in general (chapters two); then we analyze to what extent local context influences the change of power relations (chapters three); next, we explore how citizens empower themselves in urban planning (chapter four); after that, what is the usefulness of professional participatory tools in engaging the public in planning practice is researched (chapter five); and finally we explore why urban planners engage the public in planning practice (chapter six). This final chapter returns to the research questions and summarizes the main findings of the whole study. Then based on these findings it provides the relevance and contributions of this study for potential readers, such as scholars, preservationists, urban planners, policy-makers, decision-makers of urban planning.