Urban Brownfield Governance and Spatial Transformation in Modern China: a Case Study of Guangzhou

This article aims to examine the behaviors and logics presented by the local states in the process of redeveloping urban brownfields (lands with potential or confirmed contamination) in their territories. Land development and its related financial income had been the main sources to carry out the development missions assigned by the upper level government to local states since the tax system was altered since 1994. Yet this traditional way was no longer applicable easily as the arable land protection policy- “the 1.8 billion mu red line (十八億畝耕地紅線)” was issued in 2006. Moreover, the land shortages caused by the policy shift also induced a “stress structure” that featured with administrative inspections, public budget balance and land sources to most of local
governments in terms of the development of (social) housings and the transformation of their local economic structures. Given the above context, it’s timely and necessary to examine how local states responses to the “stress structure” through redeveloping the urban brownfields in their territories as land expropriation becomes much difficult. More specifically, how the changes of the administrative inspections of (social) housing developments and economic structure transformation affected local states’ brownfield reusing strategies? And what kind of (negative) consequences were caused by such behaviors?
By taking Guangzhou - a newly promoted state central city (國家中心城市) that hindered by severe housing problems, urgency in transforming its economic structure and under-supplied construction land sources - for studied case, I examined two sets (four sites in total) of brownfield redevelopment cases that associated with (social) housing developments and economy transformation in the metropolitan. The result indicated that a “spatial differentiation” brownfield transformation strategy, which tended to redevelop the high valued brownfields located in urban core into financial or commercial purposes, while the relatively peripheral and therefore low valued brownfields were reusing as social housing complexes, was adopted by Guangzhou government. Meanwhile, the process of brownfield redevelopment was also much hurried and rough since the more stressful administrative inspections after 2011, caused
several negative consequences like the “hasty” construction and demolition of industrial cultural facilities and the “selective” brownfield decontaminations. Further, Guangzhou government also gained an astonishing number of land finance through decentralizing its financial responsibility in developing social housings to the market, and the massive and systematic redevelopment of urban constructed lands (included brownfields). To conclude, this article argued that the urban brownfields redevelopment behaviors indicated above were not only the strategies to response the “stress structure” by local states, but also a “high risk land finance (高風險的新型土地財政)” with extremely uncertain contamination and harms to human bodies. As long as the “stress
structure”, the lack of brownfield regulations and the trend of reusing brownfields remained, the Guangzhou model embodied the brownfield redevelopment strategies and the negative consequences that other cities might perform.