Urban China Zoom (sponsored by Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab)

This talk analyzes the characteristics and mechanisms of Shanghai's New Relocation Policy (拆迁新政), proposing the concept of the “financialization of relocation and resettlement” to explain the transforming modes of Shanghai’s gentrification, suburbanization, and relocation governance after 2010. Shanghai’s New Relocation Policy provides market-based monetary compensation, including a portion of rising land values, to registered residents in the renewal area. Moreover, the New Relocation Policy constructed a set of economic incentive-oriented governance technologies and accelerated the speed of urban renewal through the technology of majority decision making. I argue that the financialization of Shanghai's relocation and resettlement system constituted the hegemonic relocation regime’s governmentality, involved the relocated households in the state-driven urbanization of capital and resulted in new forms of evictions, ethical conflicts and debt risks.