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Negotiating Green Space with Landed Interests: The Urban Political Ecology of Greenway in the Pearl River Delta, China
Author(s) -
Chung Calvin King Lam,
Zhang Fangzhu,
Wu Fulong
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12384
Subject(s) - china , politics , negotiation , urbanization , political ecology , economic shortage , sustainability , space (punctuation) , geography , urban ecology , environmental planning , political science , ecology , economic growth , government (linguistics) , law , economics , archaeology , linguistics , philosophy , biology
Abstract Land‐centred urbanisation has precipitated shortage of green space in Chinese cities. However, in the Pearl River Delta, an ambitious greenway system has recently managed to flourish. It is intriguing to ask how this has become possible. Informed by the perspective of urban political ecology, this paper finds that the greenway project in the Pearl River Delta represents a set of politically realistic endeavours to alleviate urban green space shortage by adapting to, rather than challenging, powerful landed interests. Three interlocking dimensions about land—municipal land quota, rural land use claims, and real estate development—have influenced why, where and how greenways have been created. Based on these findings, we argue that research on China's politics of urban sustainability necessarily needs to understand the country's land politics.