Urban Conservation in China: The reasons and conflicts of historical neighborhood preservation

Abstract

Historical neighborhood conservation plays an important part in the inner city redevelopment in China. The purpose of this thesis is to identify and understand the complexity of stakeholders' incentives and their responsibilities in historical neighborhood conservation in Chinese urban contexts by analysis two cases in Beijing and Shanghai. The two research questions are: 1) who are the stakeholders and what are their incentives in an urban conservation project? 2) What social, political, and economic factors affect decisions to preserve neighborhoods in Chinese cities? From the analysis, political implications are drawn that: 1) The governments should encourage and solicit original residents participation on a historical neighborhood conservation project. 2) The governments should introduce the private capital into the neighborhood conservation project