Rethinking Collaborative Planning in China in the Digital Era

Collaborative planning has recently emerged in China to address increasingly complex problems, conflicts of interest, and challenges of sustainability in urban regeneration and environmental governance. While some scholars have suggested a "communicative turn" in Chinese planning, the applicability of collaborative planning theory—premised on democratic institutions, neutral power, and rational communication—remains contentious in an authoritarian context.

The CoChina project, funded by an ERC Starting Grant, critically examines these foundational assumptions, with a particular focus on how digital technologies and authoritarian deliberation reshape power relations and communication in collaborative planning in China. Digital platforms, such as social media, have facilitated new forms of state-society interactions and citizen engagement, challenging traditional power structures. This project employs a mixed-methods approach, integrating fieldwork observation, interviews, social media data analytics, social network analysis, and statistical techniques to analyze case studies across several Chinese cities. The cases include urban regeneration initiatives, community gardens, the river chief system, and environmental protection efforts. By examining the interplay between institutional design, digital platforms, and power dynamics, this research offers a nuanced understanding of collaborative planning in authoritarian settings. In this talk, Yanliu Lin will present the theoretical and methodological framework of the CoChina project, share key empirical findings, and propose a reconceptualization of collaborative planning in China in the digital era.