Changing Urban Renewal Policies in China

This book explores the concept of Careful Urban Renewal, a concept of urban renewal that originated in Berlin in the 1980s and that was proposed to Yangzhou, a Chinese city of the wealthy province of Jiangsu, in the early 2000s. It sets out to understand whether knowledge and ideas originating in a specific setting can be transferred to another locality thousands of miles away from the point of origin, and have the chance to change the policies and the practices of the destination city. The book shows that foreign ideas can inspire ambitious reforms of the policies of a single city, but that there also exist multiple challenges to policy learning and to the rooting of new ideas in local practices. To explore these challenges, this book develops an analysis of the micro-dynamics of policy transfer, showing that there exist multiple hierarchies to which a Chinese city can be subjected, intermittently opening or closing “windows for policy learning”.