Welcome to this ERC Starting Grant project:
Collaborative Planning in China: Authoritarian Institutions, New Media, Power Relations, and Public Spheres

Collaborative planning has recently emerged in China to address conflicts of interest in urban renewal and environmental management. Social media and online participatory platforms are influential platforms that provide opportunities for the interactions and communication between various actors. However, the egalitarian principles that ground collaborative planning theory call into question its validity in China. Therefore, this project examines collaborative planning practices in China and identifies the challenges to the assumptions of collaborative planning theory regarding institutions, power relations and public spheres. It will lead to a new understanding of collaborative planning in China, and a reconceptualization of the theory.

This project is led by Dr. Yanliu Lin, Associate Professor of Spatial Planning and Digitalization in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning. It is funded for five years (2021-2026) through a Starting Grant awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 947879).