Abstract
The conflicts between massive urban reconstruction and cultural heritage conservation has been a challenging urban issue in China. A considerable number of cultural heritages was erased in the name of reconstruction, whereas cultural heritage has become a key indicator to measure the city’s cultural identity and competitiveness. The top-down epistemological shift from the Cultural Relics to Cultural Heritage, has evidently resulted in the inclusion of intangible cultural heritage and the encouragement of rational use of it (Bi et al., 2016). Yet a number of cultural heritages that is unlisted, but of wide social recognition in specific local context, were destroyed in the massive urban reconstruction. How to identify such local cultural heritage, bring in the appropriate mechanism, and conduct a win-win approach between reconstruction and preservation is a topic worth discussing. Shenzhen, as an epitome of China, has gone through extremely accelerated urban expansion in the last 4 decades. As the tiniest 1st-tier city in China, Shenzhen has already encountered the issue of land shortage. Urban reconstruction becomes an inevitable endeavor. In 2009, Shenzhen exercised her independent legislative power and passed a law entitled “Measures for Urban Renewal in Shenzhen”. Distinguished from the conventional government-dominant urban reconstruction, it fundamentally guaranteed a market-dominant basis, and received warm market recognition. From 2009 to 2019, Shenzhen Urban Renewal and Land Readiness Bureau has received over 800 urban renewal applications, of which 50% have undergone substantial reconstruction (One Urban Renewal, 2020). In according with the urban reconstruction campaign came with the disappearance of numerous ancient villages. This provoked a strong concern on the loss of urban history and memory, and arose intensive debates. At the center of it was the preservation of a village named Hubei. Hubei Village was first established in 1466 during Ming Dynasty and reconstructed in the 1900s. The entire village was constructed in a typical "three vertical and eight horizontal" Cantonese layout. As indigene of Shenzhen, the villagers were the first participants of Shenzhen Market, after which the city was named. In 2011, a state-owned developer, expertise in mixed-used projects, signed a contract with the local government to restart the Hubei urban renewal scheme. As soon as the Municipal Urban Renewal Bureau approved the scheme, a group of advocates assembled and argued that the unlisted Hubei village was so valuable that it should be fully preserved. However, such pursuits neither matched with villagers’ long eager for a better living environment, nor with the developer’s revenue chase at that time. A five-year debate began. This paper unravels the process of the debate and discuss the cognition of local cultural heritage, in particular the value formation process. It further analyzes the attitudes of five stakeholders participated in the debate, including the advocates, the developer, the district government, the municipal planning bureau and the culture bureau, and the municipal government. Ultimately, with considerable compromises of each stakeholder, Hubei Village explored a win-win approach to preserve the village through urban renewal, and paved the way for releasing city-wide local cultural heritage conservation policy. The emergence of local cultural heritage and the occurrence of such win-win approach between urban reconstruction and cultural heritage conservation, provokes a deeper epistemological change of cultural heritage as a social construct. It shed light on a cultural heritage revitalization approach in accordance with the ongoing urban (re)development process. Based on the review and analysis, the authors suggest future research agendas to explore how the revitalization process could play with the reconstruction process, and shape a renewed and sustaining urban cultural identity.
