From dilemma to balance: Urban conservation and (re)development in the mainland of China

Conserving urban heritage is a part of one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 11.4). Balancing urban conservation and development has been researched from the perspectives of architectural design and urban planning, but this thesis addresses a gap in knowledge by investigating the institutional factors promoting and constraining the shift from dilemmas to balance within the field of urban conservation and (re)development.
The main goal of this research is to provide theoretical understanding and practical suggestions for balancing urban conservation and development in rapidly urbanizing and modernizing countries.
The contributions of this thesis are the following. (1) It contributes to the debates on conceptualizing urban heritage and urban conservation with clear concepts of urban heritage and summarizes the governance modes in urban heritage management by conducting a systematic literature review. (2) It collates the trajectory of policy evolution concerning urban conservation over a century, based on which, the heritage conservation policy layering is summarized as drift, stagnation, hysteresis, and adjustment connected with conversions. The transformation of the urban conservation and (re)development relationship from friction or dilemma to balance is also explained, for two reasons: urban conservation is lagging behind urban development, and there is a gap between policy making and implementation capacity. (3) It summarizes current cultural heritage governance patterns with policy analysis. (4) It combines the theories of social movements and of governance with the conceptual framework of community initiative and government response interactions and enriches community-initiated urban conservation studies by exploring the sequence and configuration of mediating and conditioning factors. (5) It provides the systematic literature review dataset and policy database for future research.