The Governance Transition And Spatial Planning Responding In Third-front City-From The Perspective Of Historical Institutionalism

To better understand urbanization and urban change,especially inner relationships between spatial phenomena and institutional factors,an urgent claim for planning historians has been reinforcing theoretical framing and more systematic comparative studies between cities,between countries and over time,which is also the primary task in Chinese planning history scholarship.Different from western context,China's reformation is a process seeking balance in terms of both local-central government and planned-market economy,changing from highly centralized socialism to a compromise towards decentralization.So planning history research in China shall provide a valuable model for major socialist countries or even other developing countries.There is one kind of Chinese modem cities called the Third-front city,built for war-preparing purpose in remote Midwestern areas from 1960s,making an ideal example for analyzing Chinese special process and characteristics of planning evolution with urban transition.This paper takes one typical of them,Shiyan in Hubei Province for empirical study.Our major question is,early establishment of Third-front city largely relied on compulsory power and strictly planned arrangement of central government,which seems not a sustainable mode.Yet such city mostly went through transformation and gained follow-up development.Why and how?With the perspective of historical institutionalism(HI),we assume there exists the interaction of institutional path dependence and endogenous incremental change.Thus we take Shiyan as an example,dividing the planning process of typical Third-front city into three stages according to several critical junctures:the stage of Socialist planned economy when central government took absolutely leading role(1960s to 1970s),the stage of early reformation when those Third-front factories functioned as a hub and conjuncture(1980s to late 1990s),and the stage of comprehensive transition since late 1990s when local government getting more and more active.For each stage,we mainly focus on how the adjustments of central-local government structure as core institutional framework effected the development outcomes of the city,and the way urban planning got involved.Shiyan's case is a proper manifestation of viewpoints by historical institutionalism,while at the same time reflecting shared features among Third-front cities or even many other cities in modern China.The initial institutional system dominated by central government had ensured rapid rise of Third-front cities in early stage,while producing path dependence in terms of single-department industry,multi-leveled property and finance structure,compulsory human resource input and so on,which had long-run influence in those cities' subsequent development.In face of transformation,on one hand,it wasChinese general orientation of modest reformation that provided enough buffer space for new institutions;On the other hand,in spite of path dependent factors in terms of industry pattern,finance structure,administrative power and so on,new local actors' struggle to seek incremental changes within the original institutional framework also generated transformative effects.Thus the paper is arranged by 6 chapters as follows:The first chapter puts up research backgrounds,purposes,related existing studies and research gap,then introduces the core theoretical perspective-historical institutionalism(HI)with our primary question and hypothesis.The second chapter focuses on theoretical reasoning and manages to provide a logical framework to interpret how governance transition and spatial evolution take place in Third-front city in pace with the change of central-local relationship.After that,we apply our theoretical mode to Shiyan for more clarified and specific analyze.The third to fifth chapter,each chapter corresponds to one of the 3 stages in Shiyan's actual transition,exploring both governance and spatial planning aspects,with a keen focus on those institutional path dependent factors and their outcomes on the changes of urban space.The conclusion chapter looks back to those main points we have made in theoretical logical mode and both the empirical deduction above,gives several critical finds with possibilities for further related study.The whole thesis contains about 54 000 words,35 pictures and charts.