Grid Governance in China under the COVID-19 Outbreak: Changing Neighborhood Governance

Housing commodification seems to suggest that a process of a state is embracing private governance. However, private governance in Chinese neighborhoods is a two-way trajectory. This paper examined two types of housing neighborhoods, namely, a work-unit housing neighborhood and gated commodity housing to understand the changes in neighborhood governance. It is interesting to observe that during the Covid-19 epidemic period, the state government enhanced its presence and public trust in neighborhood governance by changing the former ways of self-governance. As a strategy for the state to return to local governance, the grid governance is the reconfiguration of administrative resources at a neighborhood level and professionalizes neighborhood organizations to ensure the capacities of the state to solve social crises and neighborhood governance. The potential side effects of changing neighborhood governance are that while the implementation of grid governance has improved internal connections among residents, the empowered neighborhood governments acting as the “state agent on the ground” leads to an estrangement between residents and private governance. The underdevelopment of neighborhood autonomy is not only due to the restriction of state government, but more importantly, the reciprocal relationship of state-led neighborhood governance in the context of housing privatization development in China.

Place Branding and Its Discontents: The Politics and Management of Neighborhood Governance Systems

Since the 1990s, urban planners in the United States have developed systems of neighborhood governance as a way to better involve citizens in decision making. Simultaneously, place branding emerged as an economic development strategy employed by local, municipal, and regional organizations. While often discussed as an elite-controlled game, little attention has been paid to the role of residents in branding their own communities. This study investigates the extent to which different neighborhood governance systems encourage neighborhood branding. Through qualitative analysis of thirty-five cities, this paper demonstrates that across systems, there is an ongoing tension between empowering residents and managing place branding.

Stakeholders’ Perspectives of Social Capital in Informing the Development of Neighborhood-Based Disaster Resilience Measurements

The cultivation of neighborhood-based social capital has gained significant attention in the disaster management sector in recent years as a means to increase community disaster resilience. However, within the sector, the concept of social capital remains unclear and its measurement is limited at the neighborhood level due to a focus on predominately top-down and quantitative approaches. By using a qualitative, inductive-driven approach, this paper proposes an integrated social capital measurement framework that combines qualitative and quantitative measures for evaluating levels of social capital in neighborhoods. Nine focus groups consisting of 58 participants across a range of socioeconomically and ethnically diverse urban neighborhoods in New Zealand and the United States were conducted. Three key themes were identified that relate to the formation, activation, and benefits of social capital resources: community demography, cultural influences on social support, and neighborhood governance. By synthesizing the study’s results and existing literature, this paper proposes a measurement framework that incorporates both quantitative indicators and contextual questions across six structural and four cognitive social capital domains. The framework can serve as a starting point for neighborhood stakeholders, emergency management practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to assess the resilience of neighborhoods and identify areas for improvement.

Governing the Neighborhood with Confucian Ideas

Attributes of communities have long been considered a major influence on people’s self-organized governing behavior (Ostrom 2005). Does Confucianism, a widely shared set of traditional ideas, inform Chinese homeowners in governing their neighborhoods? Based on in-depth interviews with 27 homeowner association (HOA) organizers from 16 neighborhoods in Beijing, we found evidence suggesting that their governing behaviors were informed by traditional Confucian conceptual distinctions and normative expectations: Stringent expectations were found on HOA organizers to serve with purely “public” motives and renounce “private” ones; neighborhood management, meanwhile, was not merely considered as a means for improving living conditions, but a patriotic act of serving the country. Arguably, these meanings corresponded to the Confucian ideal of junzi and its guide to moral cultivation. They helped sustain homeowners’ participation and promote a social norm that maintained accountability for their behaviors. The findings suggest further research on neighborhood governance, and contribute to the reforming governance of contemporary China.

Deliberation and governance in Chinese middle-class neighborhoods

This paper examines the mechanisms of deliberation and conflict resolution in Chinese urban middle-class residential communities. Along with the rise of private home ownership and urban middle-class residential estates, disputes and conflicts have risen between the residents, resident self-elected organization (homeowner associations), real estate developer and property management companies, and the local government. Through the lens of deliberation in middle-class neighborhoods, this paper analyzes (1) how and to what extent deliberation is introduced and employed as an instrumental tool by the local government to achieve their goal of maintaining social stability. (2) In what ways and to what extent deliberation has served as part of governance strategies. And (3) whether and how the state and non-state actors interact with each other during this process to produce more democratic governance under the Party-state's authoritarian rule. This paper adopts a systemic approach to examine authoritarian deliberation as a neighborhood governance strategy. The findings suggest that (1) deliberation has become an instrumental tool for conflict resolution introduced by the local government to middle-class neighborhoods. Residents’ Committees, on behalf of the state, has become key coordinator and mediator during the deliberation process. (2) The systemic approach of authoritarian deliberation includes a mix of deliberative elements and other features of political culture, traditions, strategies, and institutions. The dynamic interactions between deliberation and authoritarianism, between deliberative and non-deliberative features, and between formal deliberative meetings and informal deliberative talks all contribute to a functional deliberative system.