Institutional Change Of Self-organization In Residential Area Regeneration

In 2012, China's labour population growth approached an inflection point, indicating that the traditional economic growth model – demographic dividend development model – which relies on labour contribution was facing a transition on the one hand, and in need of exploring growth potential from other factors besides labour on the other hand. In the critical period of economic transition, the Chinese government proposed that reformation is the biggest dividend. There has been intensive discussion on how to release reformation dividend through institutional innovation, which has tended to conclude that institutional innovation is the only way to avoid ‘the middle-income trap', to grasp the reformation ‘time window', and to benefit the general public.Under this background, growth in urban areas is also likely to weaken, which suggests that the focus of future research on urban planning should be ‘developed regional planning' instead of ‘expanding planning' which was the focus of past studies. In China, the developed residential area are to face a period of large scale regeneration. A key issue in this process is be how to maximise institutional advantages to deal with problems of economic, social, culture and other aspects. This issue is of great significance in activating economic subjects and promoting the sustainable development of urban regeneration.This thesis examines a total of seven programmes of developed communities' regeneration and governance as case studies, and adopts research methods such as ‘Case Development' and ‘Sequential Interviews'. Theories and approaches of new institutional economics are undertaken as the research analysis tools in this thesis, which tries to form a frame of communities' regeneration through the analysis the precondition, inducement and guarantee mechanisms of institutional changes in its progress. This frame could then be used to provide analysis evidence and theoretical methods and explain possible problems occurred in the progress of institutional change. There are 8 chapters in this dissertation, which could be divided as following 4 parts:Part one is the analysis part. After the background introduction, the analysis was conducted in chapter 2 to investigate the major issues and their causes in China residential regeneration policy development. These issues include the negotiation dilemmas caused by lack of mutual benefit social democracy, common property right and property right illegibility led by the disregarding of membership right as well as the disorder regeneration institution which leads to a serious internal friction. Finally, the cause of these problems – institutional dilemma – was thoroughly analysed.Theoretic construction was framed in the second part of this dissertation. A historical review of the regeneration progress revealed that the regeneration institution development direction is the self-organization evolving, in which process the role of government was changed from ‘management' to ‘service'. Secondly, ‘institutional design', as an object of regeneration policy research, was expounded. Through the institutional logical analysis at the national, local bureaucracy and resident level, it was confirmed that institution is the critical factor affecting the residential regeneration progress. On this basis, aiming to achieve the harmonious development of urban space, the comprehensive connotation of the regeneration process was expounded for setting the exactly object in its economics, society, humanity and others relative aspects. At last, the new institutional economics and relatives theories were introduced as an institutional methodology introduction.The importance of promises and intendance, was explained for forming the mutual benefit of social culture in chapter 4. Meanwhile, ‘the three steps' process of building residential common activities culture was identified. To promote continuing and self-organised institutional transformation of the developed residential, the key connotation of this process, ‘game' and ‘reconstruction', was expatiated in chapter 5. Also, the conditions underlying the function of collaboration-game economical institution were expounded in this chapter. Attempting to explain how to organize and negotiate throughout the building process of self-organized multi-center institutions, social culture, economic system and political operation rules were picked as three important aspects during the theoretic inference in chapter 6. In these three aspects, a comprehensive point of view, root-cause of residential common activities' dilemmas was deeply analyzed using relative theories. Further, the analysis results were was applied to decrease the internal transaction cost, to promote the cooperative game and to fulfill relative economic subjects' requirements by adjusting systemic parameters.In the fourth part, an analytical framework was established for institutional design. Theoretic inference results were presented in chapter 7 to come up with three analytical frameworks considered to be able to solve the residential common activities' dilemmas. First, the creditable promise and the mutual supervision play crucial societal and cultural roles in advancing residents' cooperation. Second, the election and transition of developed residential institution is influenced simultaneously by a series of factors. Third, the multi-center mode could help each economic subject make full use of their advantages.There are three creative points in this dissertation:(1) Applying the new institutional economics theoretical tools when studying developed residential communities' common activities;(2) Searching for the root cause of the dilemmas in China's developed residential regeneration process; and(3) Establishing an analytical framework of self-organization in residential area regeneration. The results could greatly develop China's self-organization regeneration progress. Meanwhile, conclusions based on this thesis could be of use to other studies which adopts similar dilemmas analysis.