Materials,Collective Memory And Identity In The Reproduction Of Space

Accelerating urbanisation in post-socialist China has endangered a lot of cultural heritages in cities.To prevent these legacies from being destroyed,the Chinese government pays greater attention to urban planning’s reformation,making historic-cultural protection part of urban renewal actions.Scholarship on urban renewal has shown much attention to the technical strategies,but the social impacts of remaking urban space from the top down have not received adequate attention.Therefore,this dissertation tries to discuss the process of urban renewal,which is one of the main issues in Chinese urban planning through qualitative methods.Fieldwork consists of six months of participant observation and about 38 semi-structured interviews,gathering field records of almost 350,000 words.Meanwhile,my empirical case focus on Shuidong Street which is labelled officially as a "Historic Cultural Street" in Huizhou,Guangdong Province.According to my fieldwork conducted from January 2021 to January 2022,the millennial participants who live in or near the research site have more vague memories of the past,while those people who grew up between the 1930s and 1970s feel more confident to recognise the spatial structure and stories of Shuidong Street.This younger generation accepts the role of "Huizhou People" with a great sense of community belonging as the elderly people do.However,they seem like "spectators" with a lower cultural identity of the local culture(compared with Chinese culture),showing little interest in the government’s behaviours of reshaping Shuidong Street.There are two research questions raised from these findings:first,how can participants’memory and identity be affected by the street renewal;second,to what extent do these social impacts influence the planning process of urban space.My core concepts to answer these questions include physical space,collective memory and identity,which are the three central terms for analysing the renewal planning process of Shuidong Street.Chapter two opens with the oral histories illustrated by the elderly participants.Chapters three and four mainly introduce the reconstruction of collective memory and the identity tension of millennials.Chapter five comprehensively discusses the interaction between physical space,collective memory,and identity;meanwhile,I use the "liminality" concept of passage rites to reveal the transitional characteristics of the planning process.In Chapter six,I summarise the main research argument and express my concern about the "nearby" in cities.Based on the example of Shuidong Street,I also reflect on the current public policies of urban renewal in contemporary China.Overall,I wish to spread the idea of appreciating ordinary people and their daily narratives compared with the master discourses,having their voices heard during Chinese urbanisation.The contributions of this research are to reposition the relationship between materials,location and the human body in social memory studies,highlighting the significance of analysing material artefacts in Sociological research.