Land Readjustment - The Public-Private Partnership Experiment In Urban Renewal In China

Urban problems are becoming too serious to leave solely in the hand of government authorities but have necessitated drawing the wisdom and resources of all parties involved in contemporary urban predicaments. Under the state-ownership system of urban land in China, there are no forces to change the conventional model of urban renewal initiated only by the public sector, in which the individual property owners are almost out of the picture of decision making and renewal process. However, in some rare occasions, the developer may adopt a public-private partnership structure in the process by incorporating the individual property owners into their entity. This, in the context of rural land renewal in the urban fringe area where the property ownership structure is mixed up, has been known as the Land Readjustment model. The paper is to review the historical evolution of the Land Readjustment concept, explore the rationale behind which public authority chooses to adopt this model in the process of urban renewal and to highlight the generic promise and drawbacks of this publicñprivate partnership. The two cases in Shenzhen, the special economy zone in south China, are introduced to shed some lights on how this public-private partnership works in reality.