Gentrification without displacement? A case study of heritage-led development in post-socialist China

Abstract Urban renewal and heritage preservation have triggered gentrification and social reshuffling in post-socialist China. Heritage-led gentrification is explained by heritage preservation, environmental improvement and social/cultural legacies that follow neighbourhood development. Grounded theory was used to examine five resettled communities in Hangzhou, China an industrial cluster occupied by giant provincial and municipal state-owned enterprises surrounded by villages in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, Gongchen Bridge in Hangzhou has transformed into a residential area by the Chinese Grand Canal, a UNESCO World Heritage site. This study contributes to the growing literature on urban transformation by providing an empirical account of how gentrification unfolds in a less internationalised Chinese city, and how it produces nuanced social-spatial changes among communities. The paper argues that gentrification in this context is less about physical displacement and more about the transformation of identities and urban citizenship, mediated through institutional legacies and social changes.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Landscape Research

• Publication date

  2025-08-20

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/01426397.2025.2530731
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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