Since 1978, urban redevelopment in China has resulted in large-scale neighbourhood demolition and forced residential relocation, which can severely disrupt established people-place interactions in the demolished neighbourhoods. Urban redevelopment in China has also been criticized by the public and scholars, because the position of the residents in decision-making processes of urban redevelopment is often marginalized. Conflicts have arisen between the residents, local governments and developers, against the backdrop of the uneven redistribution of capital accumulated via urban space reproduction such as the replacement of declining neighbourhoods in which low-income residents reside, with newly-build high-rise dwellings for middle- or high-income residents (Qian and He 2012, Weinstein and Ren 2009). The aim of the thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of the influence of urban redevelopment and its induced forced relocation on residents, by investigating their behavioural and emotional responses to the state-led urban redevelopment in Shenyang, a Chinese city. In particular, it highlights the agency of the affected residents, through exploring their interactions with other stakeholders and through displaying the ambivalence embedded in their neighbourhood experiences.The research firstly conceptualises forced relocation as a process and as a specific type of residential mobility that occurs in the context of urban restructuring. It suggests a conceptual model to show the sequence of events that households experience during urban redevelopment, by dividing forced relocation into three stages: the pre-demolition stage, the transitional stage and the post-relocation stage (chapter 2). This conceptual model helps to reduce the distraction caused by the accumulation of the dynamics of relocatees’ experience as the urban redevelopment proceeds over time, by capturing the sequence of the events that occur to relocatees during urban redevelopment. We used the model to structure the analysis of the literature review and subsequently identify the gaps in the literature that should be addressed in future forced relocation studies about China. We discovered that the experiences of relocatees from household and residential mobility perspectives reveal the dynamic, variable and complex nature of forced relocation, which makes forced relocation in urban China not necessarily equivalent to displacement.We particularly targeted at the residents who are undergoing the pre-demolition stage of state-led national scale Shantytown Redevelopment Projects (SRPs) in Shenyang, a city in Northeast China. Since 2008, the central government has initiated SRPs to improve the living conditions of low-income residents living in declining neighbourhoods. Between 2008 and 2012, about 12.6 million households in Chinanbsp;were involved in SRPs, and forced to move as their dwellings were demolished. These residents are stayed homeowners living in declining danwei communities and urban villages. They are among one of the most deprived social groups due to unemployment, low-income, serious illness etc., and cannot afford better dwellings. We found that (prospective) relocatees’ experiences at this stage are worthwhile to study. Their experiences and compensation choices at this stage can affect their follow-up housing experiences, since they need to make significant decisions with regard to the type and the amount of compensation (in-kind or monetary) that they can get from local governments and/or developers. However, current studies mainly target the relocatees who are already at the post-relocation stage to recall their pre-relocation experiences to evaluate the outcomes of forced relocation, which might lead to distorted retrospective accounts of their experiences and causes of their behavioural and emotional responses to the forced relocation (Goetz, 2013; Higgins and Stangor, 1998).This pre-relocation stage is also the most stressful and conflicting stage for the relocatees involved in urban redevelopment and forced relocation. It is the stage that includes land expropriation, compensation negotiations and forced movement, after intensive interactions between residents and other stakeholders. In chapter 3, we discuss a complex interplay between different stakeholders, by focusing the implementation of SRPs and the changing roles of different stakeholders. Conflicts arise between different stakeholders, featured by frictions between the central and local governments regarding the implementation of SRPs, the mismatch occurs between the scope of the SRP policy and residents’ attempts to improve their socioeconomic situation, and an entrepreneurial paradox in the relationship between local governments and developers. However, we also discovered that various stakeholders have consensus on the need for improving the living conditions in deprived neighbourhoods and on boosting the housing market. In particular, by displaying the consensus be
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