Parallel Paradoxes in Preserving New York City’s Community Gardens and Shenzhen’s Urban Villages
In a market-driven system of land transactions, community preservationists fight an uphill battle against real estate developers and sometimes governments. Yet with creative deployment of rules governing the use and disposition of special asset types, those who are weaker in power may not be the eventual loser.
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Urban transformations are about power. Demolitions and new constructions are the battlegrounds for public, private, and community actors. However, power dynamics are seldom constant. With every fight over the politics, legality, and public opinions of urban development, power is deconstructed and reconstructed. In the histories of cities, the strong and the weak often switch places during the process of city making.
New York City in the late 1960s saw the erosion of Robert Moses’ control, as the power of constructing public spaces was dispersed from the hands of a few actors to a broader spectrum of the society. The subsequent financial crisis littered New York City with abandoned buildings, unfinished constructions, and vacant lands. These blights then became opportunities for residents to make open spaces, as New Yorkers began to, often spontaneously, grow flowers, cultivate vegetables, and bring tables and chairs – creating what are known today as Community Gardens. Gradually, citizens became more organized and formed non-profit organizations to provide long-term management and maintenance of these community spaces.
However, for many Community Gardens built with such a bottom-up approach, property right issues often pose existential threats to their stability. At the end of the day, if the garden’s land is not formally recognized as municipal parkland, then the landowners and developers are entitled to make deals and bulldoze the garden for new construction. Even in cases where the land does belong to the government, if it is non-parkland owned by agencies other than the Parks Department, the City can also have the right, as well as the incentive at times, to turn the garden into other facilities such as affordable housing and other community facilities.[1]
Recognizing this tension between vertical development and public green space, New York’s legal system deliberately protects parkland, via parkland alienation procedures based on the public trust doctrine.[2] Essentially, the State’s General City Law makes the sale of parkland asymmetrically more difficult than acquiring or building a park. It is relatively easy in New York to convert a non-park land parcel to parkland: with proper municipal land use and administrative approvals, the City can purchase a land from the private property owner at the market price and designate such land as parkland. However, if a parkland is to be converted to a different use, then, in addition to the municipal approval and market transactions mentioned above, the entire process, known as alienation, needs to be voted by the State legislature[3] – this process can be time-consuming, costly, and politically risky.
The perceived difficulty of parkland alienation reflects the value of parks and ensures the stability of public open spaces at the institutional level. Such protection is sometimes the last resort for preservationists fighting uphill battles. In New York, many neighborhood organizations have built enough capability over time to maintain and operate Community Gardens that are not formally recognized as parklands, and their operations are quite autonomous without any government intervention. But due to the pressure from private and public proponents of new construction, who often hold more financial and political powers in the development process, the otherwise self-sustaining neighborhood organizations might ask for Parks Department’s land acquisition, sacrificing their autonomy, in part or in whole, for the gardens’ permanent right to existence.[4]
In Chinese cities nowadays, there is a group of citizens facing conceptually similar predicament. They are low-income Chinese residents living in the enclaves of informal urban developments. As the epitome of China’s rapid urbanization, these residential quarters are dense and low-cost, many of which grew from historic villages that are now surrounded by modern towers.
In Shenzhen, these enclaves, known as “Urban Villages”, have been facing enormous government-sponsored or market-driven pressures for demolition and redevelopment, and their residents try everything they can to resist displacement. Prior to redevelopment, urban Village residents have often managed to operate their own community affairs and provide some level of public services – just as community groups in New York self-maintain their beloved Community Gardens. But when sweeping urban renewal plans roll out, the residents’ efforts to preserve the settlement are often countered by the developer’s astronomically stronger financial prowess and increasingly advanced negotiation tactics, as well as the government’s motivation and determination for urban renewal.
More importantly, just like New Yorkers trying to protect Community Gardens, residents in China’s Urban Villages do not have the formal ownership of land for the properties they are trying to preserve.[5]
In New York, preservationists can adopt different tactics to protect properties that they do not own from pressures for new development. Some directly confronts pro-development forces by waging public relation wars,[6] hoping to garner enough community support to stall the transaction. But this approach requires extraordinary efforts and does not always work out, because market transactions of land are in most cases as-of-right, and developers who are economically empowered and legally permitted to acquire properties as-of-right are not bonded to public sentiments. Other preservationists take a different approach. Instead of making the situation an outright war between people or parties, they seek legal protection of the land itself by advocating for the Parks Department’s acquisition. The latter method helps the underdog because, while the law treats transacting parties equally, it treats lands differently – the public trust doctrine means that once a garden becomes parkland, the parkland enjoys a special status and is therefore legally harder to sell. In this way, changing land use designation and applying park alienation laws can restructure the power dynamics of land transaction and open space preservation.
In China, some residents of Urban Villages also seek an upper hand in the tug-of-war against pro-development forces by redefining the nature of contested properties instead of waging direct wars against the other party.
Traditionally, what makes headlines about China’s urban renewal is the tenacity of tenants who refuse to leave and the perseverance of developers who do not go away, although eventually, in most cases, the developer and the last remaining tenant strike a deal to allow the project to go forward – Urban Villages are then torn down for new development. Money and power prevail.
In Shenzhen’s Hubei Village, preservationists broke this pattern by changing the legal status of pre-existing properties, specifically through Historic Preservation laws. Located in the center of the old city, Hubei Village was one of the most high-profile sites once planned for a complete overhaul and redevelopment. However, its historic architecture, urban fabric, and community customs gained attention among academia and prompted one of the very first societal debates in China on “whether or not Urban Villages can be considered as landmarks and cultural assets.”[7]
When landmark designation applies to Urban Villages, usually as the result of residents and allies’ lobbying, the confrontation between developers and preservationists will no longer be about their own fundamental strengths or endurance. Instead, it will be about the law and society’s attitudes toward cultural assets. Villagers cannot outcompete developers financially (or politically), but if Urban Villages are deemed to have significant cultural and architectural value, then the traditional settlements can enjoy a new legal status that shields them away from bulldozers. In this way, more and more often, the power dynamics in Chinese urban renewals can be restructured by the evolving academic, societal, and legal discourse on landmarks and historic preservation.
As much as urban development is about consensus building and interest alignment, it sometimes is inevitably a zero-sum game with winners and losers.
The problems facing New York’s Community Gardens and Shenzhen’s Urban Villages are different but comparable, and to a certain degree, universal: In a market-driven system of land transactions, community preservationists fight an uphill battle against real estate developers or even governments. For preservationists who lack power, seeking to redefine the assets that they try to protect and leveraging the societal institution’s special protection of certain asset types are the more creative and effective method to win the game. This is how, with creative deployment of rules such as parkland alienation procedures and historic landmark designations, the weaker may not necessarily be the eventual loser.
Admittedly, American cities and Chinese cities cannot be more different from each other in terms of politics, social norms, and spatial patterns. Nonetheless, the conflicts between preservation and development are similar, as new projects constantly inflict painful collisions between different values, interests, and life experiences. And often, across different cultures, the power dynamics of urban conflicts can be creatively reshaped, not in the sense that the weaker party can suddenly gain economic or political prowess, but as a result of seeking to apply and leverage rules governing the use and disposition of special asset types.
However, it is worth noting that the legal and normative bases of protecting certain types of assets are the very results of passionate confrontations between different interest groups during the course of human history. Why do we protect parks? Why do we value landmarks? In New York, case by case, ruling by ruling, the many plaintiffs, defendants, and judges since the 1800s have shaped today’s park alienation procedures; in Shenzhen, Hubei Village’s norm-shackling experience, which is less than 10 years old, is forging the society’s new conception and expectation of the many urban renewal projects that has since been revealed and contested. The ethos of our institutions today treats most parties equally but treats different assets differently – that is both the factor that shapes different parties’ power dynamics in urban development and the product of real struggles, politics, and wars that were fought by their predecessors.
[1] For more discussion of the conflict between government and citizens over the right to urban space in the form of Community Gardens, with cases from Lower East Side, see: Schmelzkopf, Karen. “Incommensurability, land use, and regarding the right to space: Community gardens in New York City.” Urban Geography 23, no. 4 (2002): 323-343.
[2] See the New York State’s Handbook on the Alienation and Conversion of Municipal Parkland. https://parks.ny.gov/documents/publications/AlienationHandbook2017.pdf
[3] New York Office of the State Comptroller, in its audit of park alienation, lays out the steps involved in the process and responses by local government officials. See: https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/local-government/audits/2017-11/lgsa-audit-swr-2015-Parkland-global.pdf
[4] For example, gardeners of Maple Street Community Garden in Brooklyn were supportive of, and vocally advocated for, the Parks Department’s acquisition of the land in order to achieve greater long-term stability. See: https://maplestreetcommunitygarden.org/news/2017/6/22/gardeners-voice-support-at-city-planning-commission-hearing
[5] Property rights in Urban Villages are a gray area due to the unique history of China’s land governance and urbanization. In China, urban lands are owned by the State, while rural lands are owned by the collective. Before Urban Villages are urbanized and absorbed into the municipality, they had been rural settlements where residents, with the consent of the village community leadership, were entitled to build on their own lands without the State’s administration and approval. Upon urbanization, technically speaking, Urban Village lands were nationalized to be State-owned. However, the sheer speed of urbanization and development in Shenzhen left a vacuum of land management and enforcement. Owners and developers kept some of the old structures in Urban Villages and seized the opportunity to construct even more high-density housing and retail spaces there without seeking approval from the municipality. Legally speaking, these properties in Urban Villages, as a mismatch between the village-era land rules and the urban-style development scales, were not recognized by the municipality. Hence they are considered as informal development with incomplete property rights. For more nuanced discussion on these developments, see: Paik, Wooyeal, and Kihyun Lee. “I Want To Be Expropriated!: the politics of xiaochanquanfang land development in suburban China.” Journal of Contemporary China 21, no. 74 (2012): 261-279.
[6] For an analysis of the extraordinary efforts by preservationists, see: Martinez, Miranda. “Attack of the butterfly spirits: The impact of movement framing by community garden preservation activists.” Social Movement Studies 8, no. 4 (2009): 323-339.
[7] For an analysis of Hubei Village’s urban renewal debate with a focus on cultural heritage, see: Mao, Ning, and Beibei Gu. “Study of the protection and renewal of urban villages in emerging cities: the example of Hubei Ancient Village in Shenzhen.” Journal of Architectural Conservation 26, no. 1 (2020): 22-41.