The Hybrid Spatialities of Post-Industrial Beijing: Communism, Neoliberalism, and Brownfield Redevelopment

While the redevelopment of urban brownfield sites in China has received much attention, the role of political ideology in this process is usually downplayed or sidelined to a set of stylized assumptions. This paper invites giving a greater analytical focus to the evolving and nonorthodox nature of China's politico-ideological model as a factor shaping urban change and redevelopment. The paper provides an analytical framework integrating multi-level and evolutionary perspectives while exploring the experiences of the formation and post-industrial redevelopment of brownfield sites in Beijing. The analysis demonstrates that neoliberal economic policies and the communist political doctrine are co-constitutive in the production of China's post-industrial urban space. This produces a sense of spatial hybridity that combines and co-embeds what may be assumed to be mutually exclusive.