The Politics of Changing Waterscapes in Wuhan

Abstract

The urban imagination of water has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. Once associated with poverty, danger and disease, it is now perceived as lucrative, liveable and luxurious. Using Hou Lake, Chuhehanjie, Sha Lake and Dong Lake shorelines as the primary empirical cases, this study uncovers the social-technological, historical, juridical and institutional dimensions of urban water that has shaped Wuhan’s urban development over time, with a particular focus on Wuhan’s most recent urban transition towards sustainability in the past three decades. It reveals that the expansive urban development carried out in an era of political unrest transformed a water-dominated natural floodplain into an incomplete techno-ecological compound; technological innovations in environmental governance have brought subsurface flows back to light and created new economic opportunities for urban development; foreshore area spatial reallocations exposed the juridical and institutional loopholes in watershed management and opened up new spaces for discussion of social justice and cultural identity. In this process, opposing concepts, such as rural and urban, natural and artificial, autocracy and democracy, have been reworked by the emerging knowledge in the professionalised planning sector as well as negotiations between economic growth and the needs of various special interest-oriented groups, including residents, artists, university students, etc. This study also shows that abstractions related to history, culture and identity were introduced naturally to the spatial production of the post-2000 urban waterscapes in Wuhan. Narratives about water were romanticised in the drawings of designers and planners, disseminated through political and commercial propaganda, and intensified in a hedonistic style of living. They became, at times, an accomplice that deepened community division and heightened social injustice in the face of irresistible capital power.