Negotiating urban sustainability on the ground: China’s greenway development as land politics

Since 2010, China has experienced a state-driven boom in greenway development. This chapter traces the roots of greenway as a popular landscape intervention in China to the ways the country’s land has been governed and used. In the first part of the chapter, an environmentally minded re-reading of the history of post-reform China’s spatial planning, land management and urban expansion reveals regulatory deficits and strategic disobedience which have left green space around and even within Chinese cities vulnerable to encroachment. In the second part, a case study of the Pearl River Delta’s greenway initiative suggests that support for greenway as a remedy for green space shortage is linked to the compatibility of greenway development with municipal governments’ land quota constraint and real estate developers’ interest in profiting through green amenities. Overall, the greenway boom illustrates the necessity of investigating China’s politics of urban sustainability with due attention to its land politics.