State territorialization, social territoriality and cultural zone: the remaking of Nantou village in Shenzhen, China

Abstract

After being displayed during an exhibition, Shenzhen UABB2017, Nantou village has been the focus of public. Possessing the symbiont of valuable heritages and unregulated landscapes, the redeveloped Nantou village has been regarded as a good example of creative governance that not only preserved and revived the ‘ancient town’ aura but also remade an unloved urban village into a stylish cultural zone instead of wholesale demolition. However, behind this rhetoric was calculated project of state space production. In my study, I approach the dynamic remaking process of Nantou village by a means of state territorialization, treating state as multitudinous power processes among territory with calculation, drawing insights from territoriality in social scale. I focus on the production of state space by the technology of state territorialization in the forms of re-territorialization and de-territorialization to regulate population, activity and landscape and reconfigure power relations in society. Nevertheless, state reterritorializing process may contradict social groups’ original logic of territory—social territoriality. Reacting to state territorialization, various social group guided by different territoriality practice in different forms: counter-territorialization and pro-territorialization. In the story of Nantou village, state territorialization which reflects its economic and political sense of this deserving community, serves to measure and control Nantou village and consequently produces a new form of exclusion and inclusion of different social groups, resulting in the reconfiguration of power relations.