The Many Faces of China's Sponge City Initiative

Yitong ZhaoSam Trowsdale^*

• The University of Auckland School of Environment, Auckland, New Zealand

The Chinese Sponge City Initiative (SCI) seeks to reconcile the tension between urban development and environmental protection by prioritizing nature-based solutions to urban water management. As might be expected, the existing literature on the SCI is predominantly technical and engineering based. There is a dearth of writing on how this broad reaching green policy shapes people and place. This paper explores the SCI through hydrosocial and place-based lenses, revealing the importance of the local scale in this national policy. It is at the local scale that the conversation about the SCI enables contestation of infrastructure, economic and environmental values. The SCI is concerned with the environment, but at the same time is clearly being leveraged to support new business and a form of Chinese gentrification. This fosters a more exclusive and arguably atomised urban form without obvious gains for urban socio-natural assemblages beyond individual wealth generation. Attempts to seek new forms of environmental politics show promise, particularly cooperative governance. But there remains a narrowness in building collective relational futures, in part due to a lack of explicit consideration of the way that SCI speaks to histories, cultures and place. Ultimately, this paper is about Chinese cities and how the SCI serves to rework place. The analysis makes clear that the SCI is not simply a neutral and purely technical instrument of urban resilience, but rather a politically charged project whose outcomes are shaped by the contested politics of place. In doing so, the paper invites a more critical understanding of the SCI and, more broadly, of the everyday political dynamics underpinning sustainable urban policy.