Rural idyll in a global creative city: gentrification, cultural governance and creative placemaking

This paper examines the on-the-ground process of creative city making in the Global South. It highlights the role of the state in the development of creative cities in the Chinese context, with a specific focus on how the state has instrumentalized arts and culture in remaking old villages into creative space. Through a case study of a state-led development project of an artist village in Shenzhen, it is revealed that the local government has devised a myriad of localized practices and strategies to realize the project of creating a print art cluster in a rambling peri-urban environment. State-led rural gentrification is co-opted to generate an idyllic rural landscape replete with heritage houses to attract artists to settle, while cultural governance is implemented to redefine rural aesthetics and discipline creative production and artist practices in the village. Our study unravels that cultural production and placemaking are significantly shaped by a dominant state in highly contingent ways and may lead to contingent outcomes. While state-led culture-oriented gentrification is often deployed to attract investment and develop real estate, it also functions as a creative placemaking strategy to develop public cultural projects, civilize the public, and rebrand the city as a global creative hub.