Scalar politics of urban sustainability: Governing the Chinese city in the era of ecological civilisation

Studies of urban politics have acknowledged the rescaling of state environmental regulation as a source of pressure for local growth regimes to balance their economic and environmental objectives. However, few inquiries have afforded equal attention to how these local regimes strategise their multi‐scalar context to manage urban economy–environment tensions. Informed by the cultural political economy approach to social transformation, this paper interprets urban sustainability fixes as a strategic combination of structural, discursive, technological, and agential selectivities in the scaling of urban development projects. Given their nodal position in urban governance, some actors are able to advance urban projects with conflicting environmental implications by linking them to different scalar hierarchies, each structurally prioritising different interests. These discourses are subsequently inscribed into material relations through various political technologies. This form of scalar politics is notable in the Chinese city of Guiyang, where local leaders sought to reap the policy benefits offered to cities supporting the national vision of ecological civilisation without slowing down local development. Contemporary urban politics, as Guiyang illustrates, is a scalar politics animated by competing attempts in framing and regulating urban economy–environment relations through and across a mosaic of scales and scalar hierarchies.