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Abstract
While local governments have been one of the major user groups of GIS, there is still little research on how GIS development in local government might be intertwined with urban governance, particularly in non-Western contexts. Drawing upon insights from GIS implementation, critical GIS, and governmentality studies, this article seeks to bridge this gap by examining the implications of Chinese urban government GIS practices amidst China's changing urban governance. Through an in-depth case study of Shenzhen, this article analyzes how urban GIS has been transformed from a practice involving internal organizational workflow automation, into a more active dimension of the governance of urban spaces—reflected in the expanding practice of “geo-coding” the urban landscape. “Geo-coding” here refers to a broadly defined spatial practice of carving and reconstructing a rational urban space. GIS practices have constituted a particular form of geographic rationality that seeks to govern at a distance while simultaneously regulating the urban environment, intersecting with the broader transformations of China's urban governance. These GIS developments have been largely government-centric rather than citizen-centric, yet they provide possibilities for new forms of spatial knowledge production for citizen participation in urban governance.
Notes
1 The notion of governmentality has several meanings (Dean, Citation1999). First, it can mark a particular form of modern governmental reasoning that takes as its object “the population” and is coincident with the emergence of political economy. Second, it implies a certain relationship of government to other forms of power, in particular sovereignty and discipline. Third, governmentality seeks to enframe the population within what might be called apparatuses of security. And fourth, it stresses the long process by which the juridical and administrative apparatuses of the state come to incorporate the disparate arenas of rule concerned with this government of the population. This is the process Foucault calls the “governmentalization of the state” (Dean, Citation1999, 18–20).
2 The work unit system (danwei) serves as the basic unit of urban social, economic, and political life in socialist China's cities, providing its members with housing, free medical care, and other welfare services (Bray, Citation2005, 3).
3 For example, the planning bureau has undertaken a live online discussion with the citizen on the Draft of Shenzhen Planning (2006–2010) in March 2006 (http://www.szplan.gov.cn/main/gzcy/wszbsl/200603240206346.shtml).