Incremental urbanism: Experimenting with land development and statecraft in Lhasa,Tibet

Abstract

The theoretical agendas of comparative urbanism and Southern urban critique encourage scholars to attend to the locatedness of concepts and theories, to stress-test their applicability across various contexts and on this basis to generate new ones or revise existing ones. Methodologically, to unlock the potentiality of theorisation, it is conducive to view urban processes as conjunctural configurations codetermined by diverse forces, as well as interconnections and contextualities across scales. This article presents a case study of Tibet Cultural Tourism and Creative Park in Lhasa, Tibetan Autonomous Region, revealing how the development of the Park follows principles of incrementalism and experimentation, and prioritises small-scale accretion of urban spaces, policy innovations and a complex mixture of economic and non-economic governance goals. As such, this article engages with and enriches the concept of incremental urbanism, which has been developed with reference to numerous Southern contexts. While so far, the concept has been applied mostly to vernacular practices and knowledge of individuals navigating the uncertainty of urban life, this study implies that the experimental, improvised, provisional and emergent aspects of urban changes are also pertinent to theorisations on urban statecraft and governance. Overall, this concept enables us to retheorise municipal statecraft as: (1) flexible, responsive and adaptive; and (2) intertwined with a diversified portfolio of governance objectives beyond growth per se.