The “City Operator” and the Tianyi Square Redevelopment Project

After describing today’s Tianyi Square, this chapter looks at the dilapidated conditions of this area before the redevelopment. Then it depicts the nation-wide fever of building Central Business Districts in Chinese cities since the late 1990s as the background. Afterward it analyzes the mechanism of the “city operator” (chengshi yunyingshang) in the Tianyi Square redevelopment project, which describes the role played by an entrepreneurial state and its subordinate urban development corporation in downtown redevelopment in Ningbo, as well as the origin of this mechanism back in the city of Dalian in the 1990s. It also analyzes the methods of compensating relocated residents, financing with land mortgage loans, historic conservation, promotion, and governance structure in the Tianyi Square project.