Negotiating temporalities: History, heritage, and the politics of urban regeneration in Beijing

This article examines the politics of temporality in the regeneration of Beijing's historic core. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Dashilar in 2019, it analyses how competing temporalities mediate the framing, contestation, and eventual stagnation of regeneration. The article extends the concept of temporality to describe how actors relate to different periods of Chinese history and associated institutional, spatial, and symbolic legacies, treating some as more legitimate than others. Findings show that temporality mediates how actors understand and justify their interests. Socialist histories shape residents' understandings of housing entitlement, while imperial history informs what state actors recognise as heritage and authenticity. Actors mobilise imperial, socialist and post-reform times to legitimise their claims over the same urban space variously valued as heritage, housing, or commodity. State and market actors more often select and deploy particular histories strategically. For residents, temporality forms part of everyday experience and is inhabited rather than chosen. The article therefore treats temporality both as part of how interests become intelligible and as a resource in political contestation. The article contributes to debates on Chinese urban politics, urban regeneration, and critical heritage studies by developing a historically grounded framework of temporal negotiation among actors involved in urban transformation.