Limits on growth: Governing urban futures in Beijing

This paper conceptualises limits on growth in Beijing, whose 2016–2035 master plan constructs a highly selective national capital for the central state by removing functions and populations deemed non-essential. Drawing on archival analysis of planning documents since 1949, extensive expert and ethnographic interviews, and multi-sited fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2023, it develops a Lefebvrian spatio-temporal framework with three relational dimensions for analysing urban future-making. Temporal entanglements show how a historically sedimented anti-metropolis disposition is reactivated amid contemporary state recentralisation. Performative governance examines how the diagnosis of ‘big city disease’ reframes demographic and functional pressures as urban pathology, legitimising relocation and greening as therapeutic intervention. Lived futurity reveals how officials, villagers and migrants negotiate these measures through procrastination, speculation and retreat. The article theorises limits on growth as an emergent mode of Chinese statecraft in which extra-economic priorities selectively guide the production of the urban future. Situating Beijing within a wider, politically heterogeneous turn that increasingly treats demographic and territorial growth as a crisis, it reconceives urban future-making as a politics of foreclosure: not only who profits from growth, but who is permitted to remain when growth is limited by design.