Sustainable Development of Historic Cultural Districts: A Comparative Socio-Spatial Study of Guangzhou’s Three Historic Cultural Districts Through the Lens of Field, Capital, and Regionalization

This paper adopts field theory and the concept of regionalization in structuration theory as an integrated framework to conduct a diachronic socio-spatial comparative study on the origin and development of three historic cultural districts in Guangzhou: Enning Road, Shamian, and Xinhepu. Through diachronic analysis, the study identifies mechanisms of socio-spatial evolution in these districts, provides a comparative basis for research and policy on diversity, modern transformation, and sustainable renewal in China’s historic cultural districts, and proposes appropriate recommendations for further conservation and renewal. Finding shows that Enning Road represents an endogenous commercial field, Shamian an externally implanted colonial field, and Xinhepu a capital-driven elite field. Despite their different origins and social attributes, all three experienced capital rupture and spatial decline after 1949 and revived in the twenty-first century through different modes of capital conversion. The study further argues that spatial development is a spatialized strategy through which dominant capital competes for resources and maintains position. Conservation and renewal are essentially actors’ renegotiation of field rules and reconversion of capital forms under macro institutional rules. Sustainable development in historic cultural districts depends on interpreting and creatively transforming the dominant capital of the field and treating renewal as a spatial reproduction process of a multi-actor “social contract.”