Fandong Wei

I was born at the turn of the century in a small town in northern Jiangsu, spending my youth immersed in what is now often described as "Chinese-dreamcore". My family's residential history, which includes moving from a rural brick house to urban periphery settlements and eventually city centre high-rise apartments, reflects the rapid transformation of urban China. The life experience itself sparked my fascination with the space, place and everyday urban life.

During my BA in Urban Management at Suzhou City University, I began engaging in some sort of professional activities as members of creative agency LOOKURATING STUDIO. Amid the “unconventional” by the pandemic and "conventional" between each lockdown. In partnership with government, business, and local community, we delivered diverse curation projects including public exhibitions, participatory events, independent publications, and multimedia content. We play in the city and crafting stories for every player in the city.

Following an MSc in Sustainable Cities (Distinction) from the University of Leeds, I joined the University of Sheffield’s School of Geography and Planning in 2025. Supported by ESRC WRDTP Pathway Scholarship, my doctoral research, investigates Community-Making Initiatives (CMIs) as hybrid sites where society, government and the market negotiate each other, between monumental state and everyday lifeworld.

Weaving a New Normal: The Alternative Politics of Community-Making Initiatives in urban China

Over the last decade in urban China, Community-Making Initiatives (CMIs) have emerged as new forms of collective action dedicated to building and sustaining "communities of place". Whilst often rooted in a neighbourhood with a localised hub, they grow and action primarily through relational networks. This fluid scale redefines community members not merely as local residents, but as a diverse assemblage of citizens who work, socialise, or derive their urban identity from these locales.

Although typically initiated and organised by non-profit organisations (NPOs) or social enterprises, CMIs maintain a hybrid status by securing funding from and to varying degrees, collaborating with the government, market, and public sectors. Through their active engagement with the city's everyday life, they facilitate diverse processes and outcomes, ranging from community magazines and theatre festivals to the cultivation of local knowledge, spatial changes, and the integration of vulnerable groups.

My research proposes that these initiatives may offer a unique lens through which to examine the evolving relationship between the state and society in contemporary China. Crucially, they provide a non-Western, decolonial perspective on urban politics and governance achieved through collective action. By investigating CMIs as hybrid sites where political, social, and market intersection, I aim to uncover how these initiatives how these initiatives navigate hybridity and whether such processes generate new possibilities for interventions in urban China. To achieve this, I employ a mixed-methods qualitative approach centred on multi-sited ethnography in Shanghai and Chengdu.

Supervisors: Dr Jason Slade, Dr Madeleine Pill