The aesthetic politics of memory anchoring in urban redevelopment at Shibati, Chongqing, China

Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetic politics of the distribution of the sensible, this paper proposes the concept of the agency of memory and a framework of the economisation of memory politics through a tracking study of the whole urban redevelopment process of Shibati in Chongqing. They are not only a socio-cultural construct, but also an aesthetic-political pathway embedded in material interests and institutional arrangements. Memory and counter-memory can be either co-opted as a form of policing or serve as a pathway to politics. They have porous and fluid boundaries, the shifting of which is deeply constrained by the ‘transitional identity’ of political subjectivity. Hence, in Shibati’s urban redevelopment, the politicisation of memory that questioned the established order is converted into an economisation of memory for positional optimisation, and socially and culturally constructed memory evolves into a redistribution at the economic-cultural interface. Once endowed with economic value, memory and counter-memory are transformed into a form of capital that is calculable, tradable, and manipulable, which poses a significant challenge to memory justice. This study elucidates that the gradual mechanism of inclusion–co-optation, guided by the thread of memory and counter-memory, holds significant potential and promise for urban spatial governance in China.