The Politics and Poetics of Waiting: Residents' Waiting for (Not) Being Relocated in China's Urban Regeneration

What the paper says

Waiting as a socially constructed way of experiencing time has received increasing attention in various social science disciplines. Yet the nuances of the modalities and implications of waiting in different contexts among different social groups call for further research to scrutinise this particular temporal process. This paper examined how urban residents in Cangxiang Street Historic District, Anyang, a mid‐sized city in China, strategically deploy waiting as a form of resistance within the context of local government‐led urban regeneration. Grounded in the dual framework of the politics of waiting and the poetics of waiting, this paper shows how institutional conditions, particularly China's ban on forced evictions starting from 2011, have transformed waiting from a stigmatised tacit to an informal ‘right’, or more precisely, a ‘privilege’ unevenly enjoyed by the residents, due to the discrepancy between the central‐level policy and the local‐level implementation. While the institutional conditions limit residents’ options for resistance strategies, many residents reinterpret their waiting as an act of defiance and economic opportunity, leveraging heritage tourism to intentionally generate income and unintentionally reshape the urban landscape. Residents' creative adaptation while waiting demonstrates how waiting can be productive, future‐oriented and empowering. The paper thus argues that the production, transformation and experience of waiting in this case are co‐shaped by state and society, embodying a dialectical relationship between state power and subordinate agency. The findings underscore the intertwined nature of the politics and poetics of waiting. Bridging the two dimensions enables us to further investigate the complicated power relations within the social structure through the niche perspective of waiting.