Temporalité industrielle et recomposition des espaces urbains à Datong (Shanxi)

This paper analyses the spatial dimensions of an industrial temporality in Datong, a medium-sized city in Shanxi, nicknamed China’s “coal capital”. The city center was at the core of an ambitious plan of urban makeover around the theme of the “historical and cultural city”, put in motion between 2008 and 2013, which led to a large operation of demolition-reconstruction. The project was suddenly abandoned during a period of difficult political transition. In Datong’s mining district, the state-owned company Tongmei progressively absorbed numerous mining sites during the growth of the coal activity. In 2006, the miners, who used to live on the coal mine sites in precarious and uncomfortable self-built houses, were relocated in a new urban area, built and financed by Tongmei. But in 2013, the company’s activity suddenly slowed down in the context of the coal crisis. The places reflect the traces of this trajectory of decline. The mining area is now a restricted zone with remains of the residential ruins, where the last inhabitants wait for rehousing. In the city center and in the mining district, the urban space reveals a state of waiting, with no clear deadline. This research focuses on these two places in order to develop an ethnography of a reconversion in progress, by analyzing the political temporality of urban planning, the economic temporality of the coal transition and the social temporality of urban renewal operations, two massive projects but still non completed