This project offers the first critical history of Shenzhen, the pioneer of reform and urban development in China, from the perspective of its ever-changing water infrastructure and hydrosocial territories. Situated on the eastern side of the Pearl River Delta (PRD), one of the world’s most extensive and intricate estuaries, Shenzhen’s biophysical processes have been modified by a myriad of engineering interventions and political ambitions. Within the municipal boundary of Shenzhen, 169 government-managed reservoirs are interconnected by a complex network of 310 streams and rivers and 16,377 km of water pipelines. Collectively, they form a largely unknown yet critical element of the city’s urban framework that has been quietly sustaining and nourishing the socio-economic development and socio-ecological well-being of the city.

 

This project aims to contribute to scholarships on the phenomenal urban transition and expansion of Shenzhen by understanding Shenzhen’s urbanization as a hybridized socio-ecological process. It also aims to contribute to hydrosocial scholarship, particularly studies of hydropolitics in China, by foregrounding multilayered and contingent practices of territorial and environmental governance within the specific hydro-geographical and socio-political characteristics of Shenzhen. This project explores how Shenzhen’s hydrosocial territories have continuously evolved and been reinvented particularly in their historical, social, political and cultural contexts, which in turn have transformed the territory’s hydraulic grid, economic base structures, and political relationships.

 

“Entangled frontiers: The evolution of hydrosocial territories of Shenzhen” is supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Project No. HKU 17615023). Contents showcased on this website are completed within the RGC-funded project period (7.2023–12.2025).