Paradoxical Postsecularity in the Making: A Methodological Experiment in the Study of China’s Temple-Centered Urban Redevelopment

The incorporation of Buddhist temples into urban redevelopment within China’s market transition became phenomenal after the 2000s. Domestic and international real estate developers collaborated with local governments and state-owned-enterprises in the construction of commercial complexes by converting under-used spaces around renowned Buddhist temples. Among these scattered projects of temple-centered redevelopment across China, this article identifies two during which the Hong Kong-based developer, Swire Properties, consecutively built open, low-density shopping centres in Chengdu and Xi’an around the Daci temple and Jianfu temple respectively since 2010. Named as the “Taikoo Li”, these two projects attest to unique logics of planning and operation, while nurturing discursive, cultural, and material practices, religious as well as non-religious, in people’s everyday life. Drawing upon an extensive ethnographic study in urban contemporary China, this article bridges a dialogue with postsecularist debates in Euro-American contexts, and proposes a methodological experiment that reinvents "postsecularity" as plural, contextual, and subjective.