How Does Culture Become an Asset? Property Rights Design and Internalised Governance on China's Urban Peripheries

Research on culture-led urban change in China has shifted from inner-city flagships to peripheral zones where formal planning meets managed informality. Yet two blind spots persist: artists are still cast as long-term tenants, and land is analysed largely at the macro scale of municipal supply and branding. This paper examines the Blue Roof Art District on Chengdu’s south-eastern fringe to show how selective studio ownership on collective land constituted the assetisation of artistic production and reorganised suburban governance. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews and policy/registration materials, we reconstruct the move from precarious rental sheds to a property-rights regime that bound producers to land value. We conceptualise assetisation as a meso-level governance technology: rights are engineered (enclosure, qualification, use, transfer, collateral) so that coordination is internalised to owners and operators, while the state shifts to rule-setting and boundary maintenance. The outcome is a trade-off between stability and enclave: production security increases as public interfaces narrow. We argue that attending to rights design bridges macro land regimes and micro practice, and clarifies how asset-based governance shapes the politics of urban peripheries.