Given the increasing scarcity of urban land, the Chinese government has been initiating large-scale redevelopment of urban villages that are commonly regarded problematic for their low land use efficiencies and negative externalities. During this process, the emerging neo-urbanism in China demonstrates the heterogeneity of institutional arrangements, with different levels of transaction costs incurred. To explore the transaction costs incurred in different institutional arrangements of urban village redevelopment projects, this study anatomizes three projects in Guangzhou from the perspective of neo-institutional economics. The project duration and level of conflict are taken as two key variables to evaluate the efficiency and equality of the projects. With this research design, this study illustrates that institutional arrangements significantly affect the project outcomes. The conclusion suggests that the local and central governments alter the existing institutions with a view to lowering the transaction costs.

Project duration is one of the methods to measure the efficiency of project implementation. This study identifies the factors influencing the project duration of urban village redevelopment projects (UVRPs) in China. Based on the theory of new institutional economics and behavioral economics, this study develops three hypotheses regarding the causal relationship between institutional arrangement and project duration. Statistical analysis of data on 439 UVRPs collected from seven Chinese cities revealed that projects implemented through top-down institutional arrangements were more likely to take a long time than those implemented through bottom-up institutional arrangements. Projects implemented through top-down and government funding were more efficient than those implemented through top-down and villager funding. For bottom-up projects, there was no conclusion about whether village funding or private developer funding led to shorter project duration. Other determinants, including city, project attributes and initiation year, number of households involved, size of temporary relocation fee, and methods of selecting relocated housing, calculating temporary relocation fee and calculating relocation area influenced project duration.