Abstract: Grid-based community workers serve as street-level bureaucrats within community spaces. By revealing how the spatial characteristics of communities influence the behavioral logic of grid members and the modernization of governance, this study contributes new research perspectives and empirical frameworks to the study of street-level bureaucrats and governance modernization. Compared with rural community spaces, urban community spaces are characterized by ambiguity, boundary formation, privacy, and embeddedness. These spatial features prevent grid-based community workers—who share the role of street-level bureaucrats—from adopting a one-dimensional bureaucratic logic, that is, “deceiving superiors and concealing from subordinates”. Instead, their behavior manifests as a dual strategy of “deluding superiors while respecting subordinates”. Simultaneously, the irregularities of urban community spaces render grid-based management, often framed as a path to technological governance modernization, prone to asynchronous dilemmas in technological governance, thus a failure in community governance. Therefore, tone-dimensional technological governance modernization approaches should be adopted with prudence. Furthermore, the intrinsic reflexivity within the characteristics of community spaces determines why community governance fails. To achieve effective governance, it is essential to strengthen foundational governance capabilities, particularly those related to mass work (community engagement), as this will facilitate the advancement of community governance modernization.

Key words: community governance, grid-based community workers, community space, technocratic governance, behavioral logic