China’s recent urban expansion is examined from a national statistical perspective of officially designated cities and towns, an urban regional perspective concentrated on the Changjiang Delta, and from the perspective of prevalent city-level development practices.

Peter G. Rowe is the Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor.  Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 1985, he was Director of the School of Architecture at Rice University and served as Dean of the Faculty of Design at Harvard from 1992 to 2004.  Rowe has written on a wide range of topics concerned with architecture, urban design and city building.  The author, co-author or editor of thirteen books and numerous articles, his recent publications include: Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China, Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism for Modern China and East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City.

As China moves further into its present round of urbanization and modernization there has been much attention given to the sheer expansiveness of the enterprise by the general public and academic world alike.  Speculation on Chinese cities reaching unprecedented sizes and their continual growth parallels public anticipation of China’s rise as a superpower.¹ 

To be sure, a massive amount of urbanization has taken place in China, particularly over the last 25 years, and this trend seems likely to continue for at least another quarter of a century and beyond.  Further, property transactions often occur at the scale of vast tracts, with a corresponding influence on the grain and texture of city making.  So-called “megaprojects” are more the rule than the exception and high density is commonplace.  Everywhere, or so it seems in urbanizing China, a vastness of scale is to be found.  From a national statistical perspective of officially designated towns and cities, however, China today does not have an inordinately high number of very large cities when considered on a per capita basis or in comparison to international counterparts.  Moreover, none of China’s cities figure among the extreme megalopolises of the world.  Although the rate of transformation into urban circumstances is high, again on a normalized basis it is not without precedent elsewhere, except perhaps in longevity.  This all may change in the future, but at present, the situation is not fully consistent with claims of overwhelming urban size or expansion. 

By contrast, from a different perspective within less well-documented parts of China’s rapidly urbanizing coastal and other regions, the dimensions of urban development are indeed extraordinary.  This is particularly apparent among peripheral developments and the quickly evolving urban conurbations that have engulfed or are beginning to engulf already well-established cities and towns.  Also, this is where China is perhaps struggling most, urbanistically, with wasteful large-tract developments, a lack of sufficient planning capacity, and under-regulated environmental circumstances.  Further down in urban scale at the level of specific cities, China appears to have opted for a particular style of centrally-guided urban expansion that is ambitious in scale, diversified in use and targeted towards attracting outside investment, as well as relieving pressures on existing urban cores.  What follows is an account aimed at situating China’s recent urban physical development in a balanced perspective, with regard to historical and present global-scale urbanization patterns, and describing where pressing problems of urban scale and conformation seem to lie now.

National Urban Transformations

Since 1978 and the era of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and China’s opening up to the outside world, the national level of urbanization has risen dramatically.  Before that time, China’s urban progress was marked by a very low proportion of urban inhabitants in 1950, at around 12 percent of the total population, an irregular trajectory over the subsequent couple of decades, with a drop from about 20 percent of the population in 1960 to around 18 percent in 1970 during the turmoil and displacement of the Cultural Revolution.  Overall, the number of urban inhabitants increased by almost 460 million between 1950 and today, with a full 70 percent of this number occurring since 1980.  While in normalized terms, this post-1950 increase is less marked than that which occurred in the United States (which has about one quarter of China’s population) although, by many indications, China may be only about half-way through its current round of urbanization.  In fact, it is likely to add some 300 million more urban dwellers over the next 25 years, or as many as 500 million by mid century, for an urban proportion up from the present 40 percent to 60 or 70 percent of its total population.  This urbanization rate is amounting to around a 1 to 1.5 percent shift in population from non-urban to urban circumstances annually, which in absolute numbers is unprecedented.²

Today, urban settlements in China fall into six government-designated classes.  So-called “mega-cities” refer to urban areas with populations greater than two million people.  “Super large cities” have populations between one and two million people, “large cities” between 500,000 and one million, “medium-sized cities” between 200,000 and 500,000, and “small cities” house under 200,000 inhabitants.  To those city classifications are then added so-called “designated towns” with non-agricultural populations greater than 2,000 people and appropriate density and other related qualifications.  Since 1985 and 1986, when the urban designation of populations became relatively stable and conformed to reasonably common-place definitions of urban areas elsewhere, the number of cities expanded from 324 to around 656 today.  Seen from the perspective of city size, the number of “mega” and “super large” cities (i.e., cities with urban or non-agricultural populations over one million) rose from 17 in 1995 to around 50 in recent years.  This rate has accelerated since about 1996, with several cities over 10 million in population appearing around the turn of the century, perhaps most notably Shanghai and Beijing.  There was also some increase in the proportion of the number of cities within the “medium-sized city” classification, from around 28 percent to 34 percent, although the proportion of the number of “large cities” within the total remained relatively stable, despite some downward fluctuation between 1985 and 2002.  By contrast, the proportion of “small cities” declined, although still accounting for slightly over 50 percent of the total urban population in 2002 and by far the largest number of cities at 330.  Outside of this group, “designated towns” grew in proportion at a faster rate than city populations, at least since 1995.

Over the course of several decades, the distribution of cities and “designated towns” by size, in general, appears to have followed at least the outlines of national urban policy.  The National Conference on Urban Planning in 1980, for instance, emphasized controlled development of “large,” “super-large” and “mega” cities; favored rational development of “medium-sized” cities; and promoted vigorous growth of “small cities” and “designated towns.”  This stance was modified somewhat with the urban development policy of 1989, which in the wake of a proliferation of urban settlements in the lower-sized categories, renewed the call for strict control of the larger-city categories, but extended rational development over “medium” and “small-sized” cities, as well as over “designated towns.”  In 2001, with the unfolding of the Tenth Five-Year Plan, larger cities were finally sanctioned to develop rationally, more in line with productive and market demands and with the aim of accommodating 50 percent of China’s urban population by 2020.  Likewise, the rational development of “small cities” and towns was also emphasized.  The Plan implied that the role of urban settlement was to absorb surplus labor, provide job opportunities in diversified economies, upgrade the living conditions of rural residents, and distribute streams of urban immigrants.  Indeed, “designated towns” have served as the incubators of rural industrialization and related urbanization since 1978, if not before.  In some places, like the Changjiang Delta, urban-rural migrations during prior years enhanced local rural technical capacities, which, combined with the “green revolution” in agriculture and the generation of surplus labor under tight controls on population movement, provided the precursors for the Township Village Enterprises of the post-1978 period and preconditions for the spontaneous in-situ urbanization that occurred.  This trend also lent substance to the phrase “urbanization with Chinese characteristics.”  Subsequently, however, the overall economic importance of Township Village Enterprises has declined appreciably from the earlier boom of in-situ urbanization.

Also since 1950, the expansiveness of building in China has increased dramatically.  In the residential sector, for example, household size has trended downwards from around 4.3 persons per household in 1950 to today’s level of about 3.3 persons per household, with the result that household formation, like in many other places, has outpaced population growth.  Added to this increase, there has also been a substantial increase in spatial living standards from an appallingly low level of around 3.9 square meters (42 square feet) of livable space per person in 1970 to present average levels around 12 square meters (130 square feet) per person and 15 to 18 square meters (160 to 200 square feet) per person in more developed urban areas.  In fact, much of the new construction offers 25 square meters (270 square feet) per person and above, although a recent Central Government ruling requires 70 percent of all new residential construction to be no more than 90 square meters (1,000 square feet) in floor area, largely for reasons of affordability and to curb speculation.  There has also been a change away from shared kitchen and bathroom facilities in the so-called “sleep-type” dwelling units of the Maoist period to self-contained apartment living.  This expansiveness, however, does not necessarily translate directly into urban land area, although it is expanding quite rapidly.  Chinese cities are often very dense.  Indeed, among all the cities above 100,000 people the average is 7,400 people per square kilometer and among the top-twenty cities by population size density averages close to 13,000 people per square kilometer, accounting for non-agricultural populations and official “urban district” designations.  This compares to an average density in the United States of 1,483 people per square kilometer across the top-twenty cities by population, and a place like Tokyo, with around 7,000 people per square kilometer.  Density levels, in this regard, except for some spot densities elsewhere, are among the highest on earth, with Foshan and Shantou, for instance above 25,000 people per square kilometer, close to Hong Kong’s benchmark of around 28,000 people per square kilometer.  By contrast, reasonably modernized cities like Shanghai, Dalian and Beijing are less dense, at around 14,000, 9,500 and 7,000 people per square kilometer, respectively.  Indeed, under recent high rates of redevelopment, cities like Shanghai have seen substantial decreases in urban dwelling density.  If anything, at the moment there seems to be a general expectation and guideline in favor of an average city dwelling density of around 10,000 people per square kilometer.

In the grip of its present development phase, China is consuming resources at a rapid rate and in vast quantities.  It will soon replace the United States as the largest consumer of energy in the world, of which around 40 percent now goes towards urbanization and often in a very inefficient manner.  China is also reported to consume about 30 percent of the world’s iron ore and around 27 percent of its steel, much of which also ends up in urban construction.³  Just as crucially, environmental degradation associated with urban development also appears to be rampant, due to both the expansiveness of the operation and deferment of abatement practices in favor of economic development.  Of the 656 cities cited earlier, some 400 are without adequate water supplies.  Air quality of large cities, although showing some recent improvement, is still poor.  In fact, China recently passed the United States as the highest national producer of CO2 emissions, illuminating the potentially global effects of China’s urban expansion.  Water pollution is also a nagging problem in many places, although also improving recently in others.  In short, Chinese urbanization is running well ahead of its environmental carrying capacity, with the costs of remediation expected to be running as high as nearly half its incremental increase in Gross Domestic Product per annum or more – an enormous sum.

Looking over national-level statistics on urban settlement since 1978 and especially during the past ten years, a number of summary observations can be made.  First, there has been a growing disparity in the regional imbalance of urban development from a rough level of parity in non-agricultural population in 1970 among the coastal, central and western regions, to 44.3 percent, 37.3 percent and only 18.4 percent, respectively. 

Second and as alluded to in the introduction, so far China has relatively few extraordinarily large cities by international comparison, with around 50 within official “urban district” and non-agricultural definitions of a million or more inhabitants.  This compares to the United States, for instance, with roughly the same number of metropolitan areas with a million or more inhabitants but with around one quarter the total population.  Moreover, the population sizes among China’s largest cities – Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin at around 13 million, 12 million and 10 million urban inhabitants respectively – are nowhere near as large as Tokyo at about 32 million, Mexico City and São Paolo at around 19 million each, New York in a similar vicinity, and Mumbai at close to 18 million inhabitants.  Even if China’s largest cities are more broadly construed to include non-urban populations, peripheral dwellers and floating populations, making up in total an additional two to three million people per large city, the comparison still stands.  Depending upon the statistical reference, today Shanghai ranks around number 10, Beijing number 14 and Tianjin number 21, among the world’s largest cities by population.  Moreover, the proportion of the nation’s total population in a single or several cities – another measure of mega-urban influence – is also small in China, particularly when compared to Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya in neighboring Japan at about half the total, or even nearby Seoul with somewhat over 20 percent of Korea’s population, not to mention Buenos Aires with about 32 percent of Argentina’s population.  These measures of city size in China and elsewhere will no doubt change in the future, particularly given China’s predicted rate of continued urbanization.  However, it does not appear likely that this rate of urbanization will push China’s cities up significantly in the rankings at or very near the very top, as many other cities are also undergoing comparable levels of urbanization. 

Third, and as a corollary to the last observation, China’s urbanization has been and may well continue to be peculiarly bi-polar – population growth at both ends of the scale, involving large and small urban settlements.  In the fertile region surrounding Chengdu, for instance, smaller, well-established agricultural communities and historic towns are expanding, while the city is growing at a substantial rate.  The same observation can be made about most other Chinese city-centered regions.

Fourth, while the magnitude and sheer throughput rate of China’s urbanization might be unprecedented, the scale of movement of urban population, so far anyway, is probably not.  Scale, after all, is a relative measure.  The so-called “great re-shuffling” that occurred in the United States following World War II, was estimated to embrace about 50 million people or about one-third of the population, roughly equivalent to what has occurred, relatively speaking, in China.  Similar relative shifts have also occurred elsewhere like, for instance, in post-war Italy.  No doubt, as China continues on its current trajectory of urbanization, it may well surpass the scale of urban transition in post-war United States and Italy.  So far, however, it has not. 

Finally, Chinese cities are usually dense.  However, among larger, more modernized cities, dwelling density appears to be declining, as they rid themselves of gross overcrowding and seek higher spatial standards of living.  Judging from newer cities, like Shenzhen, many also ultimately fall below the 10,000 people per square kilometer guideline.  One possible construal of the apparent containment of large city size, bi-polar urban population increases, and high though not inordinately large scales of migratory movement, suggests that China has been reasonably successful, so far, in managing the size of its recent urbanization.  Unlike some other places under rapid urbanization, for instance, massive appearance of squatter settlements, flimsily housing large proportions of urban populations are not prevalent.  Still, many urban dwellers live in poor conditions, and massive environmental degradation and substantial regional imbalances remain.  Indeed, several centerpieces of last year’s Eleventh Five-Year Plan concerning urbanization clearly recognize these conditions and change the emphasis of China’s urban growth model.  In particular, among the so-called “five balances,” under the theme of a “harmonious society” are the balance between “east” and “west,” referring to regional circumstances, “man” and “environment,” referring to more rigorous pursuit of environmental responsibility, and “economic” development with an emphasis on “social welfare.”  Nevertheless, how these new emphases play out remains to be seen.

Urban Regional Transformations

Looking below the national level and particularly at one of China’s more prosperous and developed regions, matters of urban transition and scale become more sharply defined and amplified.  The Changjiang Delta region, extends some 350 kilometers inland from China’s east coast, embracing Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces.  Together with the greater Shanghai administrative area and including large cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuxi, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Ningbo, the Changjiang Delta region has a population of some 67 million people, 53 percent of whom are classified as urban dwellers, well ahead of the national trend.  In 2003 the region accounted for around 18 percent of national Gross Domestic Product, 22 percent of national tax revenue, and 28 percent of national export revenue. 

Moreover, historically, the region has long been urbanized and relatively prosperous, in contrast to other parts of China, due to favorable environmental factors like fertile soils, ample water and good transportation.  The fifteenth century, for instance, saw extensive development of handicraft industries and trade, with Yanzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjiang and Suzhou, among other cities, as major centers.  There was also extensive rural-urban trade and numerous market towns.  Certainly by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the region was a well-settled area.  With the rise of Shanghai during the Treaty-Port era, patterns of economic development and urban settlement began to change, often abruptly, as parts of the region – and particularly those centered on Shanghai – entered the modern era.  From 1842 onward, Shanghai became a major distribution center, connecting sea trade with Changjiang River transport and harnessing the silk, tea and cotton production from the delta region.  Later in the nineteenth century, the burgeoning city also became a major industrial center and over the years its population expanded from around 200,000 in 1843 to 500,000 in 1860 and then up to 1.3 million in 1910, 2.6 million in 1927, and 5.2 million with the 1949 onset of the Communist era.  In fact, Shanghai was not a very large city in the Chinese scheme of things until well into the twentieth century. 

Nanjing also flourished, at least in national importance, as the capital of Nationalist China from 1928 to the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.  Parallel to this development a number of traditional towns fell into decline.  Nanxun, for instance, an early center of silk production near Lake Tai had a population of around 40,000 people at the end of the nineteenth century, dwindling down to about 13,000 in 1948.  By and large, however, the distribution of cities and towns in the region did not change significantly, with few exceptions like Shanghai, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early 1950s.  Beyond established centers, towns and markets had emerged spontaneously for the exchange of products and as the central places for social and economic roles in a largely homogenous agriculturally-based society.  This pattern then became broken during the early decades of the Communist era with the strict application of a centrally-controlled urban hierarchy, pursuit of heavy industry as the primary means of production, urban-rural population controls, and income as well as commodity extraction for central government purposes.  Again some traditional towns diminished; agriculturally “self-sufficient” communes proliferated; and Shanghai became overcrowded, dilapidated, lacking in adequate infrastructure and declining in population.⁴

Despite the persistence of a seemingly entrenched dual urban-rural structure, post-1978 socio-economic reforms led towards the current patterns and scale of urbanization.  The fiscal contracting system that came into effect during the late 1970s and certainly by 1980, for instance, effectively allowed a higher proportion of local product and revenues to be retained, and ascribed more decision-making power and responsibility to local authorities over their own economic development.  There was also a steady migration of rural dwellers to urban areas and a gradual softening of strict application of the household registration system. Surplus agricultural labor became at least partially soaked up by local industrial and other ventures and land within local areas became a potential source of profit.  The Land Management Law of 1986, which separated use rights from state ownership within cities and designated towns, saw its first full-scale experiment in Shenzhen in 1988, and, by 1992, resulted in large-scale use-right transfers nationwide.  Rural land, by contrast, was in the collective ownership of village residents, although for almost all concerned, further fiscal reforms in 1994 revealed substantial profits to be made from the conversion of agricultural into urban land.

Transition to the current urban patterns in the region, however, did not occur all at once, nor did it occur in the same direction.  Over the period from 1978 to the present, the region constantly gained population, partially from immigration from elsewhere.  In 1964 the registered population was around 49 million inhabitants, rising to some 62 million in 1989 and then moderately upwards to close to 67 million in 2003, as noted earlier.  Between 1964 and 1989 the whole region served as a magnet, including for returnees in the later 1970s from the earlier “sending-down” policy associated with the Maoist period.  Then, between 1989 and 1993 the dominant destination for both immigration and intra-regional migration was the center of the region, in the neighborhood of Lake Tai, followed between 1993 and 1998, by all the larger cities, of which ten presently have populations in excess of 1 million.  Among these are, Shanghai, with around 13 million designated urban inhabitants, followed by Nanjing at nearly 4 million and then Wuxi, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Changzhou with slightly over 2 million people each.  From 1998 onwards this latter trend has continued along with a trend of population expansion of smaller cities in the ambit of large-scale urban areas, especially given the decentralization of larger cities into surrounding areas. 

Overtime, cities have continued to expand their presence through annexation and urban-district re-designation.  At the low end of the spectrum, smaller urban settlements have recently begun to consolidate, partly in order to meet minimum standards for urban designation.  In short, what transpired in the urbanization of the Changjiang Delta region was a staged process, the nascent phase of which was a boom in in-situ urban settlements, similar to that described earlier at the national level; followed by congregation of population in larger urban settlements where agglomeration afforded apparent economic, service and environmental advantages; together with decentralization of larger cities into their peripheries; alongside of growth of smaller existing towns within the mega-urban areas.

The broad spatial upshot of this transitional process was the emergence of four forms of urban organization in the region.  The first was independent urban expansion, occurring mainly in the north and west.  The second was a two-staged process of metropolitan expansion of very large urban areas like Shanghai, which first attracted population and then expanded outward embracing satellite and other communities.  The third was the formation of an urban corridor, particularly along the Shanghai-Nanjing expressway, encompassing Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou, with little to denote the presence of communities other than town signs; and the fourth was centralization of urban areas through consolidation as happened, for example, in Zhang Jiagang beside the Changjiang River. 

Closer in still, another outcome was, as mentioned earlier, the rather wholesale conversion of agricultural to urban land within designated urban sites often for industrial parks and similar facility locations and often resulting in over-development and redundancy, let alone loss of arable land.  At the smaller end of the urban scale, it has become apparent that economic, employment and service capacities demonstrate marked disparities around the 50,000 population mark.  To be sure, some smaller “designated towns” have escaped these disparities, especially in places like Tongli – a tourist town – and Meili or Houyu in close driving range of Shanghai, both of which have prospered, primarily through second-home markets.  Nevertheless, the incapacity of many small towns that arose during the 1980s boom to achieve basic scale efficiencies does seem to call into question broader policy intentions to settle surplus labor in local communities and the self-sufficient economic model of scattered small-scale urban settlements.  This is also true for irrational local competition among such communities, where substandard living conditions and pollution often persist at relatively high levels.

Returning to the four urban forms at the higher end of the urban-scale spectrum, apart from Shanghai, one condition that stands out is the corridor conurbation from Suzhou through Wuxi to Changzhou.  This is where the matter of the scale of urbanization becomes very apparent.  The combined designated city populations reach nearly 7 million inhabitants, to which should be added another equal or greater amount to convey a more accurate depiction of urban contiguity with surrounding, separately designated urban settlements.  To a somewhat lesser extent the same kind of observation might also be made of Nanjing and neighboring or growth-path oriented Yangzhou and Zhenjiang, with combined population (urban conurbation populations excluded) of some 6 million inhabitants.  The point here is that national-level statistics and designations obscure the emergence of mega-metropolitan or regional urban concentrations that have arisen in the Changjiang Delta, all weighing in at well over 10 million inhabitants and collectively amounting to something like half the regional population. 

At the lower end, designated urban areas with less than 200,000 inhabitants do not seem to be making much of a dent in urban agglomeration and certainly those below about 50,000 people appear to be presently unsustainable.  In short, contrary to the findings cited at the national level, when perceived as regional conurbations some urban agglomerations (at least in the Changjiang Delta, if not elsewhere in China) are vast in scale from an international perspective, somewhat reminiscent of the eastern seaboard development of the United States from Boston through New York to Philadelphia, or the Tokyo Bay area of Japan.  Also, it is in the areas around and in-between the control regimens of larger cities that problems associated with the scrabble of duplicative and otherwise wasteful competition among settlements, together with careless disposal of land assets and residuals of production, remain very critical.  Some observers have attributed a larger part of these problems to a tension and clash between rationalistic planning and direction from those in higher authority compared with cultural conservatism, personalistic rule and the blurring of boundaries among various interests at the local level.⁵  In any event, China’s recent experience with “market socialism” has certainly seemed to both sustain the general administrative system and further entrench local capacities to operate largely as they see fit.

City-level Urban Expansions

Looking further down in scale to the level of city development in China – apart from the use of urban renewal, conservation, and revitalization practices commonly deployed elsewhere – two notable features are apparent.  The first is special-purpose “side-by-side” development, which often involves the use of very extensive land areas as outward extensions of existing urban areas.  This pattern falls under national-level planning and master planning guidelines, as well as related regulatory control procedures, both primarily in the hands of local jurisdictions.  In effect, China appears to have developed its own physical planning template, for want of a better term.

Nowadays, urban planning in China conforms largely to the provisions of the 1990 Planning Law and its subsequent amendments, where three levels of consideration are specified.  The first is the “Urban System” level, applying to municipalities over a lengthy time horizon and administered by the Ministry of Construction.  Its purpose is primarily to provide overall planning guidance, a reference for designation of administrative divisions, and to develop scales and standards for urban infrastructure and public facilities.  The second level is more directly involved with city planning and requires determination of goals and strategies for urban plans, predictions of levels of urban development, determination of types and spatial patterns of development, and conception of master plans covering numerous factors like use, infrastructural emplacement, historic conservation, environmental protection and water supply.  The time horizon is also lengthy and requires approval of the State Council, with local plans being prepared according to national criteria and guidelines prepared by the Ministry of Construction.  The third level involves zoning and preparation of “detailed control plans” at district and sub-district levels of the urban area concerned.  “Detailed control plans” – a blend of “use” and “form” zoning – specify building density, floor area ratios, open-space provisions, degrees of building coverage and building set-back, as well as parking requirements and height limits for individual land parcels within developable areas.  Overall, the urban planning approach has a strong physical orientation and is largely centrally defined and controlled.

As the terminology implies, special-purpose “side-by-side” developments usually occur on large tracts of non-urbanized land, immediately adjacent to existing contiguous urban areas.  Prominent examples include the Pudong Administrative District in Shanghai, the New District and Industrial District in Suzhou, the New District in Zhengzhou, and Jinyang in Guiyang, among others.  All incorporate specific districts set aside for one or more of a variety of manufacturing, high-technology, processing, and civic purposes, usually for the purpose of attracting outside investment.  They also include extensive residential and commercial development, as well as community services, and, in sum, are more akin to integrated new versions of the cities of which they become a part than satellites or peripheral communities.  One advantage of this form of urban expansion is that it is far less encumbered than wholesale redevelopment of existing urban areas and can occur rapidly.  Another is that new urban and building technologies can be deployed extensively, with economic and qualitative benefits.  As they become constructed these areas also provide venues for relocation of residents from overcrowded and dilapidated inner-city areas, particularly as these inner areas undergo redevelopment or refurbishing, as well as homes for immigrant populations. 

“Side-by-side” developments also allow cities to regenerate employment opportunities as they phase out moribund industrial sites.  Indeed, in almost all cases this kind of urban formation is about strategic repositioning of cities in increasingly more competitive marketplaces, while also facilitating upgrading of older urban circumstances.  While certainly similar in many respects to “new towns” and other forms of decentralized urban development in the West, the scale, scope, holistic conception, instantaneousness, and immediate adjacency to existing urban areas, is distinctive.  The Pudong Special Administrative District created in 1993, for example, is enormous, covering an area comparable to Singapore.  It is located just across the Huangpu River from the fabled “Bund” and older quarters of Shanghai, enabling its Lujiazui area to act as the city’s financial and almost geographical center.  In addition to Lujiazui, Pudong also boasts high-technology zones, export processing zones, manufacturing areas, residential estates, a cultural center and major components of Shanghai’s infrastructure, including port facilities and the Shanghai Pudong International Airport.  Since its creation, the astonishingly rapid growth of Pudong has been facilitated by the extensive release of use rights for property-development purposes. 

On the whole, Pudong houses a mixture of income groups and provides numerous new employment opportunities.  Much the same can be said for Suzhou’s planned outward expansions, under the rubric of “One body and Two Wings,” necessitated in the early 1990s to attract direct foreign direct investment to replace the city’s failing economy and to allow the original Pinjiang area to survive for historical preservation purposes, cultural tourism and administration.  One of the “wings” was the massive Sino-Singaporean joint venture on the eastern side of town, next to the Shanghai-Nanjing expressway and rail line.  The other “wing” was formed by a local consortium as the Suzhou New District, on the west.  Both pursued aggressive developmental efforts, with well-serviced commercial and industrial sites, as well as constructed mixed-use living environments, with many of the facilities and services available in the older city and its immediate environs.  Once more, many of the same comments might be made regarding the recent Zhengzhou New District, contiguous with older areas of the city, and so one could go on.

“Superblock” developments, another common development form in China, refer to the prevalent release of use rights on large single land parcels in China for various forms of urban and industrial development more or less at one time.  The sizes of these development zones vary.  In peripheral urban circumstances, parcels on the order of 10 to 25 square kilometers (2,500 to 6,000 acres) are not unknown.  For town-center developments and special production zones within the consolidation of central areas mentioned earlier, or as part of urban expansions, sizes from 1 to 10 square kilometers (250 to 2,500 acres) are relatively commonplace, and “superblocks” in intensely developed urban areas like Lujiazui can be several hectares in dimension.  Again, parallels can be found in the West, with, for example, the massive post-World War II suburban expansion of the United States.  In the U.S. case, however, the rough average size of single developments was only on the order of 100 hectares (250 acres). 

Also, during the earlier Maoist period, the Soviet-inspired danwei, or “work unit” communities, were constructed as singular developments, often housing on the order of 30,000 inhabitants although some like Caoyangxincun on the north-western outskirts of Shanghai eventually housed around 100,000 people – almost a city within a city.  Moreover, similar to the recent “side-by-side” urban expansions, these settlements were generally highly inclusive of community services, recreational areas and production facilities in a spatial and social configuration that expanded the range of non-residential functions depending on the size of the overall work unit or resulting district.  The relatively high degree of self containment of these earlier settlements, an otherwise efficient practice, also led to comparative day-to-day isolation from other parts of the city on the part of inhabitants.

One result of the application of China’s urban planning process to “side-by-side” and “superblock” developments has been a degree of administrative simplicity and clarity.  Through its extensive and prescriptive guidelines at every level, this planning process presents both a unified and unifying constraint structure for planning, particularly in its physical orientation.  This allows compensation for limits in locally-available technical and decision-making capacities, while maintaining reasonable expectations with regard to the consistency of outcomes and security for property investments.  On the other hand, through a tendency towards rote application it does lend a certain quality of uniformity to the manifestation and substance of these new developments.  This is particularly unfortunate when the often “carpet-like” application is at odds with local environmental, historical and other contextual conditions, as in the case of Wuhan, for instance, with regard to wetlands and, in Pudong, with regard to viable agricultural communities. 

Another result has often been an oddly and perhaps paradoxical suburban spatial quality in otherwise highly-urbanized city expansions.  A dominant perception is one of substantial building masses “parked,” as it were, in a broad and scale-less field of bordering landscape and roadways.  The predominantly large-block configuration of Lujiazui, for instance, especially when combined with site requirements that effectively push building masses away from the street and promote concentrated tower-forms of development, undercuts the intense street-level urbanity one might usually associate with a district of its centrality, importance and density.  This outcome was not envisaged in earlier reference designs nor in the design of Century Avenue, its central axis, which was seen to be bordered by a row of mid-rise buildings close to property lines, in the manner of its precedent, the Champs Elysée in Paris.  Fortunately, there is room to address this shortcoming, already recognized by Pudong’s planners, in a second round of urban redevelopment.  However, the case does illustrate potential shortcomings of the present scheme of urban planning and design and, in particular, the specification of its “detailed control plans.”

Without going deeply into technical detail, China’s urban planning guidelines, especially for new developments and when compared to some Western counterparts, exhibit a bias towards very wide roads and other rights-of-way at a district level and much less of the same at the smaller level of building clusters and subdivisions.  This is conspicuous, for example, in the Huilongyuan and Tiantongyuan areas, around the Fifth Ring Road north of central Beijing, where dense primarily residential development is inscribed within “superblocks” on the order of 800 meters (2000 feet) in dimension, surrounded by very wide public rights-of-way but with very few intermediate streets.  Again, the result is one of large building masses, with little finer-grained articulation, within a broad and largely scale-less field.  In addition, the coarseness of the grain of land-use zoning, even accounting for inclusion of some non-residential functions, departs appreciably from historical if not socially-desirable finer-grain patterns of use. 

To be sure, China is not alone in the raw, generic and undistinguished qualities that characterize several aspects of its new urban expansions.  Similar criticism was leveled at many American and European post-war peripheral urban developments where, in similar ways, these qualities came from the pressures of rapid, large-scale development and resorting to broad-brush formulae and templates in order to cope.  As seen elsewhere, this coping behavior may give way in China to a slower period of maturation and local variation, as well as more specific senses of place and manners of building– “writing” over, as it were, what has been “written.”  In fact, some of the very recent retrofitting of urban blocks and building complexes in Lujiazui points in this direction.

Continuing Prospects

Returning to the earlier discussion of urban growth, China appears to be at something of a mid-point in its likely urbanization since the opening up to the outside world and partial reform in 1978.  As noted, at that juncture the proportion of urban population stood at around 18 percent, rising to a present level of about 40 percent before going on to reach about 60 percent or more, towards mid-century.  The number of cities and towns can be expected to rise substantially, probably conforming roughly to the current bi-polar distribution of larger cities and smaller cities for a variety of policy, efficiency and environmental reasons of which some have been touched upon.  By contrast, the impact of towns and very small cities in accommodating further urbanization will likely continue to decline.  The number of cities to emerge with urban populations at or above one million inhabitants will probably be from around 100 to as many as 200, roughly comparable to the current distribution per capita in the United States.  The number of truly mega-sized cities with populations in excess of ten million people will also likely increase, although none seem likely to rival the size of Tokyo, Mexico City or São Paulo, to name a few extraordinarily large urban areas.  These increases will undoubtedly be subject to an interlocking bundle of constraints, within which dealing aggressively and sustainably with deferred environmental clean-up and pollution control will be of paramount importance.  Also involved will be continuing resource availability, economic wherewithal, infrastructure provision and well-placed institutional reform.  In these regards, it also seems likely that socio-economic and environmental performance over the coming ten years will be crucial.

At present, there appear to be at least two urban Chinas.  One is very dense, dirty and gritty, like Shenyang, for instance, or less so Zhengzhou, both beginning to move their way through a first round of urban expansion and some renewal.  The other is already further along and reasonably well-appointed, as in Shanghai, which is now moving into recoupment of history, environmental amenity and towards international acclaim.  Unfortunately, the places where urban expansiveness is also being registered strongly lie in mega-regional conurbations embracing several large cities and many smaller ones besides.  They continue to be indiscriminate in layout, undistinguished and problematic from a variety of perspectives touched on earlier, and places where there has been a paucity of consideration of quality and relatively few useful models to be followed, the thorny problem of regional coordination and planning notwithstanding.  Not unlike many other parts of the world, urban peripheral development is where careful and creative attention must be focused.  Moreover, in China’s case the scale of such an enterprise is likely to be unprecedented.  The Changjiang Delta, if not in other parts of China as well, is also where a well-serviced network of relatively high-density, link-node developments should be encouraged as a spatial model together with clarification and distinction of agricultural and conservation lands in between and around such a network.  Urban spread seems to be an inevitable issue.  How such expansion is guided is a matter for almost all the broader interests concerned.  Furthermore, it is where, under proper guidance, the matter of increasing scale can become an advantage by facilitating useful urban density, rationalizing high-grade transportation arrangements, and sharply precipitating resolution of competing claims among urban, rural and conservation uses.

Endnotes

1.             Thomas J. Campanella, The Concrete Dragon.  New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.

2.             National-level data is drawn from the National Bureau of Statistics of China and particularly the Urban Statistical Yearbooks.

3.             Qiu Baoxing, Harmony and Innovation: Problems, Dangers and Solutions in Dealing with Rapid Urbanization in China.  L’Arca Edizioni, Milano, 2007, p. 107.

4.             Regional level data is drawn from Zhu Bing, Urbanization, Spatial Configuration and Urban Management: The Case of the Changjiang Delta Region.  Doctoral Dissertation, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, May 2006.

5.             Michael Leaf, “Modernity Confronts Tradition: The Professional Planner and Local Corporatism in the Rebuilding of China’s Cities,” in Bishwapriya Sanyal, ed., Comparative Planning Cultures.  New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 91-111.