The City after Chinese New Towns: Spaces and Imaginaries from Contemporary Urban China 9783035617665, 9783035617658

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
I. Introduction
Questioning New Towns
What Are We Talking about when We Talk about Cities?
Between the Exceptional and the Ordinary
What Does a New Town Do?
About This Book
Walking Through
II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions
A Policy Discourse on New Town Development in Contemporary China
When Ends Don’t Meet. Historical Interpretations of Twenty-First-Century New Towns
New Urbanisation and “Go West” Policies
Shaping Urbanity. Politics and Narratives
Architecture and New Towns
The New Towns of Zhaoqing, Zhengdong and Tongzhou
III. Spaces
Exhibition Halls
High-Rise Apartments
Undergrounds
Urban Parks
Mapping New Towns
IV. Openings
The City Is Available. Chinese New Towns as a Backup Space
Scaling Up and Scaling Out. New Towns and “the Standpoint of an Absence”
References
About the Authors
Index of Places
Illustration Credits

Citation preview

The City after Chinese New Towns

Michele Bonino, Francesca Governa, Maria Paola Repellino, Angelo Sampieri (Eds.)

The City after Chinese New Towns Spaces and Imaginaries from Contemporary Urban China

Birkhäuser Basel

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Preface Michele Bonino, Florence Graezer Bideau, Liu Jian 11

I. Introduction Michele Bonino, Francesca Governa, Maria Paola Repellino, Angelo Sampieri Questioning New Towns What Are We Talking about when We Talk about Cities? 20 Between the Exceptional and the Ordinary 23 What Does a New Town Do? 26 About This Book 12

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33

Walking Through Samuele Pellecchia 59

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions 60 71

78 90 97

A Policy Discourse on New Town Development in Contemporary China Liu Jian, Xu Gaofeng When Ends Don’t Meet. Historical Interpretations of Twenty-First-Century New Towns Filippo De Pieri, Davide Vero New Urbanisation and “Go West” Policies Mauro Berta, Francesca Frassoldati Shaping Urbanity. Politics and Narratives Florence Graezer Bideau, Anna Pagani Architecture and New Towns Michele Bonino

105

The New Towns of Zhaoqing, Zhengdong and Tongzhou Filippo Fiandanese, Leonardo Ramondetti, Astrid Safina

131

III. Spaces 132 143 156 166

Exhibition Halls Maria Paola Repellino High-Rise Apartments Alessandro Armando, Francesco Carota Undergrounds Valeria Federighi, Filippo Fiandanese Urban Parks Bianca Maria Rinaldi

177

Mapping New Towns Michele Bonino, Francesca Governa, Maria Paola Repellino, Angelo Sampieri 203

IV. Openings 204 215

The City Is Available. Chinese New Towns as a Backup Space Angelo Sampieri Scaling Up and Scaling Out. New Towns and “the Standpoint of an Absence” Francesca Governa

230

References 246 About the Authors 247

Index of Places 251

Illustration Credits

Preface Michele Bonino, Florence Graezer Bideau, Liu Jian In late 2015, we came together as an international team of scholars to work on a common topic. As we began the research published in this book we realised that new urbanisation in China – already illustrated in many earlier scientific studies – was permanently changing not only the way we look at cities globally, but also our interpretation of urban phenomena. In essence, Chinese new towns make it possible to rethink the way we currently understand and design the city. So we decided to try and answer the research question, “What city after Chinese new towns?” which later inspired the title of this book. With the Politecnico di Torino as team leader, we launched the CeNTO – Chinese New Towns project, a reference to the work L’Italia delle cento città (“Italy of One Hundred Cities”, by Carlo Cattaneo). The project merged the collaborations initiated several years ago between three polytechnic universities in the East and West: Tsinghua University in the People’s Republic of China, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL ) in Switzerland and the Politecnico di Torino in Italy. The institutional backgrounds of these collaborations are all different. The Department of Architecture and Design (DAD ) of the Politecnico di Torino and the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University had initiated joint education projects in 2008. This eventually resulted in a double degree programme comprising both Master and Doctoral courses and research projects – for example, the “Memory/Regeneration” project (and its related key publication Beijing Danwei. Industrial Heritage and the Contemporary City, 2015) and the Horizon 2020 “ TR ANS-URBAN-EU-CHINA” project (2018–2020). In early 2013, the Politecnico di Torino (Department of Architecture and Design) and EPFL (School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and College of Humanities) began to collaborate in international research projects related either to urban China (“Mapping controversial memories in the historic urban landscape”, 2015–2017), or to urban memory (“Memory and the city: assessing tools for interdisciplinary research and teaching”, 2016–2018). The Politecnico di Torino and the EPFL also launched interdisciplinary teaching. The research by the Politecnico di Torino is part of the collaboration between the Department of Architecture and Design (DAD ) and the Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST ); it involves PhD candidates in “Architecture. History and Design” (DASP) and “Urban and Regional Development” (URD ). The project was implemented thanks to a grant by the Politecnico di Torino/Fondazione CRT as part of the programme “La ricerca di talenti”. The aim of the CeNTO project was to create a group of about twenty junior and senior scholars from the three academic institutions. During the two-year research period, the project boosted the scholars’ collaboration beyond the boundaries of their respective institutions by organising regular fieldwork in the three selected new towns of Tongzhou, Zhengdong and Zhaoqing. On-site research also included more extensive 6

fieldwork performed by the PhD candidates involved in the project: a PhD thesis was set up by the Politecnico of Torino for each of the three case studies. Regular seminars were organised in the China Room in Turin, a new research venue which was a direct result of the project. Our monthly meetings were crucial to discussing issues regarding the main project: decisions, methodological strategies, ongoing results and the fine-tuning of its premise. We would like to acknowledge the input to these discussions by our guests at the seminars: Daniele Brigadoi Cologna, Denis Bocquet, Michele Geraci, Gary Hack, Linda Vlassenrood, Yang Dingliang and Zhong Ge. In order to disseminate intermediate results, the research team also organised several cultural activities with larger audiences. For example, results were displayed at a seminar entitled “Chinese New Towns: Negotiating Citizenship and Physical Form” held during the Beijing Design Week 2016 where discussions focused on what Europe can or cannot learn from Chinese urbanisation. The results were also illustrated during five lectures organised as part of the exhibition “From the Old to the New Silk Road” held in 2017 at the Museum of Oriental Art (MAO ) in Turin. One interesting challenge faced by the project was the multidisciplinary and inter­ cultural perspectives of its members. Various disciplines related to urban China – such as architecture, urban design, urban geography, urban planning, urban sociology and landscape design – were jointly studied in order to structure the research framework. As a result, we had to find a common understanding and language if we wanted to improve the study and draft a common set of questions. National policies and local surveys were our main source of data. Other direct sources are currently still being studied by PhD candidates Filippo Fiandanese, Leonardo Ramondetti and Astrid Safina for their theses. This dialogue was enhanced by Samuele Pellecchia’s photography (Prospekt Photographers, Milan). He spent several weeks in China photographing these new towns: his work is an important addition to the texts. Another contribution to the research are the maps drafted by the research team, in particular Matteo Migliaccio and Maria Paola Repellino, one of the curators and key authors of this book. Repellino also played a crucial role coordinating the editing and graphic layout. Our special thanks go to our colleagues who, although not directly involved in the project, helped enormously in its production: Angela Benotto, Edoardo Bruno, Pier Alain Croset, Giovanni Durbiano, Lorenzo Gonzo, Franz Graf, Caroline Iorio, Enrico Macii, Yves Pedrazzini, Stefania Stafutti, Liu Yan, Zhang Li and Zhu Wenyi. Our thanks also go to our three universities for their incredible institutional and administrative support. We would also like to acknowledge the kindness and help received by “Cindy” Liu Yan in Zhaoqing and Han Xiaofei in Zhengzhou. The people at the Politecnico di Torino are especially grateful to FULL – Future Urban Legacy Lab – and to all the staff at the China Room.

Preface

Torino, Lausanne, Beijing, July 2018

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High-rise buildings facing the riverpark in Tongzhou.

I. Introduction

Questioning New Towns Michele Bonino, Francesca Governa, Maria Paola Repellino, Angelo Sampieri In the early twenty-first century, the Chinese Government announced its decision to build twenty new cities every year for the next twenty years; in total, approximately four hundred new cities were to be designed and built before 2020 (Shepard, 2015; Fang and Yu, 2016; Wakeman, 2016).1 While this is a substantial financial and organisational undertaking, the proliferation of new towns is not limited to China but involves most of the regions of the world with the highest urbanisation rates (India and other countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Keeton, 2011; Moser, 2014; Greenfield, 2016). In fact, the current period can be considered “the most intensive period of new cities building (…) since the peak of colonial expansion” (Moser, Swain and Alkhabbaz, 2015, p. 74). New towns are not a novelty: they have an established history and theoretical framework, and they provide well-known experiences (Hall, 1988; Hall and Ward, 1998; Wakeman, 2016). Building new planned settlements in China is one of the strategies of “city making”, at least since the mid-twentieth century.2 However, these strategies change over time, as do the results. The satellite towns built between 1950 and 1980 were part of a policy of “industrialisation without urbanisation” (Pow, 2012; Ren, 2013). Their main role was to encourage industrial enterprises to locate their plants around big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai (Gu, Wei and Cook, 2015; Wu, 2015 a, p. 29 et foll.; Shen and Wu, 2017). After the 1970s, with the advent of economic reforms and the opening up of the market, new towns became one of the tools to not only implement economic development strategies, but also attract businesses and investments as well as promote real estate to overcome public housing provisions and invest in special economic zones (Cao, 2015; She, 2017). In particular, urban housing became a type of commodity and, from the nineties onwards, the housing reform became “in essence, a campaign to privatise the country’s state-owned housing” (Cao, 2015, p. 24).3 Many elements must be combined and superimposed in order to establish a framework of policy and actions in which, unlike the period prior to the eighties, cities become a country’s economic growth engine, both as regards production and consumption (Wu, 2007; 2016 a). To exploit the comparative advantage provided by the huge pool of relatively cheap labour, the national economic policies adopted during the first economic reform period focused chiefly on investments in the production of goods for export, the adoption of a market regime by cities on the east coast and the launch of the Special Economic Zones of Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen (Wu, 1999; Yeung, Lee and Kee, 2009). However, economic development (and policy) was organised only at the national scale; cities were considered to provide undifferentiated support to locate State industries (Yusuf and Nabeshima, 2008; Wu, 2016 a). Later on, institutional reforms – especially decentralisation processes and the fiscal reform of the nineties – redefined the relationship between central and local governments, more specifically as regards fiscal and economic matters.4 In turn, land reform in the year 2000 prompted 12

local governments to implement entrepreneurial strategies and “land-based local development” (Wu, 2016 a, p. 1139), which was, to a great extent, land-based urban development. All these reforms sparked not only a political-institutional set-up, but also a new spatial organisation that acknowledged urbanisation, and thus urban expansion, as one of the undeniably most efficient mechanisms with which to facilitate economic growth. These changes underscored the city as the place in which, and through which, it was possible to support and facilitate capital accumulation (Shen and Wu, 2017).5 “Urban entrepreneurialism [gradually] drove the city to expand its territory, to enter into coalitions with development partners and to compete with other cities in order to gain the central position in the region” (Wu, 2016 a, p. 1139). The chiefly urban-based “rampant” entrepreneurialism of local Chinese governments has often been linked to the market-oriented urban policies David Harvey wrote about in 1989, labelling it a sort of “inevitable destiny” of Western countries in a late capitalist age. The growth machine became the reference model required to understand Chinese urban governance (Wu, 2015 a). However, institutional conditions radically called into question the destiny acknowledged as inevitable in the West, giving rise to the “Neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” (Wang, 2003; later also cited by Harvey, 2005) created by the merger of Party, State and the market: a mix of “asymmetric political and fiscal concentration and decentralisation of economic decision-making” (Wu, 2016 b, p. 340). Within this complex game of relationships between central and local governments, “the central government uses economic performance indicators (especially growth domestic product – GDP – growth rate) to measure and promote local government officials” (Wu, 2016 b, p. 340). In turn, by controlling the use of urban land, local governments control a key resource of economic dynamics; at the same time, an increasing slice of the tax revenues of local governments comes from the transfer of land use rights to developers (Glaeser et al., 2017). The main features of the Chinese transition or, better still, of the transformation of China “away from state socialism” (Ma, 2002; Yeoh, 2010 a) are: the shift to a Stateregulated market economy; the growing role of local governments in fiscal administration and economic management; industrial manufacturing development triggered to a great extent by the global market; and the “commodification” of land and houses.6 This institutional, economic and political transformation was boosted by the dynamics of urbanisation in which “the relationship between the central city and its suburbs [shifted] from one characterized by scattered industrial satellite towns with a vast

“planned support” for the market, but also as the new centres of the spatial reconfiguration of regional urban systems based on the global city-regions model (Xu and Yeh, 2010; Shen and Wu, 2017).7 Although Chinese new towns are part of this physical, institutional, political, economic, local and global framework, they are less well-known and difficult to include in a

I. Introduction

rural area for vegetable cultivation, to one of suburban new towns and a globalizing central area that formed a unified global city region” (Wu, 2016 a, p. 1139). New towns thus become part of a new, emerging space; they not only act as a multifunctional

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discourse, tradition and process that has already taken place. It is not easy to even define exactly what new towns in China really are. This is neither a purely linguistic problem, nor is it exclusively linked to the difficulty of circumscribing – in the restricted space of a new town masterplan – the accumulated transformations typical of an explosive urbanisation process that saves nothing. Nor does it depend on their differences to a theoretical framework and experiences on which the West has built a precise narrative that is not followed here. The misunderstandings, ambiguities and opaqueness that Chinese new towns create, compared to something we believe we are already familiar with in terms of definition, space and history, makes both the new town and our subjective evaluation ambiguous. In contemporary China, the term new town indicates spaces that are different, even institutionally different: new towns, new districts, new areas, new cities, etc.8 These nouns share the adjective new, but the adjective can always be replaced by something even newer (cfr. Shepard, 2015, or the studies by the International New Towns Institute on new new towns).9 Furthermore, Wakeman (2016) considers new to be a very vague term that can be used as an interpretative category or, more radically, “is enabled by an assertion of distinctiveness which is frequently framed by forgetfulness or denial, not innocent of power relations” (Robinson, 2013, p. 663). In fact, imbuing the adjective new with its own interpretative content necessarily means specifying why it is new (compared to what). It involves a comparison, a differentiation and a here and there. As a result, the ambiguity intrinsic to Chinese new towns is the ambiguity of an observation suspended between the upgrading of theoretical and conceptual frameworks (and experiences) of Western urbanism and the openness towards an urban theory “beyond the west” (Edensor and Jayne, 2012). Instead, many descriptions of contemporary new towns in China date to the heyday of the twentieth-century new town movement (between 1945 and 1975). Using Ebenezer Howard’s garden city as a banner, they are included in a long story which, going backwards and forwards in time, focuses on planning and utopian theories (cfr. the more or less critical views by Yuen, 1996; Tan, 2010; Hoffmann, 2011; Shao, 2015), and then provides several examples of new towns in relation to the different phases of Chinese urbanisation processes. It is not clear what links twentieth-century new towns in the West to the many, albeit different kinds of contemporary new towns. Probably this question has no answer, so it is pointless to ask. In Chinese new towns the desire for a city is not utopia and, above all, it is not newtopia, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon megalopolises (Rodwin, 1956) or American new urbanism (Katz, 1994).10 Rather than a sign of bourgeois utopia (Fishman, 1987) or some suburban dream (Allen, 1977), it is the opposite (Taylor, 2015). Chinese new towns are not the product of univocal specialisation – city of entertainment, science, institutions – even if they are often labelled with the name of some of the brands that characterise them.11 They are not exclusive, closed spaces like the new towns crossed by secular and religious utopias, or marked by apartheid. They do not colonise land in order to use its resources, like many colonial or mining cities, but are instead new settlements that gradually occupy all available land, transform property rights, shatter administrative boundaries, modify the 14

country’s economic structure as well as the status and lifestyles of the people. Unlike the history of European satellite cities, they were built to create new expansion, not to limit it. Again and again, the roots of this expansion lie in new towns; a nucleus used by urbanisation to consolidate in order to continue and be acknowledged and recognised. The real stakes seem to be available land and the real game to be played is to proudly and allusively show (and sell) new towns on the global market. New towns, new districts, new areas and new cities are found almost everywhere. Settlement logic and strategies do not leave much room for generalisation on the right location, the right topography, the most rational relationship with the surroundings, or the most balanced economic and demographic equilibrium. Moving westwards, new expansions are undoubtedly one of the key tools of national strategies to rebalance the traditional gap between eastern, central and western regions (according to the regionalisation formally adopted by the Seventh Five-Year Plan dated 1986), and reduce the concentration of the population and activities in coastal megacities.12 But where exactly? In which areas? In consolidated cities, on their outskirts, hundreds of kilometres away from old centres, between big industrial settlements, in the empty spaces between new infrastructures, or in free piecemeal sites of suburban expansion where once there were forests, water, deserts and the countryside? The new towns in each of these areas create patterns that model reality according to standard classifications and accumulation. Social, political and economic processes are present in these spaces (whichever they may be and however bounded), but at the same time they have nothing to do with the context in which they take place. The masterplans displayed in exhibition halls, and hung here and there in new expansion areas, refer to a physical space that acts only as a purely technical support: strict zoning alternates Central Business Districts, shopping centres, residential areas – villas, gated communities, towers – scientific parks, etc. These areas socially and physically separate residential districts from shopping, working and leisure spaces. Within polymorphic sequences of internally homogeneous environments, the designed space of Chinese new towns challenges every principle of hierarchy, density, proximity, mixité, compatibility and incompatibility of functions, social relationships, uses and practices due to the way in which these principles have been developed and studied within compact and scattered twentieth-century mor-

erogeneous features around a centre or within an isotropic space outside the centre (Sieverts, 2003; Secchi, 2005). Likewise, they do not involve only the reproduction of the ingredients of a uniform and unifying global urbanity (Thrift, 2000). At the same time, physical and social frameworks move beyond the traditional idea of the city as a bounded and universally replicable settlement and reflect the differentiated, varied and multi-scalar nature of contemporary urban reality (Brenner and Schmidt, 2015).

I. Introduction

phologies: from the megalopolises of Geddes (1915), Gotmann (1961) and Hall (1966) to the world cities of Braudel (1985), Friedmann (1986), Sassen (1991), Castells (1996) and Taylor (2004). Space in Chinese new towns is not defined and designed based on modern urbanity models that continually compose and recompose differences and het-

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A new physical and social urbanity is planned and presented using material infrastructures, new technologies, rhetoric and official speeches. This urbanity invents and communicates its differences and alterity vis-à-vis the past; it builds and changes reality and creates alternative urban orders. By so doing, Chinese new towns reflect a morphologically homogeneous model reminiscent of the imaginary, capable of providing an immediate and direct form to the (global) myth according to which the main road leading to economic growth involves “building big and fast” (Datta, 2016). Sorace and Hurst (2016) highlight the fact that most studies on Chinese new towns underscore the role they play (or are asked to play) to accommodate the rural population that emigrates annually towards cities, and to tackle the needs created by the sheer numbers of internal migrants. Nevertheless, these new settlements tend to focus primarily on satisfying the demand for housing, consumption and production by the new urban elite. They are one of the key tools in national economic development strategies aimed at sustaining growth and attracting businesses and activities. They are an extraordinarily effective mechanism to boost the revenue of local authorities and, more generally, to promote the Chinese urban dream (Taylor, 2015).13 This is an ambitious dream that often turns either into a nightmare or into the materialisation of a contemporary urban dystopia, as in most stories and photographic reportages about ghost towns.14 A dream in which the material construction of new towns is accompanied by a social engineering plan aimed not only at creating a new middle class with increasingly global consumption and behavioural patterns, but also an economic growth programme for a country not content to be the “factory of the world”, but which assertively wishes to conquer the frontiers of innovation and research (Tomba, 2004; Gerth, 2010). In short, there is more to new towns than meets the eye: They represent an evolving urban world; they are Chinese and also global; they are physically peripheral compared to consolidated centralities and yet also define “new“ centralities in a broader urban field. It doesn’t matter if they are beautiful or ugly, empty or filled. They ask questions and question us: Where are their boundaries? What is their relationship with the urbanisation processes they are part of? Which economic, political and design mechanisms create and legitimise them? For whom are the houses, streets, stations, start-ups, skyscrapers and shopping centres intended? What kind of city and architecture is designed and built in and by these new settlements? What orders, rules and hierarchies exist in these spaces which, taken together, deny what exists and assert an alleged novelty? New towns are designed and built; they are real and virtual; they are specific and generalised examples of an urbanity that cannot be pigeonholed, placed into predefined categories, or inserted into consolidated interpretation and design models. They elude attempts to include their characteristics within the vagueness of tabula rasa, negation, mistake and defect: cities built from scratch (Herbert and Murray, 2015); examples of fast urbanisation disconnected from its physical and social context, global in form, logic, players and the imaginary (Datta and Shaban, 2016); experiments of a dystopian urban future, with no depth or quality (Pow, 2015).

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We can either make light of this challenge or accept it as part of the history of cities, full of contamination and hybridisations in which “the centre of our urban imaginary has often shifted” (Secchi, 2005, p. 168). The ambiguity of new towns is not only an ineliminable fact, it is also a possibility to shake up categories and models and question these simultaneously simple and complex objects as if they were litmus tests absorbing and reverberating the characteristics and contradictions of Chinese urbanisation processes, quite beyond the exceptionality of demographic data. Retracing the processes that provide material and symbolic form to these places allows us to question the spatiality of transformation as if it were an outcome greater than the object in which it is implemented, both physically and in terms of the impact it creates, thereby encompassing multiple scales and dimensions. By adopting a flexible, open interpretative framework, Chinese new towns become a laboratory in which and from which we can observe the characteristics and current changes in contemporary cities (Wu, 2016 b): Questioning new towns is a way to question what cities are (and what have they become) in China and elsewhere.

What Are We Talking about when We Talk about Cities? Starting in the early twenty-first century, Koolhaas’s revisitation of Mao’s The Great Leap Forward (Koolhaas et al., 2002) was the mantra behind a wave of studies, research, scientific publications, photographic reportages and newspaper articles describing Chinese cities and the great urbanisation that spread across China since the late seventies (including: Friedmann, 2005; Harvey, 2005; Wu, 2006 and 2007; Logan, 2008; Ren, 2013; Wang, Kee and Gao, 2014; Zhang, LeGates and Zhao, 2016; Liang et al., 2016). If, in the early days, everyone concentrated primarily on the Pearl River Delta and Shanghai, after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the increasing presence of inter-

volves not only the cities which the complicated institutional set-up in China classifies as first-level centres – Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing – but also other big and small cities, villages and rural areas meandering and spreading everywhere, from Inner Mongolia to the provinces of Gansu and Guizhou (Lin, 2013). In many cases, urban models of central cities are reproduced in detail based on a mechanism that considers repeatability and emulation to be two of the most important values in an age-old culture in which the transmission of models in this vast territory has always been a key element. For example, in 2009, the government-sponsored Binhai New Area provided Northern China with a port as big as the ones in Shanghai (Central China) and Shenzhen (South China). The logistic and functional rationale behind the settlement included the construction of a Central Business District similar to that of Pudong in terms of image, size and spectacularity. However, the activation and role of the new

I. Introduction

national professionals and scholars, the focus rapidly shifted to other cities. And it’s still going strong. As strong as the endless increase in settlements and the non-stop housing boom covering the landscape with railways, dams, bridges, motorways, gated communities, skyscrapers and shopping centres, making China “the largest construction site in the world today” (Zhu, 2009, p. 169). This astonishing transformation in-

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port cannot be taken for granted: in fact, the enormous infrastructures that are still being built along the port actually bypass it, transporting the containers directly from the port to the central cities of Beijing and Tianjin. The signature style of urban China is the concentration of people, institutions, businesses, emulation, dynamism, speed, gigantism, spectacular buildings and events. Many books and articles begin by talking about numbers and the speed with which change takes place: between 1978 and 2014, the urban population increased from 18 % to 54.8 % of the total population of China. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China (2014), annual migratory flows involve over sixteen million inhabitants who move from rural to urban areas. The objective of State policies and the 2014–2020 National Urbanisation Plan is to achieve a 60 % urbanisation rate and an increase of one hundred million new inhabitants in urban areas by 2020 (Chan, 2014; Zhang, LeGates and Zhao, 2016).15 Huge numbers, exceptionally rapid changes and a violent process “unprecedented in the history of humanity” (Miller, 2012; World Bank, 2014) or, as David Harvey (2005) writes, “the largest mass migration the world has ever seen” (p. 127). But what amazes Harvey most (2012) is the “speculative scale” of Chinese urban development: although “urban development since the mid-nineteenth century, if not before, has always been speculative, (…) the speculative scale of Chinese development seems to be of an entirely different order than anything before in human history” (p. 60). Chinese exceptionality thus finds further confirmation. The data describes unquestionable processes of change which are, however, more questionable than they may appear at first sight. They are ambiguous and complex; they can be interpreted in different ways and refer to incomplete and contingent “objects” – urban population, cities – that are defined based on objectives, power relations, different institutional organisations and economic and social practices. What Roy (2016) highlights about India holds true for China: “The rural, like the urban, is not a morphological description, but rather an inscription of specific regulations and logics of territory, land and property” (p. 818). Rather than antinomic representations to more or less faithfully describe what exists (e.g., the different densities of the population and built), urban and rural are first and foremost organisational categories established by the State. These two words refer to different land regimes: urban land is owned by the State, while rural land is collectively owned.16 There is often no correspondence between Chinese urban delimitation and Western-style urban features: “The limit of the city (shi) administrative unit (…) generally comprises both city districts and counties. Thus, this ‘city’ includes both an urbanized core (high-density built-up area) and extensive rural areas, primarily agricultural but with occasional towns (zhen). The urban core, together with some close-in areas, is administratively divided into ‘city districts’ (shiqu), and the surrounding rural areas (with towns) into counties (xian). The city districts comprise the administratively defined urban area (…), while the counties are administratively rural” (Chan, 2007, pp. 386–387). Chan (2007, 2010 a and 2014) has repeatedly emphasised how, in China, not only the system used to collect and process socio-economic and demographic data, but also 18

the delimitations of cities are extremely confused and complex, so much so that answering an (ostensibly) simple question, “What is the biggest city in China?”, is rather embarrassing. In fact, it’s possible to choose between eight different urban population indicators. To answer the question, we would have to solve two dilemmas and then crosscheck them. The first dilemma is the traditional division of the Chinese population based on the household registration system established in 1958 (known as hukou). The hukou system divides the population into rural and urban residents; this has an important fallout in economic and social terms as well as for access to services. The system is behind the origin of the substantial difference between “urban pop­ ulation de facto” (i.e., the population in a city) and “urban population de jure” (i.e., the population in a city with an urban hukou).17 This differentiation involves data that is neither marginal nor negligible considering that roughly 20 % of the current urban population de facto does not have an urban hukou, and is therefore not an urban pop­ ulation de jure (Zhang, LeGates and Zhao, 2016). The second dilemma concerns the different “city types” in the Chinese institutional system: provincial-level cities, deputy-provincial cities, provincial capital, prefecture-level cities, county-level cities and towns (Ma, 2002; Chan, 2010 a).18 So which city and which urban population? We appear to be faced with an enigma, a huge puzzle that changes over a period of time and is practically impossible to solve.19 Between 1978 and 2003, the number of cities shot up from 193 to 658 (Liang et al., 2016); between 1983 and 1999, 380 counties were (administratively) turned into cities (Ma, 2002); between 1996 and 2006, 171 counties (mostly in suburban areas) were converted into urban districts (Wu, 2016 a). One of the city making modalities adopted in China is to administratively change the status of a place. The different forms of political action with which to pursue this “administrative urbanization” include: abolishing a county to establish a city, an entire county becoming a city and changing a county to a city, city-led counties (i.e., the decision to place the counties adjacent a city under the jurisdiction of said city) and changing suburban counties into city districts (Ma, 2002, p. 1560 et foll.).20 According to Sorace and Hurst (2016), administrative urbanisation is part of an extensive ensemble of tools used by local governments to achieve urbanisation: “from administrative border-drawing to expropriation of rural land and investment in expanding urban infrastructure” (p. 305); from the construction of an urban façade that looks like a city but has no “typically urban” infrastructures and economic activities, to the replica of famous cities and themed cities (like the very famous programme in Shanghai entitled “One city, nine

Since 1996, UN statistics have testified not only to a relentless increase in urban populations all over the world, but also to the imminent arrival of a veritable crossroads in history (urban population exceeding rural population; UNFPA , 2007). Much like the urban age thesis based on this data, so too does the extraordinary increase in urbanisation in China warrant a word of warning.21 The methodological and empirical limits as well as the theoretical and more radically ontological aporias which, according to Brenner and Schmidt (2014), contradict the urban age thesis, appear to also be the limits and aporias of the attempts to reliably certify urbanisation processes in China.22 One

I. Introduction

towns”).

19

aspect of our traditional difficulty is understanding what we’re talking about when we talk about urban populations (and cities) – i.e., whether we are talking about the population de facto or the population de jure, a provincial-level city or a town. This problem is compounded by the difficulties we have with the following: an extremely stratified and unstable institutional organisation; the enduring urban/rural differentiation used to define several populations; different regimes of land ownership and different rights; the “city making” modalities that cannot be pigeonholed into consolidated categories and, finally, the way in which cities are traditionally defined, studied and designed (Brenner, 2016).

Between the Exceptional and the Ordinary Reforms and opening up the market are behind the transition (or transformation, cfr. Ma, 2002) of the Chinese economic system and its declared objective: the construction of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Yeoh, 2010 b).23 Although vague, the objective reveals a rejection of the predefined categories of Western capitalism and the processes of change in former Soviet Bloc countries. It indicates “a trajectory (…) that is neither ‘communist’ nor ‘capitalist’, but a third path in which the state plays a synthetic leadership role which does not subject itself to the market capitalism” (Zhu, 2009, p. 169). This “third path” determines an even more vague “third space” (Wang, Kee and Gao, 2014, p. 6) ostensibly defining the hybrid statute of contemporary Chinese urbanisation; for years it has been repeatedly interpreted in an attempt to identify the forces and players behind this change.24 In many ways, the results of these studies remain unclear, but tend to converge in the hypothesis that the third path coincides with the advent of a “post-capitalist world system” (Tu, 1996; Ikeda, 2003; Nolan, 2004; Harvey, 2005). The system is apparently powered by a merger between the dominant role of the State, the socio-spatial methods used to organise urban life and regulate the rights of the population (in particular, the hukou system that creates the specific hukou-based urbanization described, for example, by Chan, 2014), and the ideological justification behind economic reforms and forms of urban growth (an emergent suburbanisation in which the most important centres would maintain a dominant administrative and functional role; Zhou and Logan, 2008; Pow, 2012). Merging all of the above would justify the exceptionalism of Chinese urbanisation, given “the often unique patterns of urbanization and urban growth (…), the unique measures and policies taken by the Chinese State to restrain urban growth and the unique future goals of national urban policies” (Ebanks and Cheng, 1990, p. 30). The thesis of Chinese exceptionalism applied to urbanisation – supported by many scholars, albeit each with their own viewpoint (Lin, 1994; Ma, 2002; Friedman, 2005; Logan, 2008) – facilitates our ability to acknowledge that Western urban theory is not suited to narrate (and understand) Chinese cities. From an interpretative point of view, this thesis forces us to move beyond the traditional notion of modernisation that considers a systemic process – triggered by emulation (of the West) and above all by a bottom-up approach (local entrepreneurialism) – as a repetition of similar processes 20

in all so-called developing contexts.25 According to Fulong Wu (2016 b), for example, the merger of different, divergent and contrary interpretative models, in particular Western neoliberalism and the Asian-Eastern developmental state could help to tackle the physical materialisation of Chinese cities (“fast urbanization” and impetuous economic growth) as well as the presence of forms, processes, dynamics etc. that cannot even be named using Western interpretative categories, be they traditional – Third World cities – or coined to tackle the changes in post-socialist cities. The hybridisation mentioned by Wu and many others is, however, achieved and determined by the hybridisation of different action models of the State (and more in general of public actors). This leads to a significant espousal of the exceptionalism thesis that tends to almost exclusively underline the role of the State and its institutions. Cities are thus hidden, neglected, “often treated as staging platforms where national urban policies are articulated and enacted” (Pow, 2012, p. 48). So when we consider urban China as unique and exceptional, we disregard everything which, in a more or less analytical and precise manner, we recognise as being the elements that make the city (as described, for example, by Iossifova, 2012 in Shanghai), whether or not they are the more or less direct products of the omnipresent and omniscient State. So how can we account for this merger between the exceptional and the ordinary, between Chinese specificities and global traits? Traits that are not global because they have been induced by current globalisation, but because they are inscribed in the city as a specific form of socio-spatial organisation, unlike (in what way?) other forms of spatial organisation (which forms?).26 These questions are not easy to answer when looking at China through a Westerner’s eyes. China is different, both as regards our Western urbanisation canons and the

characteristics” (Timberlake et al., 2014). On the contrary: Chinese cities are the most global, the most homogeneous and the most alike. Chinese exceptionalism therefore lies in the exceptionality of the new, urban, economic and political global centrality of China that converges in the New Silk Road strategies aimed at creating places, alliances and investments.28 In fact, the “One Belt One Road” worksites are the material symbol of a new geopolitical vision that claims leadership on the international stage by seeking centrality rather than hegemony. As a result, infrastructures and urbanisation play an absolutely crucial role. More than in any other location, this role is obvious in a place which has so far been marginal compared to the intensely developed coastal areas: Lanzhou new area, a new town approved by the Central Government. In the geographies of the New Silk Road, the desert valley where this new town is under

I. Introduction

ones provided by subaltern and post-colonial theories that reject Eurocentrism, propose the so-called “provincialisation” of urban theory (cfr. for example, the manifesto drafted by Sheppard, Leitner and Maringanti, 2013), and encourage us to consider the cities that are “off the map” or in the lower part of global city rankings (Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2009).27 China is not here. It is not off the map. Beginning in the late nineties, “more than forty-three Chinese cities had announced plans to become global cities” (Ren, 2011, p. 12). Chinese cities (and doubtless many projects for and in Chinese cities) are well and truly inscribed in the map of global cities, albeit with “Chinese

21

construction is in many ways an unusual protagonist and, in fact, is programmatically projected to be in the focus of a global vision. The brochures for potential investors describe Lanzhou new area as a logistics hub in the centre of the world, serving Asia, Africa and Europe. While this network concept would seem to make any local identity superfluous, the images in the brochure focus on the traditional features of the new town, mindful of the role played by these regions during the many centuries when trade passed along the old Silk Road. The “Chinese characteristics” refrain is perhaps indicative of a possible mediation which, however, should be applied everywhere and at all levels: neoliberalism, global cities, new towns, etc., with “European characteristics”, “Mediterranean characteristics” and “Italian characteristics”. As a result, generalisations are determined within national or at least areal canons; they define a tradition, a specific story capable of limiting extensions. Most of the literature about Chinese cities redefines their specificities, especially their links, affiliations, origins and roots; it is a reasoned attempt to preserve a deeply eroded heritage that is not only spatial. However, this kind of approach does not help us understand the way in which an ensemble of albeit localised specificities surpass local transformation processes. Say more, and speak of other things. Doreen Massey in For Space (2005) asks: “What if we open up the imagination of the single narrative to give space (literally) for a multiplicity of trajectories?” (p. 5). This kind of incitement encourages us not to lend less weight to a single narrative or a single place, but to focus more on its ability to say things that surpass it, that (also) speak of other things, that link places and issues in an unusual, open manner. So the point is not the adjective qualifying the different places, but the characteristics that require increasingly refined, pertinent, critical and accurate descriptions in order to try and elaborate on a few risky generalisations. It involves careful scrutiny. This is not easy when you look at objects, e. g., Chinese new towns, that move and change continuously. Nor does attention to detail help, since in the end it finds exceptionality in any ordinary fact. Of course, people in China live, play, dwell, work and play sports very differently in different contexts, and undoubtedly very differently compared to the rest of the world. However, Chinese cities, and Chinese new towns in particular, are so varied that they contain everything found elsewhere: in the recently finished pristine spaces in new towns, along the roads, in the squares, gardens, parks and subway stations, between the shops and new houses where people are just moving in; it is here that the pioneers (i.e., the middle class) re-establish customs and practices very similar to the ones present in inhabited spaces in many other old and new cities, near and far. Architecture and urban design play a key role; they introduce increasingly qualitative experiences into the international debate, experiences that are no longer exclusively determined by the exceptionality of some buildings, but require the autonomy of a broader critical discourse. This discourse initially involves the role of design; the latter is used in new towns not to solve problems that have already been posed, but as a simulation to build and structure the problem, and with it reality. The maquette of Tianfu new town in 2030, displayed at the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall in Chengdu, 22

shows the future city even before a decision had been taken as to the number of its inhabitants, activities and functions: iconic and concise, the design takes into account the fact that it is impossible to foresee them, but will instead help to define them. In Tianducheng new town, near Hangzhou, a decision was taken to design Parisian-type architectural districts, thereby pre-empting many political decisions. By providing them with a shared identity, it was instrumental in accelerating the creation of an urban community made up of immigrants with different backgrounds (Bosker, 2013). Another field in which architecture plays a key role is the construction of new leisure centres. As a way to compensate the scale of the transformation, almost every new town has oversized recreational areas and amenities. Often the creation of an artificial natural environment and the design of new landscapes within the city produces excellent results (from lakes to wetlands – for example, the park designed by Turenscape in Qunli New Town near Harbin). Experience after experience, new town after new town, through emulation and competition, the framework of the implementations and innovations tends to change radically or, at least, to radically change the way we view them. The season of exceptionalism in urban China appears to be at an end, and the season of its stigmatisation seems to have run its course. A much quieter urban China is on the horizon; a transformation process which, although ambiguous, problematic and suspect, needs to be examined, described and narrated.

What Does a New Town Do? For roughly two years, between 2015 and 2017, a group of architects, urban planners, geographers, anthropologists, landscape historians and urban historians studied Chinese new towns starting in three places. The first is Tongzhou New Town located on the edge of the eastern suburban expansion of Beijing. The second is Zhaoqing New Area, the new town currently being built 20 kilometres from the old city of Zhaoqing, in the Guangdong Province, at the western end of the Pearl River Delta. The third is Zhengdong, near Zhengzhou, (Henan Province), a new town that is almost completely finished.29 Although awareness of the differences between district, city, area and town, Tongzhou, Zhaoqing and Zhengdong seem to be good examples for studying issues that go beyond the specificities of each location and examine broader, problems and trends,30 the three new towns have not been chosen based on a classic logic of comparison.31 Besides, they have absolutely nothing in common: location, size, spaces, economies, inhabitants and when and how they were built. The aim was even less to dissect their complexity – a traditional approach that turns the subject into a case study. The aim was not to deconstruct, critically interpret or present an interpreta-

However, it’s also true that new towns can be extremely simplified, for example by circumscribing them within the limits of a masterplan, or within a body of instruments regulating their construction or existence. We’ve already mentioned this dual state: a

I. Introduction

tive hypothesis. It is difficult to understand what a new town is. Providing atlases and definitions, or identifying characteristics and superimposing models, does not help to clarify an ambiguity that is partly constitutive and partly contingent.

23

complexity capable of rapidly contracting into a simple image that is easy to narrate and often ostensibly neutral and clear-cut, just like the simulations that put new towns on the market. As in many other discourses about new towns, this research has also tried to instrumentally use the simplicity of these strange objects in order to understand not what they are, but what they do. So, if indeed it is possible to shed light on an action without revealing all the opacity of those who produce it, the guiding light of our research has been the question what does a new town do? What role does a new town play in the incredible urbanisation process of which it is a part? What can help us understand this process? What does it reveal? Tongzhou, Zhaoqing and Zhengdong are certainly not places ignored by literature on urban China. Most studies performed in the last twenty years have focused on Beijing and the Pearl River Delta. Likewise, Zhengzhou has been repeatedly studied after the important transformations that have taken place there. We could have chosen less well-known and unfamiliar places, just like many current studies have opted to do (e. g., Kendall, 2015). The research hypothesis was that questioning new towns starting in Beijing, the Pearl River Delta and Zhengzhou allowed us to discuss the new spaces currently under construction (including) in relation to what has already been said and demonstrated about these three enormous conurbations. We could even go so far as to re-examine consolidated interpretations and analyses. So, ours were three revisitations to understand what the three cities – under construction, on the drawing board and recently finished – are doing in these three well-known places. Tongzhou means revisiting Beijing, its logic of expansion and decentralisation. The district dons the image of a new town, at least in the Overall Planning of Beijing (2004–2020), followed by the plan drafted in 2005, completely redesigning the existing area which has now been completely built. Since then, the gradual erosion of the old city has led to the construction of the new town which in fits and starts has continued up to the present day. While the transformations were initially rather slow, in 2010 Tongzhou was relaunched by the Tenth Congress of the Municipal Committee as “the new international modern city”, a city in which the capital was meant to invest heavily. And so it came to pass. So much so that in 2012 the city topped the ranking of new towns “with the highest investment value in China” (Shao, 2015, p. 377). However, it was in November 2015 that Tongzhou grew in both size and quality. That year the government announced it wanted to shift the offices of the Beijing municipality to Tongzhou, an important decision that would double its population. Tongzhou will be a new town for more than two million inhabitants. It will also be the seat of the new administrative centre of the Beijing Municipality and have a new CBD . Finally, apart from being new, it will be international and modern, completely redesigned by a team of designers selected after an international competition. Zhaoqing means revisiting the Pearl River Delta after studies concentrating on its densification and saturation. Like Tongzhou, Zhaoqing will double in size and population, and the administrative centre will be shifted. However, the numbers differ in comparison to Beijing. The new area – or at least the area earmarked in the 2012 masterplan 24

to cover an area of 115 square kilometres which until then had been chiefly agricultural – will accommodate 600,000 new inhabitants before 2030. However, the numbers differ radically if we consider the seamless urbanisation extending east along the Xi Jiang River from Zhaoqing to Foshan and Guangzhou, occupying all available flat land. In fact, in 2010, Zhaoqing was included in the Development Plan of GuangzhouFoshan-Zhaoqing Economic Circle, i.e., in the Development Plan of the Pearl River Delta Region (2008–2020). Being part of the plan makes all the difference. It allows the city to become a protagonist (which it previously was not), and gives it the confidence to play a strategic role in the entire region. The main role of the Zhaoqing New Area, currently ensured by increasingly widespread regional infrastructure, appears to be that of a small city, an ecological and healthy liveable city: a park providing a good life, close to big rivers and mountains still covered in woods. Zhengdong means once again examining the optimisation of an inland area believed to be crucial for the Rise of Central China Plan (RCCP) adopted in 2004. Actually, the history of Zhengdong began a little earlier. The new town was announced and designed in 2001 as an addition to Zhengzhou, capital of Henan: one million new inhabitants and, again in this case, a doubling of the surface area (more than 150 square kilometres of new built space), several buildings, the new CBD and, above all, the new high-speed train station. In fact, Zhengdong is part of the reinforcement of the infrastructure system in China, which in recent years has led to the construction of a new airport, a new subway, new railways and stations for high-speed trains, as well as a fourth ring road connected to the main Beijing-Guangzhou road along which Zhengzhou is a crucial intersection. A large area of Zhengdong has been built and most of it is inhabited, but it still continues to grow and spread: Zhengbian is the linear city, designed between 2006 and 2009. It will cover roughly 300 square kilometres and will merge with Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, more than 50 kilometres east. Finally, it will gradually absorb many other small and big cities in this central region. Once again, the construction of new towns should be interpreted as part of much bigger areas and plans – for example, the project by the Zhongyuan City Group that in Henan promotes integrated programmes for the cities of the Central Plains of China. Its ambitious aim is to make Zhongyuan one of the richest and biggest conurbations in the country.32 Three revisitations in three places that have been extensively studied as regards their form and the processes of their urban expansion; the new towns have contributed by decentralising (Tongzhou), densifying (Zhaoqing) and enhancing (Zhengdong). Revisit-

the Vinex programme for the Randstad, and Zhengdong is not Euralille. And yet, in a sort of enlarged exploded diagram, the narratives and representations of Chinese urban expansion chiefly continue to feed on this kind of image, incapable of recognising distances and differences, save the ones involving scale and measure: in China

I. Introduction

ing to these places means trying to re-discuss these narratives and possibly chip away at them. How does Tongzhou affect Beijing? How does it decentralise and rebalance? How does Zhaoqing contribute to the saturation of the Pearl River Delta? How can we say that Zhengdong enhances the centrality of Zhenzhou, of Zhongyuan? Tongzhou and La Défense certainly have different histories; likewise, Zhaoqing is not part of

25

everything is bigger, but if we change the lens we use, we basically always see the same objects. So in this book, revisiting Beijing, the Pearl River Delta and Zhengzhou is a way to get a better understanding of what these new towns do in these spaces, how they affect them and how they change them (if they do). It also allows us to re-discuss any old categories which are perhaps no longer suited to describing contemporary cities, whether in China or elsewhere. By adopting this approach, Chinese new towns become an object of study as well as a specific viewpoint with which to examine contemporary urbanisation and tackle the fact that we need to radically rethink the vocabulary, conceptualisations and even the epistemology of the urban (Amin, 2013; Amin and Thrift, 2017).

About This Book This book is divided into three parts separated by three primarily iconographic sections: a photographic essay by Samuele Pellecchia, who has travelled for a long time through the spaces under construction of the new towns; three synthetic profiles of the new towns of Zhaoqing, Zhengdong and Tongzhou, in order to provide information about their short history and present the spatial features emerging in these places; and a series of maps to highlight the complexity of the space in which the new towns are inserted. The four chapters in the first part of the book focus on several general issues related to the new town phenomenon, while the more significant results of the fieldwork are provided in part two and part three. In part one, several authors discuss the contradictory role that new towns, new districts, new cities and new areas play in urban expansion policies in terms of programming and planning tools; they focus on the relationships between “go west” policies and new town building; they discuss the role of architecture and design practices; they examine the position Chinese new towns occupy in a contemporary narrative which, working backwards, focuses on the return to Western genealogies; they also reflect on the relationships between social change and urbanisation processes. Part two concentrates on several specific spaces. Each space can be considered a sort of spy: it provides clues about the relationship between the new town and the greater urban area where it is situated. The photographs help identify telltale traces and signs. The selected spaces are almost “everywhere”; they are continuously seen and used and have their own functional and aesthetic centrality. They are the exhibition halls that sell parts of the city at every street corner. They are the high-rise apartments on the top floors of the homogeneous nuclei of buildings constructed exclusively to be inhabited. They are the underground spaces: indeed, there is a new town under the new town, just as big and just as lived in, made up of infrastructures for the mobility and functioning of the city above ground. Finally, they are the big and small parks that between broad, extended supple forms create a spatial layout which in other respects is rigid. What do these spaces do? What do the exhibition halls do? They undoubtedly sell the city, but which part of the city? The district? The metropolis? The region? What do 26

the underground spaces do? Do they amass? Redistribute? Are they designed based on a logic of densification? What do the apartments on the top floors of residential blocks do? How do they fit (if indeed they fit) in a new town? What do the parks do? Do they insert an ecological approach in the design of new towns? The last section of the book asks in which space is the urban organised; it examines the relationship between new towns and the somewhat broader undefined space around them in order to understand the logics, orders and imaginaries that create this new urban world. The goal of our research is to open the new towns and rediscuss excessively simple narrations that force them into conceptual models that are too old, too poor and too standard. The traditions behind new towns are outdated; the models currently used by the market to renew them are ephemeral and transitory (eco-city, techno city, lowcarbon city, healthy city, smart city, etc.); the morphologies that inspired their spatial functions are poor; the expansion strategies tasked with decentralisation, completion and enhancement are standard. Perhaps it’s true: Chinese new towns are neither very exemplary nor new. When viewed from the point of view of the relationship they create with their environment, new towns do however appear more interesting than when observed within their boundaries. This is not due to any original traits they may have when compared to the external environment, but rather to the way in which

1 Although the number of new cities being built or under construction is unknown, it is nevertheless considerable. For example, according to Fang and Yu (2016), “by the end of January, 2014 , there were 106 various new urban districts under construction. Among them 13 were approved at the national level, 38 were approved at the provincial level, and 64 were approved at the municipal level. 19 such new districts occupy total land area over 1000 km ² each, 10 are within 500–1000 km ² and 40 are within 100–500 km ². At the national level, there were only 3 new urban districts approved prior to 2010, namely, Shanghai’s Pudong New District (1992), Tianjin’s Binhai New District (2006), and Chongqing’s Two-Rivers New Districts (2010). The Zhoushan Islands New District in 2011, and Lanzhou New District and Nansha New District in 2012 , and Xi’an-Xianyang New District and GuiyangAnshun New District in 2014 were added afterwards in a hope to replicate the successful experiences in the three previous new districts. (…) Not only are many cities seeking to expand their development spaces via the proposal and construction of new urban districts, but also do the ones that have already got approved seek further expansion of their new districts. (…) Many cities deem new

urban district construction as a golden opportunity to expand their urban spaces, hence accelerate their urbanization rate (again, a typical ‘more the better,’ ‘quantity over quality’ mindset from the planned economy legacy). Some cities even have more than one new urban district. (…) The immediate consequences are that there are more new urban districts than needed” (pp. 34–36). 2 Wade Shepard (2015) emphasises how “nearly 600 new cities have already been established across China in roughly sixty-five years, and there is no sign of a slowdown yet. (…) 114 cities in just twelve of China’s thirty-two provincial level areas were in the process of building over 200 new towns. (…) [N]early every city in the country is expanding – some are doubling or even tripling their size” (p. 5). 3 Since the mid-2000 s the real estate sector, an industrial pillar in China’s economic development, has been heavily affected by an increase in the demand for investment and, thus, by the financial strategies of families, even when faced with weak (or lack of) other possible investments (Ong, 2014; Cao, 2015). Regarding the characteristics of the Chinese real estate market and its connotation as a “real estate bubble” cfr. Glaser et al., 2017. 4 From the eighties onwards, decentralisation processes

I. Introduction

their contradictory assertion pries open a world, and with it the language to describe it. Considered thus, yes, new towns are new. They oblige us to radically rethink how to interpret and make the city.

27

took place, in different ways and different forms, all over the world (Rodríguez-Pose and Sandall, 2008). Everywhere, legitimisation of these processes involved three topics: identity, good governance and economic efficiency. In China, in particular, “the advantages of decentralisation lie in the economic potential to be unlocked through local knowledge. In this, the Chinese case shares a key feature with (…) other cases and the unusual Chinese political context does not seem to have resulted in a particularly unusual discourse on decentralization” (ibid., p. 65). According to Harvey (2012), “decentralization is one of the best ways to exercise centralized control. The idea was to liberate regional and municipal governments, and even villages and townships, to seek their own betterment within a framework of centralized control and market coordinations. Successful solutions arrived at through local initiatives then became the basis for the reformulation of central government policies” (pp. 63–64). 5 In Western countries, more specifically in Europe, political-institutional decentralisation processes were accompanied by the gradual reorganisation, restructuring and redefinition of the spatial scales involved in economic-spatial transformations and relative levels of government (Brenner, 1999 and 2004), thereby facilitating not only the gradual “emergence” of supranational and infra-national territorial subdivisions, but also “networks of power” not linked to explicit processes of institutional reorganisation and restructuring of functions and competences (Strange, 1998). According to Wu (2016 a), in the Chinese context these rescaling processes are “not (…) a continuation of decentralization of state governance but rather (…) a countermeasure towards localism (based on individual cities). It is not an outcome of the politics of distribution within the city-region (Jonas, 2012) but rather the central state’s endeavour to reverse decentralization and identify a specific scale (the urban cluster, or the networked city-regions) to impose its regulatory control” (p. 1148). 6 “Because the concept of ‘transition’, as used in the literature on postsocialist development, assumes a process of change toward a preconceived and fixed target, it is not entirely appropriate for China where economic reforms seem to have aimed at a number of moving targets. Instead, I prefer the concept ‘transformation’, which avoids the implication of the inevitability of ‘transition’. Moreover, China’s economic transformation away from state socialism should be viewed as a prolonged process of change with unpredictable consequences, instead of as a transitory short phase leading to a Western capitalist system of production” (Ma, 2002, p. 1546). 7 Regarding global city-regions as spatial units of global economic dynamics, see the very famous book by Scott (2001), in which, in chapter 1, the authors write: “The concept of global city-regions can be traced back to the “world cities” idea of Hall (1966) and Friedmann and Wolff (1982), and to the “global cities” idea of Sassen (1991). We build here on these pioneering efforts, but in a way that tries to extend the meaning of the concept in economic, political and territorial terms, and above all by an effort to show how city-regions increasingly function as essential spatial nodes of the global economy and as distinctive political

28

actors on the world stage. In fact, rather than being dissolved away as social and geographic objects by processes of globalization, city-regions are becoming increasingly central to modern life, and all the more so because globalization (its effects magnified by shifts in technology) has reactivated their significance as bases of all forms of productive activity, no matter whether in manufacturing or services, in high-technology or low-technology sectors. As these changes have begun to run their course, it has become increasingly apparent that city in the narrow sense is less an appropriate or viable unit of local social organization than the city or networks of cities in regional context” (Scott et al., 2001, p. 11). From the point of view of spatial organisation, “whereas most metropolitan regions in the past were focused mainly on one or perhaps two clearly-defined central cities, the city-regions of today are becoming increasingly polycentric or multi-clustered agglomerations. (…) Moreover, in virtually all global city-regions there has been a rapid growth of outer cities and edge cities, as formerly peripheral or rural areas far from old downtown cores have developed as urban centers in their own right. The blurring of once rigid and clearly defined boundaries has been an integral part of the globalization process and the new information age, and this is now reflected in the increasingly ambiguous meaning of what is urban, suburban, exurban, or indeed rural or not urban at all. Thus, what has been happening can be described as a simultaneous and complex process of decentralization and recentralization of the city-region” (ibid., p. 18). 8 “New districts, also called new areas, are typically massive, county-level administrative zones that have been marked for large-scale urbanization projects or simply added on to an existing municipality. New cities are just that: new, centralized, ‘downtown’, urban areas that consist of a commercial core, and oftentimes, a CBD (Central Business District), which are surrounded by residential areas, schools, hospitals and green spaces. (…) New cities can be their own county-level division or a part of a district. (…) New towns are smaller scale, centralized areas that tend to have a diminutive commercial area that is surrounded by residential neighbourhoods. They are generally built within districts, counties or county-level cities” (Shepard, 2015, pp. 44–45). 9 Cfr., http://www.newtown institute.org/spip.php?rubrique52 (Accessed: 29 August 2017 ). 10 For a critique of the Chinese “adoption” of North American new urbanism, see Wu, 2007 and 2009, where he highlights how the principles of new urbanism were adopted by developers to “package and brand” real estate initiatives in suburban areas (thereby sparking the radical critique of new urbanism by, for example, Harvey, 1997; Smith, 2002). 11 As in the case of the eco-cities studied by Austin Williams (2017, p. 20) who, citing the ambiguous (to put it midly) definition of the government’s 2015 Green Book – “ecocities are ecological cities with Chinese characteristics” – underscores how they can be considered new city brands rather than brand new cities. 12 The Seventh Five-Year Plan assigned specific tasks to each area: “export-oriented industrialization and foreign trade in the eastern region; agriculture and energy development in the central region; and animal husbandry and

I. Introduction

mineral exploitation in the western region” (Fan, 1997, of rural land is more controversial, even despite the gradp. 623). By doing so it contributed to the increase in ual evolution in the institutional and social structures of regional inequalities. In fact, even if the economic growth rural areas (Ho, 2001; Cao et al., 2008). 17 According to of recent decades has led to a significant reduction in the Chan (2014), “hukou-based urbanization has helped Chipoverty rate (with a drastic reduction in the percentage na to generate a huge army of cheap laborers (…) who of the population living in extreme poverty, from 39.5 % work and live in the city, but are not part of the urban of the total in 1981 to 1.32 % in 2011; see Zhang, LeGates population by law” (p. 3). Intense, internal migratory flows and Zhao, 2016, p. 20), it has increased regional imbal- have sparked a revision of the hukou. The National Urance, with a large gap in growth and income between banization Plan (2014–2020), presented by Prime Ministhe coastal and inland regions. During the nineties, for ter Li Keqiang (2013) (according to Shepard, 2015, “the example, real GDP pro capite went up by 95 % in inland architect of China’s broader new city movement”, p. 49) regions and by 144 % in coastal regions (Fu, 2004). 13 The as the tool with which to promote a “people oriented” urexpression “Chinese dream” was introduced by Xi Jing­ banisation, in fact envisages a gradual redefinition of the ping in 2012 and reused since then in “domestic” offi- hukou, so as to increase, amongst other things, the purcial speeches and international meetings. However, it re- chasing power of the new urban inhabitants and facilitate mains a vague expression which, as highlighted by Wang an economic shift in the country from an export-driven (2014), is reminiscent of the “great rejuvenation of the economy to a consumption-driven economy (Chan, 2014; Chinese nation” (p. 6) used in the early nineties to which, Liang et al., 2016). Before 2020, one hundred million ruhowever, a “positive” approach is added in order ral migrants, in particular those who move to small and to make China – and Chinese cities – “a better place, medium-sized inland cities, should be guaranteed an urwith more strength, prosperity, and advancements” ban hukou (Liang et al., 2016). 18 “In the contemporary (ibid., p. 11). 14 The pathologies of Chinese urbanisation era, four main administrative levels form the hierarchy of are emphasised in many reportage and articles about the governmental system. (…) At the highest level is the ghost towns. Regarding their media construction, cfr. central state in Beijing. At the subnational level are provWoodwort and Wallace, 2017. Ordos Kangbashi in Inner inces (sheng) (including the four centrally administered Mongolia is probably the most photographed and narrat- municipalities (zhixia shi, Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and ed “ghost town”; see, for example, http://edition.cnn.com/ Chongqing) and autonomous regions (zizhi qu, autonostyle/article/china-ordos-ghost-town/index.html; http:// mously governed areas of ethnic minority groups). At the c o n t e n t . t i m e . c o m / t i m e / p h o t o g a l l e r y/ 0 , 2 9 3 0 7 , next level are cities (shi) of different types, followed by 1975397,00.html; Shenfu New Town, in the north-east counties (xian) and county-level cities. Below counties are Province of Liaoning: http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/ towns (zhen) and townships (xiang) or villages, which asia/2016 /09/china-ghost-towns-developers-run-mon- form the top echelon of the rural administrative hierarchy. ey-160914084316042.html; http://www.washingtonpost. (…) While city-level appears to be one administrative rank com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-hard-hit-rust-belt-reflects- in the four-level hierarchy, four different administrative the-countrys-economic-woes/ 2015 / 08 / 24 /d 5 d 827 ranks exist within the city-level. These are the centrally 52-45bf-11e5 -9 f53 -d1e3 ddfd0 cda_story.html?utm_term=. administered municipalities or province-level cities, sub7b5 c6 e8 c9127 or Lanzhou New Area in the Gansu Prov- province-level cities, prefecture-level cities and countyince, see, for example, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ level cities. The state also organises cities by three differworld/asia_pacific/along-the-new-silk-road-a-city-built-on- ent types of administrative characteristics or legal status, sand-is-a-monument-to-chinas-problems/ 2016 / 05 / which are the province-level cities, cities with districts 29/982424 c0 -1d09 -11e6 -82c2 a7dcb313287d_story.htm- (subprovince- or prefecture-level) and cities without disl?utm_term=.0842263 c00 bb or http://www.theguardian. tricts. Moreover, there are currently six different categories com/cities/ 2017/mar/ 21 /china-west-ghost-city-comes- of special administrative status for select cities; these into-life-lanzhou-new-area, which highlights, half amazed clude the four province-level cities, the special economic and half incredulous, that the ghost town has mysteriously zones, coastal open cities, and cities designated to experifilled up. (Accessed: 21 March 2017 ). For a different pres- ment with new economic programs, among others” (Cartier, entation about Chinese ghost cities, questioning the time 2005, pp. 24–25). The cities included in the first two levels required for a new town to be filled up with people and have considerable political and administrative power as life before being able to stigmatise it as a failure, see well as extensive representative power nationally and inShepard, 2015. 15 “A Blueprint for China’s new urbaniza- ternationally. Although most Chinese cities are small to tion: 2014–2020 ”, outcome of the Eighteenth Central medium in size, and are therefore included in the last Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP ), No- three levels of the administrative hierarchy, a description vember 2013. 16 This is specified in Article 8 of the Land of urban China takes into account only the cities in the Administration Law (originally approved in 1986, and then first two levels, as highlighted by Ren (2013), a big part modified several times. The last modification was in of international literature has focused chiefly on the inter2004). Obviously the land-ownership regime has multiple pretation of the transformation processes of the main effects on the organisational forms and modes of the real cities, and placed the social and spatial changes that have estate market and on the way in which local authorities occurred in less important cities on the back burner. can act. While reference to state property is clearer and 19 “In fact, frustrated observers over the last quarter of straightforward, reference to the “collective” ownership the 20 th century proclaimed the Chinese urban popula-

29

tion to be an insoluble “enigma” (Oreleand and Burnham, 1982), or, at the very least, an “immense puzzle” (Forshall, 1989). The situation has not improved tangibly in the early 21st century” (Chan, 2007, p. 384). 20 “Because a city formed under the policy ‘changing county to city’ contains an extensive rural area as well as a large rural population, and its areal extent is greatly expanded, it is a city only in the legal sense. There is also the problem regarding the meaning of ‘city population’. To the uninformed, the city’s total population could be misconstrued as ‘urban population’ whereas in reality only a small percentage of people living in the urban core are actually urban” (Ma, 2002, p. 1560). 21 The Global Report on Human Settlements (1996) drafted by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements begins as follows: “As we approach the new millennium, the world stands at a veritable crossroads in history” (Un-Habitat, 1996, p. xxi). The forecast of veritable crossroads was confirmed in 2007: “In 2008 , the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: for the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost 5 billion. Many of the new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of cities in developing countries, the future of humanity itself, all depend very much on decisions made now in preparation for this growth” (UNFPA , 2007, p. 1). Since then, all UN reports always (or almost always) start by indicating a point of no return: the urban world population has exceeded the rural population and, according to the 2014 statistics, 54 % of the global population resides in areas defined as urban (United Nations – Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2014). The tone of these statistics, and the comments and indications accompanying them, swings between triumphalist and alarmist: the advent of the “urban era” and the “century of the city” (Brenner and Schmidt, 2014; Gleeson, 2014). The urban century or urban age thesis spread quickly and pervasively, so much so that, in Brenner’s words (2013), “it has become one of the dominant metanarratives through which our current planetary situation is interpreted, both in academic circles and in the public sphere” (p. 85). 22 “Despite its long history in urban demography and its increasingly widespread influence in contemporary scholarly and policy discourse, the urban age thesis is a flawed basis on which to conceptualize contemporary world urbanization patterns: it is empirically untenable (a statistical artifact) and theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception)” (Brenner and Schmidt, 2014 , p. 734). 23 According to Wei (2015) in particular, the Chinese transition is in fact a triple transition in which decentralisation, the opening up of the market, and globalisation intersect and are superimposed. Their role is in itself incomprehensible; it only assumes a specific “Chinese characteristic” when combined with the other factors. For another view about if and when China can still be considered socialist, one which focuses less on “models of socialism” and more on the possible “descriptive characteristics” of a socialist system (especially: capacity, intension, redistribution and responsiveness), see Naughton, 2017. 24 Wang et al. (2014) attempt to summarise the most important inter-

30

pretations. They identify three dominant theoretical perspectives behind the recent discourse about contemporary Chinese cities: the institutional perspective, which can be used to retrace the decentralisation process leading to current pluralist institutionalism; the rational choice perspective focusing more on bottom-up processes and on urbanization from below (Ma and Li, 1993; Lin, 2007 and 2011); the procedural-dynamic perspective, more inclined to emphasise the merger of multiple forces. In this trend, for example, Webster (2002), identifies at least four-level drivers, in other words: external forces (international investments, role of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, global imprintings such as the “American Dream” etc.); central government policies; regional and provincial policies; and actions promoted locally by individual municipalities (Wang et al., 2014, p. 5). 25 This idea was part of the convictions of the theorists of development in the fifties. Lasch (1991) disagreed and reiterated the fundamental role of the State in economic and social change and its ability to assume different initiatives vis-à-vis internal and external forces. 26 The distinction between city and non-city is radically questioned by the thesis of planetary urbanization, in other words the contemporary version of the “complete urbanisation of society” predicted by Henri Lefebvre in the seventies (cfr., Brenner, 2014; Brenner and Schmidt, 2014 and 2015). The great merit of the planetary urbanization thesis is that it radically deconstructs the urban and city categories: the city – delimited, agglomerated, territorialised – is no longer considered notable as a significant theoretical and empirical object because the differences between city and non-city appear to be increasingly vague given the now widespread global dynamics of urbanisation: “there is, in short, any outside to the urban world; the non-urban has been largely internalized within an uneven yet planetary process of urbanization” (Brenner and Schmidt, 2014 , p. 750). Nevertheless, according to Scott and Storper (2015), “even in the twenty first century, when, for the first time in human history, most of human existence is geographically contained in cities, not all or even the greater part of this existence – pace Lefebvre – can be described as being intrinsically urban” (p. 13). For a critique of the planetary urbanization by Brenner and Schmidt from the point of view of southern urbanism, cfr. Schindler (2017 ) and, more specifically, regarding the persistence of the distinction between urban and rural, cfr. Roy, 2016. 27 Ong and Roy (2011) adopt a similar position in their study of the “ongoing art of being global” of Asian cities that challenges both the political economy of globalisation and the centrality assigned to the subaltern agency by post-colonial studies. By trying to understand how an urban situation can be both specific and global, and by considering the city as a continuous place of change and experimentation, the “wordling practices” of Asian cities are thus seen as “projects that attempt to establish or break established horizons of urban standards in and beyond a particular city” (Ong, 2011, p. 4). 28 Cfr. Special Issues of East Asia, 2015 edited by Shen, 2015 a and 2015 b. 29 For a more detailed description of the characteristics of these three places, and additional

I. Introduction

literature about the towns, cfr. the contribution by Fian- ative approach, cfr. Robinson, 2011. 32 “At the provincial danese, Ramondetti and Safina in this book. 30 Tong- level, Henan Province is among the most active. From zhou is generally labelled as both new town and new city, February 2010 to January 2013, in less than 3 years, there even if it is a district. Zhaoqing is a new area, as per its were 14 new provincial districts approved. With the existtoponym. Administratively speaking, Zhengdong is a new ing Zhengzhou and Luoyang new districts, there were district. 31 Regarding the limits of traditional compara- 16 approved new urban districts in Henan Province alone tive urban studies to understand cities in “a world of (over 40 % of the national total)” (Fang and Yu, 2016, cities”, as well as the possibility of innovating the compar- p. 34).

31

Walking Through Samuele Pellecchia Generally speaking my work involves observing. That’s what I’m asked to do. I pick up my cultural baggage and material luggage, charge my cameras and off I go. I try to travel light, in every respect. But often it’s not easy, because the reason why I’ve been asked to take pictures nearly always has an underlying rhetoric: the answer to the question lies in the question itself. And as far as I’m concerned, however good my intentions are, I always risk falling into the trap of what I already know. The trap of the images I’ve already seen and have stuck in my brain, over my eyes. China is no exception; it has been so extensively observed and judged in the last few decades that it was almost impossible for me to try and look at the country without those deep-rooted Western prejudices that I often find myself criticising in other people’s observations or interpretations. Although I set out with the best intentions of keeping an open mind and maintaining intellectual freedom, I landed in China fully aware that my extremely entrenched inclination to classify, file, memorise, judge and, ultimately, appropriate myself intellectually, would be triggered in no time. That my mental colonialism would soon take over just as soon as I found myself in front of something I had already seen, or a situation that was hard to decipher, one where the signs could somehow be pigeonholed into a known category. I think this did happen to me, at least to begin with. Despite the research approach that was purposely left open-ended, as was the result, I repeated my pattern and redid the homework I was already familiar with. I used the name I had already heard; I reproduced the images I had already seen. And just as soon as I had slipped into this comfortable vision, I realised that nevertheless Tongzhou, Zhengdong and Zhaoqing existed and grew. That despite my cultural baggage and all my ideas about the country­ side, cities, villages, wellbeing, practicality, beauty, speed, history, etc., I hadn’t understood anything. That from one day to the next Zhengdong had already changed, and the more I tried to fit the new town into one of my mental and visual pigeonholes, the more Tongzhou would come out the other side. And vice versa. The way these three new towns are built escapes me. Just as soon as I had put the inhabitants of Zhengdong into a model, they would build a floor on top of the ones that the builder had constructed in the organised design of the terraced houses. Woefully destroying my pigeonholes. Because just as soon as I began to consider the curves as a symbol of wealth, and straight lines as a sign of ordinariness, I was immediately contradicted by the children’s playground or the care lavished on the hedge planted under the viaduct. China and its new towns rise skywards whether or not I interpret them. Whether or not I photograph them. Whether or not everyone else, like me, that’s photographing them,

criticises them, classifies them, verbally dismantles them or simply “mentions” them. New towns are huge objects. They exist! Standing out against the sky or sprawling along riverbanks and canals. Round and curved, or long and straight. Immobile or mobile in the pathways around them, in the streets and railways built around them. At the same time, new towns are images of a new urban future those who build them, for those who watch them grow, for those who want to own them. In the practically inconceivable possibility of being able to own them. Possession is part of being Chinese. Because this endeavour is their great endeavour. I’ve understood this much, perhaps (again – perhaps). During my meanderings with eyes wide open, yes, I’ve seen how straight and curved lines divide two kinds of possibilities. The rich curved line, the more modest straight line, but nevertheless not rural. Many times have I seen this situation elsewhere, and others have contradicted me. But as always, and therefore in this case too, it depends on how one looks at things. So I think I’ve understood that these new towns nonetheless represent a possibility. Therefore they exist. They exist because we watch them grow. And often the smiles I’ve found around them have taught me so much. Much more than my cultural prejudices. The wonderful old men sitting on the edges of the worksites, who in Italy will impart advice, impart the same advice in Zhengdong and Zhaoqing, but then they go on to tell you that they’ll live in them and that this doesn’t bother them at all. They aren’t at all bothered by being once again part of a huge, seemingly unstoppable and above all Chinese project. A project that belongs to them, one they really want to show me. Like the boys at the exhibition hall who, despite the fact they knew full well I wasn’t in Tongzhou to buy an apartment, tumbled over each other to look after me and show me the beauty of what they were promoting. They proudly wanted to show me, a Westerner, what they were doing. They. Us. This distinction is quite pointless when you’re sitting with old men next to a worksite. We are mirrors, and we constantly mirror ourselves. I’ve often had the feeling that if only either one was missing in this “reflection”, everything would be extremely less interesting and undoubtedly less amusing.

1 A man looking at plans and projects exhibited in an observation tower in the middle of the construction sites of Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017. 2 Old demolished rural houses and new residential building, Zhongmu County, Zhengzhou, 2017. 3 A guard controlling the entrance of a residential compound, Tongzhou New District, Tongzhou, Beijing, 2017. 4 Building a new road along the Jailu River near Zhengzhou, 2017. 5 A historical pagoda surrounded by construction sites, Tongzhou New District, Tongzhou, Beijing, 2017. 6 A street vendor in Zhongmu County, Zhengzhou, 2017. 7 Peasants of Taiqian New Agricultural Town leaving their houses to go to work, Zhongmu County, Zhengzhou, 2017. 8 Main square of Wangjia’an, Zhongmu County, Zhengzhou, 2017. 9 High speed railway between Kaifeng and Zhengzhou, 2017. 10 Construction

site in Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017. 11 A man standing in front of a construction site near the high speed railway station of Kaifeng, 2017. 12 Tongzhou New District viewed from the top of a tower, Tongzhou, Beijing, 2017. 13 A woman shelters herself from the sun outside the new high speed railway station, Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017. 14 The new Convention Hall, Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017. 15 Creating a wedding album on the construction site: wedding couple in Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, 2017. 16 Recently completed gardens within the residential compounds, Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017. 17 The CBD , the pagoda and a new luxury residential compound in Tongzhou New District, Tongzhou, Beijing, 2017. 18 The square in front of the high speed railway station, Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, 2017.

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II . Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

What role do new towns, new districts, new cities and new areas play in urban expansion policies in terms of programming and planning tools? What position do Chinese new towns occupy in a contemporary narrative which, working backwards, focuses on the return to Western genealogies? What are the relationships between “go west” policies and the construction of new towns? How do urbanisation processes drive social change? Finally, what role does architecture play in the project of the new towns?

A Policy Discourse on New Town Development in Contemporary China Liu Jian, Xu Gaofeng Since initiating its policy of reforms and opening-up in the late seventies, China has seen an accelerating process of urbanisation unprecedented in human history. The average annual increase in the urbanisation rate is over 1 %; this implies an annual immigration of about 14 million people from the countryside to the city, people who demand houses, jobs, public services and other facilities necessary for urban life. This sustained increase in the urban population has inevitably led to sustained urban expansion, represented by both the quantitative growth of new cities/towns and the scale growth of existing cities/towns. From 1981 to 2015 the number of cities in China rose from 226 to 656, with an annual increase of twelve, while that of towns rose from 2,678 to 20,515, with an annual increase of sixty-nine. From 1996 to 2015 the total built-up area of Chinese cities increased from 20,214 to 52,100 square kilometres, with an annual increase of 1,594.3 square kilometres, while the average built-up area of each city augmented from 30.4 to 79.4 square kilometres, with an annual increase of 2.45 square kilometres. Both almost tripled in twenty years, regardless of the remarkable quantitative growth of cities. No matter how the figures are presented, urban expansion has been the development trend of Chinese cities/towns; it has involved rapid urbanisation and a profound transition from a planned economy to a socialist market economy (Wu, Yang and Zhang, 2011), shifting urban development from city-centred to region-oriented (Yang and Liu, 2017). In view of China’s political system, policy is one of the most influential driving forces behind urban expansion. Given the above, the “new town development” in this chapter refers to the urban expansion that has taken place since the eighties, an expansion that can be categorised into three policy frameworks. They are: new cities/towns driven by an urban planning policy; several development zones driven by an economic development policy; and new areas driven by a comprehensive reform policy. Although the three prototypes of new town development were initiated in different periods, conducted for different purposes, promoted by different policies and endowed with different titles, they all refer to some delimited areas in a city where specific policies are implemented. Very often they not only physically overlap with each other so as to benefit as much as possible from various policies, but also functionally complement each other to create, to the greatest extent possible, an urbanism full of Chinese characteristics. This chapter chronologically elaborates the socio-economic context, policy objective, spatial pattern and management mode of each kind of new town development and summarises the unique characteristics of China’s new town development in our contemporary age. New City/Town as an Urbanisation Container New city/town is the term widely used in the field of urban planning in China; both terms stem from “satellite town”, imported from the West (Osborn and Whittick, 1977). 60

Policy framework

Initiating body

Type of development

Urban planning

City government

Satellite town

1950s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

New city New town Economic development

Central government

Economic and technological development zone High-tech industrial development zone Tax-protected zone

Comprehensive reform and development

Central government

New area

Fig. 1 Chronological evolution of different kinds of new town developments within their policy frameworks.

As urban planning policy, the development of new cities/towns is proposed through city masterplanning, initiated by city governments and focuses more on the construction of the physical environment. Implemented in different periods, for different purposes, and involving different localities, (Fig. 1) satellite towns, new cities and new

Satellite Town Development from the Fifties to the Eighties The development of satellite towns became an urban planning policy in China in the late fifties, when the country implemented a planned economy and prioritised industrialisation in its socio-economic development. At that time, urban development was considered as a measure to assist industrial development rather than as one of the goals of socio-economic development.1 When conflicts with the Soviet Union and challenges from the United States forced the Chinese government to decide to decentralise industrial development, firstly from city centres to suburban areas, and later from coastal areas to hinterlands (Lu et al., 1998), satellite town development became a reasonable response to the real demand for industrialisation. Some Chinese cities, especially big ones like Beijing and Shanghai, promoted satellite town development through city masterplanning, locating some industrial projects in certain suburban towns for purposes of implementing the national strategy of industrialisation while balancing the industrial development in both the city centre and suburban areas (Liu, 2015). For example, the Preliminary Master Planning Scheme for the Urban Construction of Beijing (1958) envisaged 113 industrial projects in thirty-seven satellite towns to

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

towns physically refer to urban extensions within a city (but beyond the existing city centre) intended to accommodate new urban development. In that sense, they can be regarded as spatial containers of urbanisation.

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create an industrial network in the countryside, apart from the one in the city centre. However, at that time, there were no specific policies supporting satellite town development. Moreover, as satellite towns were mainly towns designated at the lowest level of China’s hierarchical administration system, they were not able to compete with other local territories, especially upper-level urban districts, to attract enough investments through finance allocation, which was the only channel for funding under a planned economy.2 Accordingly, the planned industrial projects were neither carried out nor well developed; as a result, satellite towns developed very slowly. In the case of Beijing, during the sixties and seventies, only sixty of the 113 planned industrial projects were carried out in thirty-one of the thirty-seven planned satellite towns, and only the ones that hosted either county governments or large-scale enterprises saw reasonable growth (Liu, 2004). In 1983, the Master Planning Scheme for the Urban Construction of Beijing (1982–2000) maintained only twenty-two previous satellite towns, while the number decreased to fourteen, according to the City Master Plan of Beijing (1991–2010) issued in 1992; both plans included ten county government seats. (Fig. 2) After China’s reforms and opening-up in the late seventies, city governments gradually increased their focus on satellite town development due to its positive role in restructuring urban development from a regional perspective, something that appeared necessary during economic restructuring and urbanisation development. Apart from the preferential policies for industrial development implemented by both central and local governments, city governments also issued specific policies to promote satellite town development, for example Beijing’s Interim Provisions for Promoting Satellite Town Construction issued in 1984. Nevertheless, satellite town development was far from satisfactory, especially in terms of development scale and urban function independency. New City Development since the Nineties New city is an updated version of satellite town in China; it differs mainly in functional composition, development scale and administrative status. As part of an urban planning policy, new city development replaced satellite town development in Chinese cities in the nineties, when the country initiated its transition from a planned economy to a socialist market economy; it implemented profound industrial restructuring amid economic globalisation and stepped into the fast lane of urbanisation. The emergence of new, high-tech industries, the establishment of a real estate market and large-scale immigration from the countryside to the city were all favourable conditions for new city development. Moreover, the 1994 tax system reform increased the possibilities and ini­ tiatives open to city governments to invest more money in, and pay more attention to, urban development not only in the city centre, but also in suburban areas (Zhou, 2006). Under these new circumstances, many Chinese cities planned new cities through city masterplanning; the aim was to accommodate new industries, new immigrants and new urban functions, decentralising the over-congested city centre if needed, and functionally and spatially restructuring urban growth from a regional perspective. Located in a city’s suburbs beyond the existing city centre, new cities are often physically based on previous satellite towns and/or combined with various development 62

New town development

Initiation time

Targeted locality

Policy objective

Development mode

Relation with city/town centre

Satellite town

1950 s

Designated towns or other localities in suburbs

Serving industrialisation

Relying on industrial development or based on existing

Away from existing city centre

New city

1990 s

Holding new urban growth or decentralising existing city centre

Based on existing town development or combined with development zones

New town

2000 s

New growth pole in rural areas

Scaled expansion of existing town centre

Designated towns in suburbs

Neighbouring existing town centre

Fig. 2 Various new town developments within their planning policy frameworks.

zones; with both comprehensive urban functions and a considerable urban population they become an independent urban growth pole with a regional perspective. Thanks to policy support from both central and city governments, especially the support related to various development zones and the prosperity of real estate development, many

experiments regarding new modes of sustainable urban development and urban management, they also had some problems. As a widespread phenomenon, new cities saw quicker growth in the physical environment compared to demography and society (Wu, 2016 c), making some of them deficient in urbanism. In some cases, the overdevelopment of real estate projects, driven by the land revenue intention of local governments, even turned them into so-called ghost cities, full of empty houses rather than actual residents (Nie and Liu, 2013). In other cases, over-emphasis on industrial development made new cities suffer from remarkable imbalance between housing and employment. Let’s take Beijing as an example. In order to decentralise Beijing’s urban growth from the overcrowded city centre to suburban areas, in 2004 the City Master Plan of Beijing (2003–2020) approved the designation of eleven new cities for the capital metropolitan area, including ten seats of district government and one national-level development zone, i.e., the Beijing economic and technological development zone in Yizhuang. Since they were all satellite towns proposed by the previous city masterplan, each of them was designated to accommodate certain industries and urban functions, as well as an

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

new cities successfully became home to new industries (high-tech manufacturing, information, finance, trading, business and modern services), to new functional areas (central business districts, civil administration centres, university cities, high-speed train interchanges and various development zones) and to a large number of new immigrants. As many new cities are actually the seats of county-level government, their higher administrative status under the direct jurisdiction of city government also contributed to their rapid growth. However, while new cities were praised as positive

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expected population varying from 150,000 to 900,000. Along with the rapid development of Beijing, and thanks to the preferential policies issued by the Beijing municipal government (Implementation Opinions on Promoting the Construction and Development of Infrastructure, Public Services, and Ecological Environment of The New Cities issued in 2009), the new cities of Beijing have seen remarkable growth in the past decade. They have also played a role as a regional centre to transform the spatial structure of metropolitan Beijing from mono-centred to multi-centred (Wang and Lu, 2006). Meanwhile, the imbalanced development between housing and employment was quite remarkable in the three key new cities of Tongzhou, Shunyi and Yizhuang, which, to some extent, endangered their long-term sustainable development (Jiang, 2014). New Town Development since the Year 2000 After China resumed its rational process of urbanisation in the late seventies, a debate developed regarding the kind of urbanisation mode China should adopt: should it focus on metropolitan development or on small city/town development? (Song, 2013). This long-term debate seemed to have ended by the Outline of the 10th Five-Year Plan for National Socio-Economic Development (2001), which proposed the new idea of coordinated development of big-, medium- and small-sized cities and small towns. Chinese society had long been extremely concerned about small town development due to its important role as a link between the city and countryside (Wang and Zhao, 2009). That is why urbanisation in China is also interpreted as “townization”. At the dawn of the new millennium, when China encountered the problem of imbalanced urban-rural development amid accelerating urbanisation, in 2000 the State Council issued Opinions on Promoting the Healthy Development of Small Towns in order to reaffirm the strategic significance, guiding principles and key missions of small town development as a way to promote the socio-economic development of the countryside. The document justified the focus of the urban development policy on small town development proposed by the Outline of the 10th Five-Year Plan for National Socio-Economic Development and triggered initiatives by city governments to promote small town development through urban-rural planning. Designated as a new growth pole in rural areas, new town refers to the scaled expansion of an existing town centre within the administrative boundaries of a town; in most case, it is the central town in the planned urban system. By accommodating both basic urban functions and certain preferred industries, new towns are capable of serving as a centre for certain rural areas and, in some cases, develop from previous satellite towns. Like satellite towns, new towns stand at the lowest level of the hierarchical administration system of China. However, they have seen comparatively rapid development thanks to strong policy support from both central and local governments, becoming another option vis-à-vis cities for rural immigrants intent on pursuing an urban life. A typical example of new town development is the nine towns of Shanghai. In order to accelerate the urbanisation process in suburbs, the Comprehensive Plan of Shanghai Metro-Region (1996–2020), approved in 2000, proposed the development of eleven new cities, twenty-two central towns and about eighty towns, designated for different roles and scales from a regional perspective. In the following year, Shanghai municipal 64

government issued Pilot Opinions on Promoting Town Development in Shanghai, identifying “One city and nine towns” as a pilot project to implement the urbanisation strategy, highlighting the development of new cities and central towns and clarifying the objectives and key working areas of this pilot project.3 Thanks to preferential policies, some of the nine new towns were built quickly and became famous for their “mannerist style”, i.e., “borrowing iconic ideas from cities and countries abroad to serve as a theme for the new city centre that’s being created” (Hack, 2012). For instance, as a historic town dating back to the Ming Dynasty, Anting Town was designated as an industrial satellite town in 1958, an industrial central town in 2000 and a new town in 2001. As its industrial structure is dominated by auto parts production for Volkswagen, Anting New Town was designed by a German architecture office using a German-inspired style, juxtaposed against the historic town centre with traces of a traditional Chinese town in the water country of the Yangtze River Delta region. Development Zones as an Economic Reform Laboratory Development zones came into existence in the eighties when the country revived its economic engine together with the ongoing advent of reforms and opening-up (Zhu and Zhou, 2012). Critical transformation from a planned economy to a market economy,

The development zone policy, with a focus on international trade, new industrial development and import and export, was first initiated by China’s central government in the eighties, i.e., the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the General Administration of Customs. (Fig. 3) The growth of development zones is closely linked to the cities where they are established.4 Most of them are physically located in a city’s suburbs, either as the city’s new city/town or as an isolated enclave; their geographical location and spatial layout are determined by the city’s masterplan. As part of a city’s urban areas they are primarily functional industrial areas characterised by a high percentage of industrial land use and areas dedicated to industrial activities, such as storage and logistics; if land is used for housing, services and administration, these areas are also affiliated to industrial activities, making them extremely dependent on city centres for urban functions. From an administrative point of view they are managed by a commission which, as the dispatched agency of city government, is mainly engaged in investment promotion and operation management; this provides development zones with a higher position in the hierarchical administration system of China, but reduces the focus on social issues.

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

as well as overall participation in economic globalisation and profound industrial restructuring related to these two important changes, urged the government to explore new ways to promote the country’s economic development and continue its process of industrialisation, to which the emergence of development zones is a realistic reaction. Development zones are an economic policy zone specifically designated within a city where special policies (especially finance and taxation related to industries and enterprises) are implemented for the purpose of experimenting with innovative industrial development modes in the new market economy, i.e., by attracting international investments, facilitating exports and trades and fostering new industries. Thus, development zones can be regarded as a laboratory for economic reform.

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Focus

Authority

Initiation

Type and number by 2016

Objectives

Location

International trading

Ministry of Commerce

1984

Economic and technological development zone, 219

1992

Border economic collaboration area, 17

Industrial development international trading; openness

As part of a city’s urban area, in either inner or outer suburbs

New industrial development

Ministry of Science and Technology

1988

High-tech industrial development zone, 156

Industrial development innovation

Import and export

General Administration of Customs

1990

Tax-protected zone, 12

2000

Export processing area, 63

2004

Bounded logistics park, 6

Industrial development openness; export

2005

Tax-protected port area, 14

2006

As part of a city’s urban area, usually far from city centre and neighbouring port areas

Integrated tax-protected zone, 52

Fig. 3 On the national level, three groups of development zones can be distinguished.

Since designating the first economic and technological development zone in Dalian in 1984, China has set up more than five hundred development zones of various kinds all over the country, not only in top tier cities in coastal areas, but also in second tier cities in the central and western regions. They play an active role in national economic development; in fact, the GDP growth rate as well as the export-oriented economy growth rate and the land use output per unit area is much higher than the average of the whole country (Feng, 2015). Apart from the remarkable performance in economic growth, they also make a significant contribution to the urban expansion of the cities where they are located. However, compared to conventional urban areas they are less efficient in land use due to low development density, and more vulnerable to imbalanced development between housing and employment due to the unique functional composition focusing excessively on industries. Let’s take the Beijing economic and technological development zone in Yizhuang as an example. Yizhuang, covering an area of 15 square kilometres, was first set up by the Beijing municipal government in 1991 as a municipal industrial park located south-east of the city centre. It was confirmed by the City Master Plan of Beijing (1991–2010) as one of the fourteen satellite towns when the Beijing municipal government made a strategic decision to reorient its urban and industrial development from the city centre to the suburbs. In 1993 the State Council designated it as a national-level economic and technological development zone and enlarged it to 46.8 square kilometres. Ten years later, the City Master Plan of Beijing (2003–2020), approved in 2004, upgraded Yizhuang, turning it into one of Beijing’s eleven new cities; its development area was further enlarged to 213 square kilometres, almost fifteen times its original size. Although the development area of Yizhuang economic and technological development zone has re66

mained 46.8 square kilometres since 1993, in roughly a decade that of Yizhuang New City increased exponentially to 213 square kilometres, about five times the scale of the development zone itself. Meanwhile, in order to support the economic growth of Yizhuang, in 1999 a 7-square-kilometre area of the Yizhuang economic and technological development zone was incorporated into the Zhongguancun high-tech industrial development park so that all the enterprises could benefit from the preferential policies for both kinds of development zones. This strong economic policy support very soon allowed Yizhuang to take a leading role in economic growth amongst Beijing’s new cities. From 1993 to 2015, the Yizhuang economic and technological development zone had built up an area of 37 square kilometres, attracted 12,722 enterprises, and completed a total investment of 503.3 billion R MB , including 7 billion from direct foreign investment. By the end of 2015, it accommodated over 314,000 employees and, in 2015, generated a GDP of 108.1 billion R MB , accounting for 4.7 % of Beijing’s total GDP, as well as a gross industrial output value of 255.6 billion R MB , over 91 % of which came from high-tech industries. At the same time, Yizhuang New City saw a built-up area of 56 square kilometres and accommodated a population of 343,000. However, since housing developed less than employment, for a long time Yizhuang New City suffered from a housing/employment imbalance. That is why in recent years the Beijing municipal government has made great efforts to promote the transformation of Yizhuang from a mono-function development zone to a multi-function new city by investing in public services and encouraging real estate development (Jiang, 2014). In a sense, this represents the general development trend of development zones all over the country.

development of the Shanghai Pudong New Area. It was not widely applied until 2010, when China moved into a new era of development. In terms of “openness”, China successfully joined the WTO in 2000 and became a formal member of the global economy; this required further opening-up and reforms towards a full market economy. In 2008 and 2010, Beijing and Shanghai successfully hosted the Olympic Games and World Expo respectively, putting China on the world stage and allowing it to show its significant achievements in the field of reforms and opening-up. As regards socio-economic development, in 2003 China adopted the Scientific View on Development to promote the overall development of the economy, society and humanity by coordinating urban and rural areas, several regions, the economy, society, man and nature, domestic issues and outward openness. After sustained economic growth for three decades, in 2010 China surpassed Japan to become the second biggest world economy. As regards urbanisation, in 2003, for the first time, the Chinese central government listed urbanisation as one of its national strategies, together with industrialisation, marketisation and internationalisation. In 2006, the Outline of the 11th Five-Year Plan for National Socio-Economic Development prescribed a new urban development policy involving coordinated development of big-, medium- and small-sized cities and small towns with a focus on city-cluster development, thereby highlighting the regionalisation of urban growth. At the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium,

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

New Areas as a Comprehensive Reform Experiment The new area policy was initiated by China’s central government in 1992 with the

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i.e., by 2011, China’s urbanisation rate exceeded 50 %, indicating its critical transition from a rural society to an urban society. In 2012, the eighteenth National Congress of the CPC proposed the new national strategies of industrialisation, urbanisation, informatisation and agricultural modernisation, while the National Plan of New Urbanization (2014–2020), issued in 2014, concretised the national strategy of new urbanisation. All these events and facts were a metaphor indicating that China was working on a new impetus to merge the development of society, the economy and urbanisation, three issues once dealt with separately. Given the above, the comprehensive new area reform policy is an experimental response to this new demand. Similar to the development zone, new area is a policy zone specifically designated by the central government in a city where special policies involve the implementation of multiple aspects of socio-economic development (such as economy, governance and urban-rural development), not only in order to experiment with new modes of new urbanisation, modern governance and innovation-driven development, but also to promote balanced regional development at the national level, strengthen city-cluster development at the regional level and foster “new urbanism” full of Chinese characters at the local level. In this sense, new area can be considered a laboratory for comprehensive reforms, demonstrating the strong intention of the central government to further promote reforms and openness through integration. A new area is a large, physical part of a city which, either far away from or close to the existing city centre, is either totally or partially made up of several lower-level local territories, such as districts, counties and/or county-level cities, and includes one or more new cities/towns and any kind of development zone. It covers an area of several hundred or even more than 1,000 square kilometres, but its physical development must be confirmed by the city masterplan. For example, when the Shanghai Pudong New Area was set up in 1992 it covered an area of 533 square kilometres made up of all Chuansha County, part of Shanghai County, and Huangpu, Nanshi and Yangpu Districts. Today, its land area is 1,210 square kilometres, covering all or part of the aforementioned local territories and playing host to three new cities, three new towns, one tax-protected zone and one bounded logistic park. Functionally speaking, a new area is the integration of urban and rural areas which, by merging the development of new cities/towns and development zones, plays a leading role in regional and national economic development and functions as a new growth pole in a city-cluster development. From an administrative point of view, a new area is either a local territory under the jurisdiction of a local government with full powers, or a policy zone managed by a commission which, as the dispatched agency of city government, is engaged mainly in the planning, coordination and implementation of economic and land development, without any responsibility for social courses. By the end of 2016, two of the eighteen new areas set up since 1992, i.e., Shanghai Pudong and Tianjin Binhai, were already under the jurisdiction of a local government, while the other sixteen accepted the institution of an administration commission. The trend in the institutional governance of new areas is exemplified by the transformation of the administrative set-up of the first two new areas created before 2010 (Shanghai Pudong and Tianjin Binhai) from administration commission to local government. 68

Designation time

Land area (km 2)

Construction land area (km 2)

Geographic location

Key policy orientation and related strategy

Shanghai Pudong

10 / 1992

1210

730

East

International financial centre and shipping hub; Yangtze River economic belt

Tianjin Binhai

05 / 2006

2270

644

East

International shipping hub and logistic centre

Chongqing Liangjiang

05 / 2010

1200

550

West

Yangtze River economic belt; development of the West; coordinated urban-rural development

Zhejjang Zhoushan Islands

06 / 2011

1440

172

East

Marine protection and development; coordinated marine-land development

Guangzhou Nansha

09 / 2012

803

300

East

One Belt One Road; Integration with Hong Kong and Macao

Shaanxi Xixian

01 / 2014

882

272

West

One Belt One Road; development of the west

Guizhou Guian

01 / 2014

1795

220

West

Development of the west; pilot for developing regions

Qingdao West Coast

06 / 2014

2096

468

East

Marine development; coordinated marine-land development

Dalian Jinpu

06 / 2014

2299

435

North-east

Regeneration of north-eastern China; collaboration with North-East Asia

Sichuan Tianfu

10 / 2014

1578

580

West

Development of the west

Hunan Xiangjiang

04 / 2015

490

190

Centre

Yangtze River economic belt; emergence of central China

Nanjing Jiangbei

06 / 2015

788

350

East

Yangtze River economic belt

Fuzhou

08 / 2015

800

210

East

One Belt One Road; exchange and collaboration between the two sides of Taiwan Strait

Yunnan Dianzhong

09 / 2015

482

326

West

One Belt One Road; Yangtze River economic belt; gateway to South-East Asia

Harbin

12 / 2015

493

280

North-east

One Belt One Road; regeneration of north-eastern China; collaboration with North-East Asia

Changchun

02 / 2016

499

276

North-east

One Belt One Road; regeneration of north-eastern China

Jiangxi Ganjiang

06 / 2016

465

200

Centre

Yangtze River economic belt; emergence of central China

Fig. 4 New Areas by 2016.

By the end of 2016, China had set up eighteen new areas in eighteen of its provinciallevel territories covering all its four regional policy zones: seven in the east, two in the centre, six in the west and three in the north-east. Each of them plays a specific role in national development and vis-à-vis certain national strategies. (Fig. 4) This widespread geographical distribution and diversified objective orientation clearly show the strong

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

Name

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intention of the Chinese central government to further comprehensive reforms and use integration to promote balanced regional development all over the country (Wu and Yang, 2015). However, it is still too early to make any decisive evaluation regarding the development of new areas, with the exception of the first new area – Shanghai Pudong New Area – which is undoubtedly very successful. As a laboratory for China’s long-term comprehensive reforms, new areas face the challenge of exploring new modes of socioeconomic development, urbanisation and governance as regards the problems or even failure of traditional modes, for which innovation is the only approach. Conclusion Since its reforms and opening-up in the late seventies, China has seen sustained urban expansion during rapid urbanisation, and radical transition from a planned economy to a socialist market economy: new town developments have been a strong aspect of its urban growth. Among them, new city/town, development zone and new area are the three key prototypes that have been extensively applied in China through different policy channels, spreading from coastal areas to the hinterland. They were initiated in different periods, under different conditions, by different promoters, and for different purposes. They physically overlapped to benefit from various policies as much as possible while functionally complementing each other to foster urbanism as much as possible; their spatial layout and functional composition was coordinated by city masterplanning. New city/town development as an urban planning policy originally starting in the fifties, focusing more on the construction of the physical environment. Several development zones, as an economic development policy initiated in the eighties, focus more on industrial and economic development, while new area development, as a comprehensive reform policy popular in the early twenty-first century, focuses more on regional integration and overall innovation. They all play a significant role in China’s socio-economic development and urbanisation. However, during development they encountered several problems: the slow growth of new cities/towns (especially before the establishment of development zones) due to the lack of an economic driving force, and the weak urban functions of development zones due to over-domination of industries in their functional composition. China’s new town development is quite different to the new town development in developed countries in the West; it is characterised by government initiation, industry priority, policy drive and planning coordination. It is a national strategy to deal with accelerating urbanisation; a policy instrument to promote new economic development; a physical venue to accommodate new industries, new population and new functions; a collaboration between central and local governments; and, finally, an urban morphology to present new urbanity.

1 Key resolutions of the expanded political bureau meeting in February 1951. 2 According to the Constitution of People’s Republic of China, all local territories are categorised into a top-down four-layered administration system, i. e., provincial, prefectural, county and town. 3 “One city” refers to the new city of Songjiang and “nine towns”

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refer to the central towns of Zhujiajiao, Anting, Pujiang, etc. 4 Later on, this policy was quickly imitated by local governments, resulting in the flourishing of development zones of different levels all over the country. This chapter focuses only on national-level development zones.

When Ends Don’t Meet. Historical Interpretations of Twenty-First-Century New Towns Filippo De Pieri, Davide Vero How do historical interpretations of the new town phenomenon understand the recent proliferation of new towns in non-European contexts, and particularly in China? The question bears no easy answer: the expression “new towns”, which is often used in the English-speaking literature concerning newly designed or newly built urban settlements worldwide, seems itself to imply a reference to previous experiences, and especially to those carried out in the advanced capitalist world during the twentieth century. To what extent can a line of continuity be traced between these contemporary undertakings and previous historical examples? This chapter discusses the mutual relationship between histories of new towns and contemporary town-making practices by adopting a two-fold perspective. On the one hand, we will turn our attention to a number of recent and less recent histories of the new town phenomenon written by professional historians and we will discuss in which ways these manage (or rather fail) to integrate twenty-first-century new towns in revised diachronic narratives at the global scale. On the other hand, we will dedicate our analysis to a number of recent discourses and initiatives concerning Chinese “new new towns” in which the

same examples make no small use of historical references. Such a conundrum arguably has something to say about public uses of the past in contemporary place-making processes and about the problems faced by history-making practices within the context of urban globalisation. Recent Histories of New Towns: Facing the Global Challenge The many histories of “new towns” written since the sixties tended to see pre- and post-WWII new towns as belonging to a specific town-planning tradition that linked them with previous, early-twentieth-century experiences of urban and land reform, and particularly to those carried out within the context of the garden city movement and its nineteenth-century antecedents (Osborn and Whittick, 1963; Hall, 1988). The fact that both garden cities and new towns had been prominently experimented in the British context – to be later exported in a number of European and non-European countries – reinforced the idea that they could be seen as part of a continuous history, with an early-twentieth-century urban reform movement followed, after WWII , by a new phase characterised by more systematic forms of regional planning. The biography of some protagonists was exemplary in this respect: Frederick J. Osborn famously

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

latter are presented as part of long-established traditions in the fields of urban design and planning. Our analysis will lead us to expose a paradox: while historical research on new towns seems to consider recent East Asian examples as mostly disconnected from the twentieth-century tradition in the field, contemporary descriptions of the

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moved from implementing Howard’s ideas in Letchworth and Welwyn to being one of the foremost advocates of new town schemes within the Town and Country Planning Association and the 1946 committee chaired by Lord Reith (Whittick, 1987). Some of the questions which garden cities and new towns were supposed to answer – metropolitan growth, the need for decentralisation, a search for greater territorial balance – appeared in many ways to be the same. There were, admittedly, also relevant differences, regarding for instance the leap between the voluntary principles that had been at the heart of Howard’s proposals and the public faith in state-led planning policies that provided the core for post-WWII new towns (Meller, 1997, pp. 39; 67). Such a combination of similarities and dissimilarities turned the garden cities-new towns continuum into a vantage point from which to observe the general traits of twentieth-century British planning history, one that allowed to focus on the recurrent character of a few urban problems while detailing the patient development and experimentation of alternative solutions (Hall and Ward, 1998). This interpretation of the origins of twentieth-century new towns has largely influenced international histories of the phenomenon, which have tended to conceptualise the global history of new towns as a process of diffusion from the centre to the peripheries, one in which urban models were subject to a transnational circulation that brought with it more or less successful adaptations (Strong, 1971; Scargill, 1979, pp. 160–176; Chaline, 1985). Such an analytical perspective also applied to the historical study of urban elements and materials, as with the case of the international circulation of the garden suburb model (Stern, Fishman and Tilove, 2013). These views, however, have not gone unchallenged. A number of works published since the early eighties have investigated the limits and implications of the idea that modern planning models had circulated following a pattern that proceeded from the more to the less technically advanced, from the more to the less developed societies (Ward, 2000). Post-colonial studies have been an important factor in such a reassessment, moving from a prevalent focus on power imbalance and cultural dominance within global capitalism (King, 1976) towards perspectives that have emphasised the ways in which architectural and planning models were “imported” within colonial societies, and the power of manipulation and reinvention displayed by local actors (Nasr and Volait, 2003; Chang, 2016). Transnational approaches to planning history have also experimented with precious tools in order to observe the practices of exchange and the actors involved in them (Rodgers, 1998), the goal of such studies being to gain a better understanding of the ways in which urban globalisation emerged less as the result of macro-economic processes than as the combined outcome of micro-practices that were partly shaped by the strategies and culture of local actors (Saunier and Ewen, 2008; Scrivano, 2009; Kenny and Madgin, 2015). Such research paths have largely contributed to offer a nuanced understanding of the manifold ways in which urban techniques and ideas circulated in the twentiethcentury urban world (Bigon and Katz, 2014; Ewen, 2016, pp. 114–128). Recent studies of the new town phenomenon have partly been able to take advantage of these method72

ological perspectives but have also continued to reserve a central role for narratives implying a centre-periphery process of diffusion. An example of this attitude can be found in Stephen Ward’s The Peaceful Path, published in 2016, an interesting hybrid between a regionally focused history of garden cities and new towns situated in Hertfordshire and a broader overview of the phenomenon (Ward, 2016). The author adopts a transnational perspective to the study of planning but also moves from the persuasion that the global history of new towns is genetically linked to a highly specific British tradition. It is significant that the study opens with a short biography of Ebenezer Howard, while the concluding remarks recapitulate some of the intellectual and technical challenges originally posed by the garden city movement and still open to future urban experiments. Another recent publication on the subject, Rosemary Wakeman’s history of the post-WWII “new town movement”, challenges the traditional notion of the garden cities-new towns continuum, proposing instead to see post-WWII new towns as embodying a new phase that was markedly global in its geographies and

The discussion is, of course, open as to whether the persistence of an emphasis upon the Western origins of global new towns is the reflection of a scholarly environment in which the lion’s share of the research on traditionally “peripheral” contexts is still carried out by authors educated in North American and European institutions. China offers an interesting viewpoint in order to analyse the problem. A few sparse works on East Asian cities have recently called for a change of perspective, putting forward the need to “provincialize Europe” and to understand East Asian modern architecture and planning on their own terms (Chakrabarty, 2000). Recent studies by Hajime Yatsuka and by AMO on the history of Japanese metabolism have proposed to see the iconic urban design schemes of the late fifties and sixties as less influenced by European architectural modernism – as it had often been assumed – than by previous Asian experiences, such as the planned settlements designed during Japan’s colonisation of Manchuria (Koolhaas and Obrist, 2011, p. 29). Pierre Singaravélou’s study of early-twentieth-century Tianjin offers a promising example of a research strategy that takes a Chinese city as a privileged point of observation in order to understand the origins of globalisation as a process of “coproduction” involving a number of local and trans­ national actors (Singaravélou, 2017). One of the many challenges faced by studies on new towns in China is, therefore, to contribute to the elaboration of diachronic narratives that, while being rooted in the methodological debates of international planning history, can detect patterns of

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

largely dominated by a few transnational actors (international corporations, international design firms, research foundations, military bureaucracies) and by the patterns of US influence under the Cold War (Wakeman, 2016). Despite their partly divergent views, both works share the idea that the history of twentieth-century new towns has mostly come to a close and is not strongly linked to more recent versions of the phenomenon: the richest and most interesting aspects of the new town movement are to be found in its past, of which the present offers a somehow diminished replica, largely deprived of the utopian and/or reformist tension that had characterised the movement in its heyday.

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exchange and influence that did not travel along the networks of the interconnected English-speaking world. A few recent studies show that it is possible, although by no means easy, to explore China’s twentieth and twenty-first-century planning history in ways that are sensitive to both its transnational aspects and its potential elements of specificity. Duanfang Lu’s research on the international circulation of the neighbourhood unit model and its adoption in Communist China represents an example of a sophisticated work that documents the ways in which one of the key notions of twentieth-century planning reached China through unexpected paths, developing along the way a number of traits that were not always implicit in Clarence Perry’s original model (Lu, 2006). Other scholars have reminded us to what extent some of the elements used in contemporary Chinese urban design are the result of an incorporation and adaptation of historical models, as with the boulevard designed as the supporting element of Shanghai’s new financial district in Pudong (Olds, 1997; Campanella, 2008, pp. 71–88) or with the “green wedge” solutions that can be found in ecological new towns such as the Songzhuang Arts and Agriculture City (Lemes de Oliveira, 2017, pp. 202–204). The open question here is to what extent contemporary urban China bears the mark of a process of globalisation that tends to cause the disappearance of locally rooted urban forms (Broudehoux, 2004; Bosker, 2013) or, on the contrary, provides an example of how globalising factors combine and crossbreed with a number of local patterns and traditions, engendering the production of highly specific urban forms (Ren, 2013; Bonino and De Pieri, 2015; De Pieri, 2015). Invoking History through Practices: Redefining Expertise and Inflecting Narratives in the “New New Towns” While current historical research makes it difficult to reach a verdict concerning the degree of affinity existing between Chinese new towns and previous Western traditions of urban design, occasional statements concerning such familiarity do not fail to emerge from contemporary discourses and initiatives on newly built Chinese cities. A recent publication surveying the new town phenomenon in East Asia argued that we should, at least in part, “examine the design and construction of cities as a cultural act that fits into the history of planning and urbanization”, and proposed to discuss potential comparisons with the garden city tradition, with Europe’s post-WWII reconstruction and with the global new town movement of the fifties–seventies (Provoost and Vantisphout, 2011, p. 23). Lip-service references to the City Beautiful movement or to the garden city tradition are recurrent in the literature (Shao, 2015, pp. 23–30) and are not necessarily misplaced given the early penetration of these ideals in China, a process the long-term impact of which still awaits to be fully assessed (Hoffmann, 2011; Wong, 2015; Lu, 2017). As superficial as references to historical examples of Western planning may occasionally appear, they signal a need to understand current practices within a broader framework, while exposing a widespread tendency to inflect existing narratives in order to make them useful within the new urban contexts. Such discourses are often associated with specific professional or scholarly practices, three of which are particularly interesting: first, projects for new towns in China that explicitly assume the link with European traditions as a source of inspiration 74

for the design; second, networking activities promoted by cities that include “classic” European new towns and recent global ones, implying a mutual recognition of the participants as sharing a number of similar problems and belonging to a common town-planning tradition; third, collective initiatives carried out by groups of scholars and professionals that define themselves as experts of the new town phenomenon, their competence including a knowledge of both the history and the present problems of global urbanisation. If we assume that the object of study of history also includes the ways in which historical narratives may be appropriated by a plurality of actors coming from different contexts, there is, indeed, much history being written in present-day practices regarding Chinese new towns. A significant illustration of the question is provided by Shanghai’s heavily mediatised “One city nine towns” programme, launched in the early twentyfirst century, which allowed for the construction of a number of satellite towns in the metropolitan region, each characterised by a specific reference to a European planning tradition – “German” in Anting, “Dutch” in the Holland Village of Gaoqiao, “British” in the Thames Town of Songjiang, etc. In many cases, the design of these cities involved a collaboration with European professionals who were called to provide an interpretation of the proposed theme, as with the case of the Italian firm Gregotti Associati, entrusted with the task of providing an “Italian” feel to the new town of Pujiang (Den Hartog, 2010). Shanghai’s flirtation with European planning traditions is interesting in many ways: first, because the link between Chinese new towns and previous examples of European planning is explicitly put forward by the institutional actors and the developers promoting the new schemes, and second, as a sign of the role played by the commodification of historic values in real-estate schemes aiming at the creation of a sense of place in increasingly globalised environments.

together “old” and “new” new towns, thus implying a certain degree of mutual recognition and the acknowledgement of a common condition. A significant example of this trend is provided by the “European new towns and pilot cities” platform, which was founded in 2001 as a network of European cities with a number of non-European partners that represented pilot urban developments, new towns and fast-growing cities. The network aimed at establishing an exchange on relevant issues that ranged from mobility to cohesion policies. The platform was channeled in 2014 within the project “EAST : Euro-Asia Sustainable Towns”, co-funded by the European Commission with the goal of developing exchanges between local authorities in Europe, China and India and promoting an integrated urban approach to the sustainable development of new towns and satellite cities in Asia (Gaborit, 2014). Other recently launched networks between existing new towns might have the potential to develop along similar lines, for example the “New Towns Heritage Research Network”, supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council with several local authorities and agencies and focusing on the role played by the built heritage of British and European new towns in the context of future transformation processes (Colenutt, Schaebitz and Ward, 2017).

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Another relevant point of view from which to observe the continuity/discontinuity problem is provided by the existence of a number of networking initiatives linking

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In the field of academic and professional expertise, there are several examples of groups of specialised scholars and actors that base their competence on knowledge of both the historical past of new towns and their present and future development. A certain degree of continuity of the new town phenomenon throughout the world is in this case assumed as one of the essential premises behind the definition of a specific field of action. Western universities have no lack of initiatives on the study of contemporary global and Chinese new towns, a recent one being the “New Town Initiative” promoted by Harvard University in 2015 and led by Richard Peiser and Ann Forsyth, with funding from the Chinese developer Vanke. The most visible example of an initiative aimed at building a strong and recognisable expertise in the field is, however, provided by the Dutch-based International New Town Institute (INTI ), founded in 2008 as a collaborative platform with the goal to carry out “scientific research on the past, present and future of New Towns in an urbanizing world” (INTI , 2010, p. 7). INTI is led by architectural historian Michelle Provoost and its first relevant research work was the compilation of a historical database on international new towns documented between 1900 and 2020. The aim of the survey was not only to observe the boom of new towns, especially in Asia, but also to understand whether and how to restructure old-generation new towns, mainly situated in Western and Eastern Europe and in the United States (Provoost, 2010). INTI went through a process of gradual adaptation and adjustment of its goals, mov-

ing from an understanding of the past of international new towns to a description of their present and an exploration of their potential future. This shift culminated in the programme “New New Towns”, launched in 2012 and dedicated to improve the urban and social quality of a selection of new towns in transition, namely Shenzhen, Chandigarh, Almere, Nakuru (Kenya), the Lotus Park township in Cape Town (South Africa), the satellite city of Alamar in Havana (Cuba), Campos de Santana in Curitiba (Brazil) and Tema (Ghana). The programme investigates the concepts behind new schemes and analyses the social, ecological, spatial and economic dynamics related to them. It functions as a catalyst for the exchange of knowledge between researchers, design professionals, students, developers, policymakers and politicians. Research in the field has led to the publication of monographic books on Cape Town (Provoost, 2015) and Shenzhen (Vlassenrood, 2016). Although INTI continues to deal with the “old new towns” through actions that have included the publication of a series of travel guides (dedicated to Nowa Huta, Cergy-Pontoise, Milton Keynes and Alamar), its greatest efforts are now concentrated on “the amount of future new cities on the drawing boards” (INTI , 2012, p. 2). The institute works at the construction of an international network of cities and has organised a New Town Day yearly event that took place in Almere in 2016, in Milton Keynes in 2017 and in Rotterdam in 2018. Conclusion As we suggested in our opening lines, the materials discussed in the previous pages confront us with a paradox. On the one hand, a number of recent historical studies concerning twentieth-century new towns shows a tendency to exclude contemporary non-Western examples from this tradition, partly as a consequence of the fact that 76

the latter is identified with a number of collective ideals regarding the production of space that can be difficult to find in present-day patterns of global urbanisation. On the other hand, discourses and strategies regarding recent non-Western new towns appear to contain several traces of Western town-planning traditions, a state of affairs that shows that the latter are the object of processes of cultural appropriation and adaptation that are not without relevance for planning historians. It will also be evident, at this point, to what extent historical research on the continuity/discontinuity conundrum is still underdeveloped. Continuity or discontinuity between urban phenomena do not exist per se and there are many aspects through which they can be measured, such as administrative processes, techniques of territorial planning, morphological patterns, the circulation of architectural models, the circulation of expertise, etc. So far, none of these aspects appears to have been fully investigated in studies concerning the history of Chinese new towns. Such a lack of research is not surprising, given how difficult it is to carry out in-depth analyses on such matters, and even more so in the context of modern China, a country for which reliable sources on administrative and planning practices can be difficult to access and in which modern planning history only recently gained recognition as a specific field of study (Abramson, 2018). Some recent works have, however, shown that it is possible to at least partly defy such challenges and create the conditions for rigorous comparative studies of specific spatial policies (Zan et al., 2018).

nese new towns is a broader one that concerns the role being played by narratives of the past in global urbanisation processes. Chinese new towns can sometimes appear to defy historical continuity and to engender territorial configurations that are essentially non-comparable to previous socio-spatial patterns: it is, however, reasonable to admit that they are not exempt from phenomena of diachronic stratification and that “urban planning in China reflects both the persistence of historical practices and the adoption of new ones” (Abramson, 2006, p. 198; Haiyan and Stapleton, 2006). The frequency with which images of the urban past are invoked in contemporary descriptions of Chinese cities also signals the need to observe with greater attention the forms of appropriation of the past that take place within the context of planning processes. The public use of images of the past as an instrument for the negotiation of urban identities and economic values has often been recognised as one of the defining traits of contemporary urbanisation (Huyssen, 2003; Sand, 2013) and Chinese new towns may well prove to be a fertile environment for the study of such processes.

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Ultimately, the issue at stake in the historical understanding of contemporary Chi-

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New Urbanisation and “Go West” Policies Mauro Berta, Francesca Frassoldati This contribution focuses on the spatial features of the new towns in inland China that have been approved and are now under construction. The reference framework within which they are studied is the much broader agenda of the so-called “go west” policies. The latter are strategic policies which, starting with the Five-Year Plans launched in the eighties (Sixth, 1981–85 and Seventh, 1986–90) and thanks to massive public investments, have shifted the country’s expansive growth from the coastal regions towards inner China (Lai, 2002, p. 433). The six selected cities were chosen because their foundation was specifically linked not only to infrastructures, especially long-distance, highspeed railways between inland China and the country’s coastal regions, but also international trade. The following issues were studied regarding the urban districts in this necessarily limited sample: approval phases involving several administrative levels; plans, projects and, where possible, progress reports regarding construction; promotional and informative material tasked with conveying images of the new urbanisation projects. The brief project descriptions will illustrate the relationship between the new towns and existing cities based, albeit critically, on the classification proposed by Zhou (2012, p. 50) who exploited localisation and economic-functional criteria to theorise either a subordinate status vis-à-vis major cities, including functional replacement of a capitalised city and economic-productive specialisation (techno-scientific parks, innovation centres, etc.), or the creation of regional growth poles in less developed areas. With this in mind our contribution will first discuss the relationship between “go west” policies and new urbanisation in inland areas of China. We will present several aspects of six projects based on specific data (construction period, extension, localisation issues, forms of promotion, etc.) and then highlight some of the recurrent spatial features in the six new towns. The Long Journey West of Chinese Urban Policies Most of the recent literature on spatial transformation in China appears to be dominated by two macro topics. One involves the domestic effects of urban growth that began in the seventies (Chen and Lu, 2014, p. 145) and has steadily intensified up to the present day without showing any signs of abatement.1 The other topic – studied more recently and very much pro-government initiatives (Hu and Chen, 2015) – merges the urban transformation process in the inland regions with the international New Silk Road initiative (NSR ). Both topics reveal how urban policies have, at least for the last three decades, been focused on trying to shift urbanisation towards regions in the West. The first topic appears to be driven by rural industrialisation after the 1978 reforms. In fact this urbanisation process helped absorb the potential demographic and socioeconomic imbalances created by migration from the countryside to big cities (Tang, Li and Kwok, 2000; Pannell, 2002, p. 1579; Friedmann, 2005, pp. 35–36). Amongst other things, migratory flows from peripheral areas have been responsible for the rapid 78

increase in the “floating urban population”, i.e., the “illegal” population, people who do not have a hukou but live in the city and are highly mobile in urban space. This phenomenon was almost non-existent in 1978, while in 2012 it involved roughly 17 % of the population, residing primarily in more dynamic coastal cities (Wang et al., 2015, p. 281). The time span and ways in which this thirty-year-old process affected the country is now universally acknowledged and established. It began with the Five-Year Plans in the eighties (Sixth, 1981–85 and Seventh, 1986–90). The latter were tasked with implementing domestic growth, considered as a strategic campaign to gradually conquer the country, starting with the western coastal regions to the south and interior of the continent (Lai, 2002, p. 433). For the first time this campaign explicitly put into practice the approach Deng Xiaoping repeatedly expressed in public: “let some regions and people get rich first” (Li, 2000, p. 157; Mees, 2016, p. 4). In other words, accept a transitory imbalance in national growth in the coastal and eastern areas as a physiological phase leading to a future in which there would be “prosperity for all” (Li, 2000, p. 157). This prosperity would be enjoyed later by the more internal areas of the country, and only ultimately by the western areas. Like the phases of a meticulously planned growth, Deng’s “ladder-step doctrine” – defined amongst others by Yang (2012,

between urbanisation and renewed attention for the western part of the country (Taylor, 2015, p. 109). The Plan appeared to be a necessary rebalancing operation exploiting not only infrastructure and urban growth as an economic development engine (Ren, Folmer and Van der Vlist, 2014), but also the promise of citizenship. The latter was implemented by emphasising two fundamental elements of the contemporary “Chinese dream”: the “rejuvenation” of the nation and the assignment of an urban hukou and consequent acquisition of the right to access primary services by citizens arriving from rural areas (Huang, 2004). In other words, the possibility for a great many people to live in a healthy, comfortable and modern environment (Miller, 2017, pp. 113–114) and achieve the people-oriented “new type of urbanization” announced by Prime Minister Li Keqiang in February 2013 (Wu, 2013 b). The official political discourse plainly concentrated on the overall reinforcement of the urban identity of Chinese society and the breakdown of the urban/rural divide, either thanks to processes that raised settlement standards – previously defined as the “townization” of villages and “citization” of county towns and small cities (Guldin, 2004) – or thanks to the administrative annexation of rural fringes to urban districts in all regions (Ma, 2005). The second topic we wish to emphasise is the international New Silk Road initiative (NSR ). Resolutely conducted by the Chinese government after it was officially announced in 2013, this grand geopolitical and macro-economic vision of the NSR

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

p. 27) – benefited the coastal regions throughout the eighties and most of the nineties thanks to the promise that the inner and poorer regions were next in line. This promise began to materialise with the adoption of the objective of the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1996–2000) to reduce regional inequalities. At the turn of the century this objective became a fully-fledged policy when the “go west” strategy was officially announced by Secretary Jiang Zemin during his “Xi’an Speech” in June 1999 and its ensuing inclusion in “China’s Western Development Program” (Lai, 2002, p. 436). In the National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014–2020) the central government created a direct link

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became the underlying issue in the debate on China’s consolidated territorial and economic policies. In fact, the NSR initiative sinks its roots in the long season of “go west” policies; the opening of a new trade route towards countries in Asia was an explicit option as far back as the late nineties or even earlier when attempts were made to reroute the manufacturing sector towards inland China (Wang, Li and Linge, 1997). A crucial shift in scope and spatial distribution was introduced by the transformation required to ready the rugged regions and cities of inland China for the construction of the NSR infrastructure belts (outlined in official documents by non-spatial lines across the whole continent). In this respect, the NSR is simply the most recent embodiment of the dialectic relationship between controlled development and decentralised actions. Wang, Li and Linge (1997) defined the policies adopted between 1949 and the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1996–2000) as an unsolvable contradiction between attempts at controlled levelling of regional disparities and the imbalanced distribution of natural resources, population and industrial development which have left a difficult industrial legacy in western regions (state-owned enterprises that did not survive the shift to a global market, obsolete mining industries, etc.). In addition, Tang, Li and Kwok (2000) have retrospectively identified continuous tension in political campaigns between the attempt to smooth over regional differences by exploiting centralised industrialisation and infrastructuralisation processes focusing primarily on inland regions (“thirdfront regions”, far away from the critical borders with Vietnam and the Soviet Union) during the Five-Year Plans of the sixties and early seventies (Li, 2000, p. 157), and the designation mechanisms of local pilot projects to be adopted as reference models in order to reinforce “linkages between localities” (Tang, Li and Kwok, 2000, p. 17). These authors encourage centralised control and decentralisation to be considered as processes that coexist in the “institutional configurations of a place” rather than being mutually exclusive (Tang, Li and Kwok, 2000, p. 17). In this respect we believe it important to link new towns to the national policies for the development of regions in Western China, not only because the construction of new towns is direct evidence of the intentions of the central government, but also because new towns highlight the relationships between policy objectives and the characteristic features of the plans. A quantitative link exists between the new urbanisation projects in inner China and the long maturing process of the Chinese “go west” policies – the NSR being the last and most ambitious evolution. In 2013 the China Centre for Urban Development analysed the planning documents of 156 prefecture-level cities in twelve provinces (Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Jiangsu, Henan, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Guizhou and Shaanxi).2 All the twelve provincial capitals and 133 cities had plans for one or more new towns: a total of two hundred worksites (see also: Yang, Day and Han, 2015, p. 99). Instead sixty-seven of the 161 county-level cities had plans for new towns in the same provinces. The provinces in question roughly cover the NSR and Jing-Jin-Ji region, with the addition of Guangdong (now part of the coastal regions touched upon by the coastal One Belt One Road (OBOR )) and the Hunan Province. The capital of Hunan Province, Changsha, has recently inaugurated a new railway link with Europe based on the active branch of the Eurasian Bridge of the OBOR .3 The study by the China Centre for Urban Development concentrates on places that influence urbanisation processes by connecting new towns with important urban centres. The grand 80

narrative of the redistribution and conquest of inland regions is superimposed on existing cities and regional systems. In other words, there’s a gap between the many local realities that emerge when the new, envisaged infrastructure belts intercept existing cities and settlements, and the rationale of big infrastructure projects constantly proposing a representative image of the “go west” policy and the three metropolitan macro-regions “Bei Shan Guang” based on the rhetoric regarding the long distances of mobility and interregional and international logistics.4 The local realities include big, consolidated metropolitan systems, second- and third-tier cities that now have new opportunities for growth, and also smaller cities waiting for a much desired upgrade in urban quality and standard of living. The new towns described in the following paragraphs are located in these intersections. They are hubs along the main routes of the infrastructures linking the coastal regions of China to central Asia and Europe. They are also the end product of the mechanisms with which central policies interface not only with the actions of local governments, but also with the daily lives of an ever-changing society, which includes building new urbanisations. The NSR and the “go west” strategies turn these new places into possible national hubs, at least in terms of distance. In addition, going west reunites the origins of the history of Chinese civilisation in central regions to this new urbanisation designed to curb migration towards coastal regions and provide new development options to regions currently less affected by post-reform economic growth. If we momentarily look beyond individual experiments, the areas being built in cities in the West appear to once again propose a specific bricolage that reshuffles the past, long-distance relationships and new themed foundations (Zhou, 2012).

Lanzhou: Lanzhou New Area Lanzhou is located in the centre of continental China, Gansu Province. It is one of the most prominent infrastructure hubs of the OBOR . The inauguration of the LanzhouXinjiang high-speed railway in late 2014 makes it possible to travel from Lanzhou to the western border of China in twelve hours. It used to take over twenty hours to cover the same distance before the railway link was built along part of the northern silk road. Since 2017, Shanghai can be reached by rail from Lanzhou in nine hours compared to the thirty it once required.5 The promotion of the Lanzhou New Area is an example of what we have outlined so far. Videos show the infrastructures running through certain cities: when the camera gets close to each place or city their names become zoning patterns, immediately revealing 3D research centres and well-arranged residential buildings. In actual fact, the plan for the new settlement existed before the NSR became official. In fact, Lanzhou New Area was approved as the fifth state-level new area in 2012, a few months before the election of President Xi Jinping, who boosted infrastructure construction towards central Asia and Europe, thereby breathing new life into attempts to implement the first inland China urbanisation campaign. The project documents reveal the ambitious aspiration of the Lanzhou New Area to emulate the new areas in Shanghai Pudong, Tianjin Binhai, Chongqing Liangjiang and Zhejiang

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New Towns in Inland China

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Zhoushan Island. However, in actual fact Lanzhou New Area (Fig. 1) is rather isolated, even from old Lanzhou, which, with over two million inhabitants, is a good 70 kilometres away. It is a growth pole that wants to materialise the policies of central government by building new infrastructures, industries and services. The plan revolves around a regular road network created by moving huge land masses. The motto “a city, six parks, two corridors” is reiterated in the promotional claims by the government as a concise description of the plan showing an urban centre surrounded by sprawling industrial parks separated by impressive gardens.6 The road sections in the virtual images are so big they seem to separate Fig. 1 Lanzhou New Area, 2017, 40 × 40 kilometres. rather than connect the big building blocks with their workshops, logistics platforms, training centres and residential housing units. However, the one million inhabitants envisaged for Lanzhou New Area have yet to materialise. In fact, the new town is often equated to the ghost towns built and never occupied (Shepard, 2015).7 Initial residents currently include the inhabitants of the pre-existing villages whose lands were expropriated in exchange for the assignment of an urban hukou, and the technical-administrative staff who moved here after their businesses were transferred from old Lanzhou. Xi’an: Xixian New Area Since 9 July 2017, when the new stretch of the high-speed railway link was opened between Lanzhou and Xuzhou in Eastern China, it only takes three hours to cover the 500 kilometres between Lanzhou and Xi’an (Mengjie, 2017). The promo by the Xinhua State Agency stated: “The new rail line is part of China’s efforts to boost connectivity along the Belt and Road”; it chose as its testimonial a Kazakh student enrolled in Xi’an Jiaotong University. The city of Xi’an, located in the central province of Shanxi, is considered one of the most populated cities in Western China. It was the founding capital of Chinese culture, seat of the Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui and Tang dynasties between the eleventh century BCE and 904 CE , before the barycentre of the country shifted towards Eastern China. It was also the place where the old silk road started and ended. Today it is an important industrial centre which after the nineties developed as an aeronautical engineering pole thanks to investment by the military. The urban planning exhibition hall in Xi’an displays all the planning documents of the new initiatives involving the old capital. Upon entering visitors are greeted by a huge map of the Euro-Asian region explaining the historical importance of Xi’an and how the current regional network retraces the old international trade and traffic routes.8 This reinterpretation of Chinese ancient history inspired the urbanisation project; in a single narrative it merges the lost capital and new expansion areas, envisaging a total of ten million inhabitants in an urban area of 800 square kilometres in 2020. The Xixian New 82

Area, (Fig. 2) one of these expansion areas, is a combination of the Guanzhong Tianshui Economic Zone Development Plan (2009) and the Plan for the National Main Functional Areas approved by the State Council in 2010 as part of the internationalisation package of western cities. Xixian New Area was designed as a link between the two towns of Xi’an and Xianyang – an area of 882 square kilometres, of which 272 square kilometres are urban. Merging the two cities is indicated as creating the critical mass needed to legitimise the city as an international metropolis. The original Silk

by the provincial government since 2011. The planning documents explicitly mention the link between the Xixian New Area and the Twelfth Five-Year Plan for Great Western Development; it is considered a “city core area” and “modern garden city” and is one of the five key areas of the western regions (XNAC , 2013). This new town is described using its links (airport, motorways, the link between the two urban systems of Xi’an and Xianyang), rather than as a single morphological unit. In fact, Xixian New Area is the union of seven counties and twenty-three townships and villages previously part of Xi’an and Xianyang. The new urbanisation already has a population of almost one million inhabitants, with a forecast of at least 1.2 million in 2020, despite the fact that only infrastructures are envisaged during the early construction phases. The masterplan is structured and divided into sectors inside the designated perimeter in which orthogonal urban grid segments and urban layouts with central axes alternate with large unbuilt areas to be used for agriculture and archaeological and environmental tourism. The strategies for the future urban morphology repeatedly refer to “five vocational directions”, “four morphological axes” and “five functional clusters” with specific industrial park sub-projects: Airport City, Fendong New City (R&D), Qinhan New City (culture and tourism), Fenxi New City (IC) and Jinghe New City (logistics). The strategy is completed by combining the “two belts” linking the archaeological areas of the Qin and Han dynasties, the three ecological corridors along the Wei, Jing and Ba Rivers, as well as agricultural production for the urban market. Special attention is dedicated to this issue as part of the more generic attention awarded to the environment. The overall development plan incorporates existing material artefacts in the expansion area which, apart from Xi’an international airport and important archaeological sites, currently envisages largely agricultural activities. The plan implicitly associates pre-existing villages with the agricultural areas: the two different uses are indicated in two tones of green despite the fact they refer respectively to cultivated land, divided into small lots, and densely inhabited built areas. The planning document specifies that there has to be a balance between the primary production of saleable cereals and vegetables (repeating the words used in statistical direc-

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

Fig. 2 Xixian New Area, 2017, 40 × 40 kilometres.

Road and the founding myth of Chinese civilisation are the main drivers behind the public narrative of the Xixian New Area, developed

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tories), but omits to clarify whether this also includes a balance between industrial agriculture for mass production and the family-run kind of micro-agriculture that exists today. Luoyang: Luoyang New Area When the high-speed rail link between Xi’an and Zhengzhou opened in 2010, it provided two-hour train journeys, effectively killing the air link. At first glance, “go west” means a rapprochement between selected centres. The shift from plane to train also created more land links. Luoyang in Henan Province is an intermediate stop on the Xi’an–Zhengzhou line. Construction of the station coincided with construction of the Luoyang New Area (Fig. 3), south Fig. 3 Luoyang New Area, 2017, 40 × 40 kilometres. of the city; this area with its archaeological remains is currently available for urban expansion. The new area reorganises preexisting villages to create settlements as a real hub on the Luo River; these settlements have an orthogonal grid layout following the rivers Luo and Yi. The strategy is based on water as the defining element of the urban form; its motto “four canals, nine affluents, three basins” refers to the hydraulic engineering project implemented to reshape the three artificial basins with a surface area of 120,000 to 190,000 square metres that were completed in 2013.9 On 18 November of that same year, the Management Committee of Luoyang New Area (which until then was not an independent body of the Luoyang government) announced the winning proposal from amongst the eight groups invited to participate in the competition for the “Conceptual Planning for Smart City in Luoyang New Area”.10 The new area is made up entirely of villages which will subsequently be subject to “rural and urban integration planning”, including industrial parks and residential settlements. Rather than creating a continuous urban area, these villages, parks and settlements generate potential urbanisation with different densities.11 The parts already built by real estate developers between areas yet to be developed make it impossible to present an overall interpretation. We know the infrastructure project was launched in the early twenty-first century thanks to a detailed document by the mayor, Li Guiji (Li, 2004); the document was submitted to the Assembly of the Henan Provincial People’s Government on 9 March 2004. The new area as an ecologically modern project – from the sewage system to the landscape – is implemented by large-scale relocation of village inhabitants to multi-storey buildings; instead the old city will specialise in revamping cultural tourism by once again proposing the model of old trading districts, with an explicit reference to the Xintiandi district in Shanghai. Shijiazhuang: Zhengding New District Local institutional communication channels touted the new Zhengding in Hebei Province as the solution to the “urban chaos” and inefficiencies of Shijiazhuang that expanded due to productive investments rather than as a planned urban centre.12 84

These solutions included ecology and the creation of the right sort of environment for an orderly, metropolitanised society. The 135square-kilometre expansion area was created in 2010 thanks to a special, provincial-level plan; it envisaged a population of 1.4 million inhabitants, up from the 170,000 already living in the two small pre-existing cities and over sixty villages north of the main centre of Shijiazhuang on the banks of Hutuo River. Construction began the following year while Shijiazhuang was also growing as an industrial centre and infrastructure hub to gradually give respite to the industrial areas in the Beijing-Tianjin region. Using ostensibly convenFig. 4 Zhengding New District, 2017, 40 × 40 kilometres.

tional dynamics, a provincial initiative was incorporated into macro-regional and national

may have excluded the individuals for whom the whole operation was implemented. Dezhou: National New Energy Demonstration City The designation “new institutional entity” assigned to a designed space is not univocal or permanent. Several restrictions can apply in terms of specific facilitations (taxation, settlement costs, special economic zones), and institutional contact persons may change over a period of time. However, this does not modify the key objective of the plan: controlled urban growth. The Overall Urban Plan (2010–2011) for Dezhou was approved in July 2017 by the State Council; it includes a total expansion area of 155 square kilometres for 1.44 million inhabitants and has been baptised “National New Energy Demonstration City”. It is unclear what this means compared to the current situation, not only because the approved plan has to be backdated by roughly six years, but also because compared to 2011, the space in question is now made up of pre-existing villages reorganised around a recently-designed urban road network and new residential compounds (under construction). It is here that the biggest Chinese builders are promoting settlements with evocative names such as “Royal City”, “Green Town”, etc.,

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

plans. In fact, in February 2017 an announcement was made regarding the transfer of the entire administration of Shijiazhuang to the new Zhengding. (Fig. 4) This shift reflects the dynamic by which the transfer of an administrative centre and the reconfiguration of stations generate a new wave of development and the transformation of the pre-existing centre.13 The official news release leading to the creation of Zhengding as a national new district explicitly refers to the transfer and redistribution model of functions from Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei. The public auctions for the assignment of land use rights began later, in June 2017.14 This temporal gap shows how its proximity to the Jing-Jin-Ji system – an important goal when the operation was legitimised – made it necessary for the developers to implement price control mechanisms and mark up the final sales price of the housing units since the system used to acquire an urban hukou is linked to the purchase of real estate, and speculation in the spatial Jing-Jin-Ji system

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located around the economic and technological development zone and the railway station for the new high-speed link connecting Dezhou to Beijing in just over an hour. However, the new Dezhou (Fig. 5) does appear in planning documents of the Shandong Province dated 2002; it is part of the many initiatives that exploited massive infrastructure construction to jumpstart the economy of the province (which at the time was anything but flourishing). That was also the period when construction began on big road networks lined with modest-sized residential compounds. Solar Valley, a settlement similar to a company town, began to develop within this grid; it was a private initiative launched in 2007 by the founder of the Fig. 5 National New Energy Demonstration City, Dezhou, Himin Solar Energy Group. Solar Valley is a 2017, 40 × 40 kilometres. model district for an important producer of solar panels, a sort of urban-scale showroom; it was initially supported by the municipality which imposed similar technological devices to be inserted on new buildings outside the settlement.15 Despite the alternating fortunes of the private company, new Dezhou is expanding and developing the theme tested in the initial centre (which can currently boast a 4 A rating as a tourist attraction) without explicitly referring to the founder. Xiangyang: Dongjin New District The new Dongjin (Fig. 6) is an ambitious urban reconfiguration project for a relatively small centre on the secondary north-south link with Chongqing in the central Hebei Province; it is slowly taking shape based on individual compounds built and promoted by real estate developers. Simply building residential homes triggers an economic cycle. In addition: launching the projects redefines the assignment of the hukou that precedes the final urban layout. Thanks to Dongjin, the urban population in Xiangyang in 2012 was recorded as being 53 % – in line with national objectives. It was a staggering doubling compared to the urban population recorded in 2000 (Li, Zhu and Sun, 2014). These percentages include both the resident population that was compensated for the expropriation of their rural land, and the urbanised migrants who benefited from a favourable situation: employment opportunities and credit facilities to purchase a new home. After instant approval, this newtype urbanisation immediately materialised 86

Fig. 6 Dongjin New District, 2017, 40 × 40 kilometres.

for these buyers in the form of a single housing unit, an apartment that could be purchased to access the promised urban dream. It is at this level that we can distinguish the internal segmentation of the new urbanisation projects. One channel is addressed to users and involves the real estate agencies and their own, dedicated viewing centres, while the framework within which the individual urban experience is created includes the business and administrative district of the new town. This is the most represented district in official promotional material; it recalls the new objective and contains numerous references to the urban success of other Chinese cities. Recurrent Features and Specificities in the Area under Construction Our study of the sample towns corroborates the theory that Chinese new towns play a very precise role in the creation of a modern, advanced country, albeit with ostensibly controversial results that can only be properly assessed in the medium to long term. That said, the new urban areas created in cities in the central and western regions of China are catalysts for investments in the future of the NSR ; they initially appear to share a specific organisational mission, capable of controlling the population’s desire to live in urban areas and the ensuing risks of imbalance towards major metropolitan regions. Whether or not we consider these operations “innovative”, perhaps their most novel quality is an extremely pragmatic attempt to materially continue and tangibly express Deng’s ambitious “prosperity for all” project reconciling the old Marxist principle “to each according to his needs”. A new town becomes something that is seemingly rigid in its reiterated forms, but very freely interpreted and redesigned based, inter alia, on the following: the facilities provided, its more or less local promotion, its transmissible values (historical, environmental, etc.) and a constant search for balance between

new urban districts continue to convey a very hierarchised city model in which a few, simple concepts – the reinvention of history, ecology and scientific and technological progress – are suitably manipulated on a case-by-case basis in order to create a solid, credible narrative. The materialisation of stereotypes and exogenous status symbols spreads rapidly amongst all social groups. This leads to a narrative based on simplicity and immediacy, so much so that the dissemination of new towns appears to be a ready-made model. Its design materials – the forms of the initial buildings and public space – are simple objects, easy to duplicate and adjustable to local contexts with slight variations and, above all, to the narrative forms used to promote them. Several narratives are present in this model. One involves the resurgence of local history. History dominates especially in inland areas where the big metropolitan areas in the east of the country have less influence and echoes of an imperial past can be revived and re-edited more easily in order to create new imagery. In smaller centres, such as Luoyang, history is often used in an instrumental and unscrupulous manner, ostensibly creating more room for creativity. In more important cities, like Xi’an,

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the idealism of Mao’s equalitarian utopia and the tangible acceptance of inevitable differences. Otherwise the urban models adopted in new towns in inland areas do not appear, at least in principle, to be really “new”, especially physically and morphologically. Behind the glimmering glass and steel curtain wall and formal virtuosity of these symbolic buildings, and apart from the pervasive greenwashing in promotional images,

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national rhetoric is the instrument of choice, focusing on the lustre of certain periods rather than others, the past history of ancient capitals or reminiscences of the Silk Road. Reference to history is used everywhere in new towns; it helps promote the old urban centre revived thanks to tourism enhancement policies. Another recurrent theme is the environment and, more in general, environmental policies (sustainability, green building, energy saving). The latter have become a priority in China, especially after President Xi inaugurated a new season of national environmental policies, thereby making China one of the main supporters of agreements regarding global climate change and the reduction of urban pollution. New towns are often promoted as alternatives to polluted environments rather than as enhanced solutions. For example, the Zhengding New Area in Shijiazhuang, considered one of the most polluted cities in China, is simply proposed as a well-organised, clean space situated in parallel: an alternative to the problems of the existing city. Energy and the environment are continually mentioned in informative material and official documents, so much so that empty spaces outnumber solid spaces, and there is more landscaped nature than there is city. However, this often obliterates the image of a recognisable urban environment. It has happened in Dezhou, for example: the powerful solar installations of the “Solar Valley” Company Town emerge from sprawling vegetation where infrequent collective buildings seem to be almost inopportune, haphazard presences. Xiangyang is another example: here the “green ribbons” cutting through the new Dongjin district are the only real, continuous “ribbon” in an urban environment made up of scattered objects. In short, the construction of urban space appears to be fostered by the reiteration and partial recombination of a repertoire of limited forms and narratives. Instead the morphological layout seems essentially based on a regular road pattern generating rules defined at a later date. In fact, only the development of the compounds of real estate developers provide a detailed plan of the entrances, centralities and functions in common with other areas and exclusive open spaces, all detached from the general urban form. In the end the individual user purchases a set of facilities organised in a recognisable area. Ultimately, the geography of new towns is very mobile; their novel characteristic consists primarily in moving beyond traditional concepts such as centres and suburbs and, in a sense, the metropolitan dynamics we often use when referring to them. A new settlement geography is triggered by the fact that the map of urban China is redesigned based on high-speed train stations, and proximity relationships are redefined by multiscalarity, infrastructure progression and national and international narratives. This geography is an alternative to consolidated layouts which are basically simple, tested objects, compliant solutions that can be duplicated in local contexts with only slight variations. To a large extent they are entrusted with the task of welcoming and, to a certain extent, educating future generations in inland regions. They are also responsible for influencing the requests of these individuals and shaping their expectations and ambitions in order to achieve what is still the country’s main objective: a “moderately prosperous” society. 88

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

1 On 28 April 2011, a communiqué by the National Bu- by the names of the three main cities: Beijing (Jing-Jin-Ji), reau of Statistics of People’s Republic of China regarding Shanghai (Yangtze River Delta) and Guangzhou (Pearl Rivthe 2010 Population Census reported that 49.68 % of the er Delta). 5 The Xinhua State Agency, on 9 July 2017, also population lived in cities, an increase of 13.5 % compared specifies how “to promote regional tourism, photos and to the census ten years earlier (NBS , 2011). The recorded brochures are now distributed on trains between Lanzhou migrant population, living primarily in urban areas, topped and Xuzhou city in the east”. 6 Video material obtained 221 million (16 %). Along the same lines, in 2014 China’s on 20 November 2017 (available at: http://www.lzxq.gov. National Development and Reform Commission published cn/tsxq/9362 . jhtml). 7 On this issue, see also Phillips, the National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014–2020). 2017 a. 8 The visit took place on 4 August 2016. 9 FigOne of its objectives was to raise the percentage of the ures provided by the Luoyang Water Authority. Available urban population to 60 % (Wang et al., 2015), measured at: http://www.hnlysl.gov.cn/slj9288 /slj6475 .html (Acaccording to current statistical indicators, and introduce cessed: 9 January 2013). Urban and Rural Planning Buthe gradual allocation of new urban hukou to the mi- reau of Luoyang City. Available at: http://www.lysghj.gov. grant population. It has often been noted that when pub- cn/ (Accessed: 23 December 2017 ). 10 News release by lic administrations in China use statistics, the figures may the Luoyang government, available at: http://www.ly.gov. be significantly inconsistent due to the redefinition of the cn/tzly/tzlyzxdt/454183 .shtml (Accessed: 8 November indicators and implicit political interpretations of the phe- 2013). 11 “Urban-rural integration policies” are a series nomena. Furthermore, statistical data should be consid- of documents published by the central government, startered more as trends rather than objective data. (For an ing in early 2000, to overcome the rural-urban divide updated list of contributions on this issue, see Li and Gib- and implicitly promote the urbanisation of small and meson, 2013). 2 The China Centre for Urban Development dium-sized towns (Ye, 2009). 12 Available at: http:// (CCUD ) is a research institute supervised by the Nation- www.sjz.gov.cn/ (Accessed: 26 September 2017 ). 13 Availal Development and Reform Commission (NDRC ) which able at: http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2017-05/03/ since 1998 helps to draft reports and enquiries for the c1120907740.htm (Accessed: 3 May 2017 ). 14 Available central government. A summary of the report is availa- at: http://news.sjz.fang.com/2017-06 -28 /25591316.htm ble at: http://www.ccud.org.cn/2013 -09 -26/113349759. (Accessed: 28 June 2017 ). 15 It is important to note html (Accessed: 26 September 2017 ). 3 See on this issue that Dezhou was chosen as a venue for the second conthe news published on the official government One Belt test entitled Solar Decathlon China 2017–2018, an inter­ One Road website, available at: http://eng.yidaiyilu.gov. national competition reserved for twenty university teams cn/home/rolling/16695.html (Accessed: 24 September in partnership with building companies and businesses. 2017 ). 4 Abbreviation often used to indicate the three The competition involved the design, construction and main metropolitan macro-regions in China; it was inspired testing of a housing unit powered only by solar energy.

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Shaping Urbanity. Politics and Narratives Florence Graezer Bideau, Anna Pagani How is it possible to control the largest urban population in the world? (Li and Tian, 2016) The “engineering of Chinese society” has been largely interpreted as an attempt to control the battle between urban and rural rights and at the same time enhance them. This struggle has pervaded the urban fabric and led to the stratification of Chinese society (Douglass, Wissink and Van Kempen, 2012; He, 2013). The Chinese engineering population process has continued on and off for decades; it started when the urban-rural divide was set up through the hukou, the household registration system, separating Chinese society into two spheres (Chan, 2015). The current dualism created by the hukou no longer appears to be based on a large-scale geographical distinction. Rather than being directed against people registered as urban population (in larger towns and cities) and rural population (in villages and townships), controversies are now urban-based between local residents (with local registration or a hukou), the “locals” (Jacka, Kipnis and Sargeson, 2013, p. 66) and outsiders (with no local registration). The intricacy of the relationship between social actors in cities requires a more in-depth analysis to reveal all the nuances of the contrasts between owners, wealthy urban inhabitants, tenants, and the dispossessed. Indeed, such subtle opposition affects all rights, from the political and social – such as citizenship – to the economic, in other words consumption practices (Wu, 2016 b). In this chapter we will discuss not only the question of who is living in Chinese new towns, but also deconstruct both the concept of new urban population, promoted by the government, and the narratives used to advocate the concept of civilising citizens. Engineering Population: the Urban and Rural Hukou The dualism between urban and rural populations has characterised the Chinese social structure even to the present day. As presented by Wang Fei-Ling, the distinction between those who had access to cities and were “in”, and those who were excluded and therefore “out”, “emerges and is imposed to divide and organise people, to manage and allocate resources, including labour, and to enable political and social control” (2005, pp. 5–6). This institutional inclusion and exclusion, dating back centuries (historical proof may be found in the sixth or seventh century BCE ), was aimed at structuring and maintaining a stable socio-political order. It legitimised social stratification and assigned everyone a status, a location, and an economic capital with which to live and produce, at the same time restricting the volunteer migration of people and labour. Although the Chinese institutional inclusion and exclusion system evolved during Imperial China and the Republic of China, during the Mao era the hukou system became very rigid and efficient: the population was segmented to ensure better control, and internal migration was regulated according to the centrally planned economy. As a result, a small proportion of urbanites from cities and towns in wealthy regions were largely privileged in terms of social opportunities and economic resources, whereas the majority of rural residents were excluded from the system. As described by Wong, Han 90

and Zhang “From the mid-1950s to 1978, cities in China were tightly controlled in physical and population size and peasants were kept attached to the land producing food and basic necessities to support the proportionally small urban population regulated by a ration system” (2015, p. 1). These dynamics sparked a dual economy and society, a dualism transferred to future generations. To maintain the illusory balance between urban and rural areas, as well as the privileges of the citizens included in the system, the hukou was significantly improved: compared to Imperial China it registered and divided people according to geographically defined locations and socio-political identities, and restricted mobility between household registration areas (Wang, 2010). This renewed state tool ensured control over economic growth and public security (Chan and Zhang, 1999); as a result it was used to manage population distribution and determine people’s accessibility to social services and benefits. Subdivided in “agricultural” and “non-agricultural”, the hukou was no longer linked to urbanity: the label was assigned based on entitlement to commodity grain, thereby determining access to radically different opportunities or obligations as well as the socio-economic status of each component of the citizens’ group. From the outset this agricultural/non-agricultural categorisation produced various effects; today it represents one of the major issues faced by China. As a result, a more in-depth analysis of the so-called urban/rural divide is crucial if we are to understand the increasing attractiveness of urban citizenship, the

Household registration was implemented in an unprecedented manner during the sixties and seventies (Chan and Zhang, 1999): the hukou system was initially a domestic passport, but after the 1979 reform it produced a tangible chasm in Chinese society. Economic factors furthered this divide: money introduced new social divisions and exclusions between those who “have” and those who “have not”: serving the “interests of capitalist development” (Tomba, 2008, p. 49). China opened the market and introduced private property; this led to the collapse of the socialist danwei system (Bray, 2005). At the time urban citizenship was considered “superior” in terms of access to social services and economic opportunities; so the increased attractiveness of large Chinese metropolises triggered a significant migration process for wealthy, educated and talented individuals. Illegal migration was facilitated by the mobility restrictions imposed by household registration and the complexity of the procedures to obtain an urban hukou for one or more family members. However, illegal migration was crucial for the “industrialisation of the cheap”, a definition referring to control over the mobility of low-skilled workmen. Although this labour control was put in place to support the growing economy, it also had social consequences: it kept the majority of peasant migrants in an “inferior” institutional, economic and social position within society (Fan, 2008). The social disparity that existed between rural migrant workers and urban citizens continues even today; in fact, migrant workers have no access to social services. This uniquely Chinese urban-rural dualism has triggered the phenomenon of a floating population claiming land rights and urban citizenship (Zhang, LeGates and Zhao, 2016; Wang, 2017). This huge army of cheap labourers reached 234 million in 2014 (Gipouloux, 2015): the “pivotal human cog powering China’s economic engine” (Chan, 2015, p. 74). Migrant workers are inexistent since they have no urban rights and

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migration processes and the strategies adopted to benefit from both.

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are not considered urban citizens. Ever since it was applied the hukou had, and still has, a devastating effect on the population. The privatisation of residential spaces inevitably led to segregation, and new lifestyles have struggled to visibly express social boundaries. In order to create a more balanced society (i.e., the “harmonious society” currently present in ideological discourses), the central authorities released the New National Urbanisation Blueprint in March 2014; it aimed to increase the proportion of urban households by granting urban hukou to one hundred million migrants. Although hukou are now granted, this engineering population process had new aims: the creation of the new “civilised citizen”. Towards the Civilising Process The milestones in the exploration and interpretation of the so-called “civilising process” (Pow, 2007, pp. 1546–1548) that has shaped and modernised Chinese society for decades are: the objectification of the urban/rural divide implemented by the PCC since the fifties (Brown, 2012), the building of a “material and spiritual civilisation” in the eighties (Dynon, 2008), and the promotion of a “harmonious society” in the nineties (Chan, 2010 b). Ever since the reform era the word suzhi has played a pivotal role in this process, defining the social and political hierarchies of Chinese society. Translated into “quality”, the concept was adopted by the authorities of the People’s Republic of China to distinguish between individuals: “high quality” people were entitled to gain more income, power and status, while people who lacked this trait were usually rural migrants and other discriminated categories. Suzhi has been used as a tool to build and shape the nation “by individually and collectively raising the quality of its citizens” (Kipnis, 2006, p. 296). Suzhi has become viral since it was repeatedly mentioned in party campaigns (to improve the quality of the population) (Feuchtwang, 2012, p. 7) and was in fact memorised together with the party’s key slogans. By increasing natio­ nalism, conveying birth-control propaganda and enhancing the need for education, suzhi emphasised the competitiveness of society, again shaping well-rooted clusters. Simply put, it became a “powerful form of governmentality based on pressures toward self-regulation and self-development that are internalized among the people as much as they are imposed by the State from above” (Jacka, 2006, p. 42). Today, such intangible and unspoken rules shaping so-called “civilised citizens” (or the ones with a “high suzhi”) are still part of the party’s narratives and branding. Suzhi plays a crucial role in promoting the future middle class, recognisable by their new lifestyles and especially consumption (Jacka, 2009; Goodman, 2014 a). These lifestyles do not provide answers to real needs, but rather shape or plan the needs that the future city’s inhabitants must have. As Feuchtwang (2012, p. 7) exemplifies perfectly: “The newly minted Chinese civilisation emphasises modernity and prosperity, particularly academic and professional qualifications, hygiene, and civic responsibility. […] They are accompanied by admonitions to be civilised on streets, billboards, notice boards and the mass media, reinforced by an elaborate system of awards to households, work units, buildings, urban neighbourhoods and villages. They are accepted as the expected activity of a state civilising mission”. Apart from government propaganda, consumers’ habits are being self-shaped through a process that can be described as “mutual display 92

and identification” (Taylor 2004, quoted by Feuchtwang 2012, p. 13). Adverts have fostered a new middle class that has seen the light while searching for a proper definition of its status (Fraser 2000). Private housing ads play a key role, “selling the associated symbolic meanings and cultural packages […] [and providing] new meanings and special norms for a new social class” (Zhang 2008, p. 38). In fact, the privatisation of property and lifestyles sparked what Li Zhang defines as the acquisition of cultural capital through consumption practices: “In this open, unstable process, competing claims for status are made through a public performance of self-worth, while at the same time what is considered suitable and proper is negotiated” (2008, p. 25). The discriminating factors that determine membership of a social class are car ownership, interior home design, children’s schooling, clothes, food choices and leisure activities (such as tennis, ballet or golf), but also the formation of bible study groups. However, displaying these habits veils not only the need to “fit in”, but also deep-rooted insecurity about what is proper and what is not. Indeed, these new civilised citizens are not only looking for a common, social and cultural way of identifying with their class, they are also trying to keep abreast with government propaganda about how people should live. In this process, the protagonists of new urbanisation seem to be both the product of government strategies and its producers. By reproducing the norms and social values promoted by the official authorities and their discourses, this new middle class carefully protects its social status and lifestyles.

dichotomy between the wealthy and the dispossessed social groups. Although rural hukou holders are ineligible to apply for public housing and unable to rent apartments or access job opportunities in urban areas, they are the hands that build the city, the workers who cut costs in factories. This is what they do in the major Chinese cities or suburbanised new towns where they search for employment; one effect of their search is the creation of urban villages, enclaves for migrants where the networks of the “excluded” are built (Lau and Chiu, 2013). Recent studies have explored the settlements of migrants and their social lives in urban villages, highlighting their reliance on informal geography-based networks (the native province or locality), or occupation (Zhang 2001; Siu, 2007; Bach, 2010; Wang, Li and Chai, 2012; Li and Wu, 2014; Wissink, Hazelzet and Breitung, 2014). Although the hukou system was relaxed a little in the 1980s, allowing rural workers to work temporarily in cities, the household system has heavily influenced their quality of life. Whether rural hukou holders open a small business or work in township and village enterprises (TVE s), they have to deal with unequal treatment on a daily basis. Since they are excluded from all the social and economic benefits afforded to urban hukou holders, they are accustomed to finding alternative solutions to address these shortages, spending half of their income on their children’s education, and most of the rest on healthcare and rent (Wu, 2014; Wu and Zhang, 2014). Although rural hukou holders often work as caretakers, maids, babysitters, cooks and gardeners for urban hukou holders, they never rub shoulders, despite living side-by-side.

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The use of urban space, notably residency, is not only a way to express the conformity of the middle class to a new social status. It is also a stage on which to exhibit the

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Rural hukou holders are currently at the heart of the government’s new political strategy since it is well aware of the issues involved, for example the rise in poverty and the slowing of the economy and social welfare. On the one hand, the plan ostensibly seems to envisage the demolition and redevelopment of migrant enclaves – a process that has displaced many people, shifting from informal to formal urbanity (Wu, 2016 b) – and, on the other, to increase the proportion of hukou holders to 45 % by the end of 2020 in order to maintain the flow of migrants coming into cities. However, this plan has many geographical and economic constraints and requires big changes if it is to be implemented. These changes are what Taylor (2015, p. 118) defines as “smart urbanisation” and “shared prosperity”, to be achieved by focusing on rural towns and small cities, rather than expanding megacities. These considerations are still debatable: indeed, Chan (2015) argues that a local revenue system based on property or household consumption taxes, and the relocation of jobs to less-attractive cities, would slow down not only the access of migrants to social services and welfare, but also the improvement of citizens’ rights. Urban Plans and Narratives for the New Urban Population If, on one hand, the Communist Party considers that the Chinese urban dream can be achieved only in conjunction with the advent of new civilised citizens, on the other, new towns are being planned to exhibit the achievement of socially and economically sustainable urbanisation (Tan, 2010). The goals of China’s New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014–2020) is to spread policies focusing on a new kind of urbanism and target social issues or human capital (Bai, Shi and Liu, 2014; Griffiths and Schiavone, 2016). Its main objective is to slowly eliminate this robust dualism perceived as an obstacle to development: “The targets and policies for urbanization, defined in the New-type Urbanization Plan for 2014–20, is a sensible attempt […] [that] also stresses the importance of a people-oriented urbanization. […] This first official plan on urbanization finally aims at integrating one hundred million migrants settling in towns” (Gipouloux and Li, 2015, p. 21). However, although the government is willing to achieve “genuine urbanization” (Chan, 2014) by integrating the second-class population cut off from access to social services, it keeps drawing boundaries between social categories: in fact, priority will be given to college-educated and skilled workers regarding the assignment of urban household registration. The way in which the citizens inhabiting and materialising the urban dream are defined have some points in common with other governmental strategies adopted in the twenty-first century. Two well-known international events – the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the Shanghai Expo in 2010 – were important turning points for China, both in terms of the economy and society. Local and national transformation involved the construction of huge infrastructures, the clearing of villages around the stadiums (Wong, Han and Zhang, 2015), and government slogans (“better city, better life”). These events were perfect opportunities to launch new policies, introducing and encouraging the population to adopt new lifestyles (Cartier, 2013). Government still exploits that technocratic rhetoric to build new cities, together with the specific narratives or fashionable concepts required to promote them (Tomba, 2009; Gipouloux, 2015). One 94

of the many narratives, the “China dream”, emphasises a future, human-centred, and environmentally friendly path to urbanisation (Taylor, 2015). It goes hand-in-hand with Deng Xiaoping’s idea of shaping a “moderately prosperous society” through an achieved process of urbanisation. To reach these goals, specific policy-making strategies (Tomba, 2004) are currently supporting socio-spatial differentiation through real estate privatisation (Wu, 2016 b): as a result, choosing where to live is crucial in order to determine the boundaries of class requirements. Residential spaces are not merely a way to express socio-economic differences, they are the place where a specific social class performs according to the narratives with which they are associated. For the new middle class, buying a home means taking part in the China dream, a project that “manufacture[s] and disseminate[s] the dreams, tastes, dispositions and images of the new middle class” (Zhang 2008, p. 25). On the other hand, the urban forms of the suburbs are the outcome of “multiple interrelated processes that are representative of activities from both formal and informal development approaches” (Wong, Han and Zhang, 2015, p. 8). Certainly a far cry from being shaped by top-down planning.

recent one: the territory is being turned into a new, international, modern city, exhibiting the superimposition of the new urban fabric over the old one. This overwriting is inevitably affecting the city’s social structure, which needs to integrate and embody both its assigned municipal governmental function, its strategic location in the JingJin-Ji urban cluster and also its valuable past (the Grand Canal is listed as a World Heritage Site). Tongzhou’s future population – destined to reach two million inhabitants – will therefore be defined by branding and planning. However, this new, modern image of the city needs to find a way to amalgamate its past inhabitants (notably a large Hui Community of Muslims), its present inhabitants (CBD employees and illegal migrants), and future inhabitants (mostly Municipal officials). Zhengdong is just as fragmented as Tongzhou, but it reflects the urban dream. It is an impossibly uniform, “oversized” city made up of different clusters connected by a huge infrastructure. In this urban setting, the relocated villagers’ housing units are juxtaposed against the high-class gated neighbourhoods imitative of Western cities (i.e., Vancouver City). “Pieces” of cities seem to correspond to “pieces” of inhabitants. However, communities have little weight in the urban planning decision-making: as the project “developer”, the municipal government’s only aim is to maximise public welfare. Participation of the public in planning the city has been limited to the most popular choices regarding aesthetic appeal (Xue, Wang and Tsai, 2013). What is this aesthetic appeal if not the image of a city “suitable for living”? Indicated as such by the Development Plan of the Guangzhou-Foshan-Zhaoqing Economic Circle, Zhaoqing aims to become a demo zone by 2040, an ideal city of 600,000 inhabitants. To do so, the New Area Committee declared it was ready to facilitate and prioritise household registration from rural to urban residents.

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Shaping Urbanity in Tongzhou, Zhengdong and Zhaoqing: A Complex Process Tongzhou, Zhengdong and Zhaoqing offer three different perspectives on the process of shaping urbanity. Beijing’s new town, Tongzhou, is a case of overlapping history. Having undergone several transformations, in 2010 the city embarked on its most

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However, transition will not be easy: the urban grid of the city is superimposed on its agricultural and rural layout, inevitably affecting the social structure of the rural villages through resettlements and demolitions. Tongzhou, Zhengdong and Zhaoqing provide a snapshot of the complexity of shaping urbanity in Chinese new towns. Although discursive and practical aspects have chiefly been used to convey the reform of the hukou system among the local population, a “harmonious society” has not been practically achieved in many locations. Indeed, there are complex and highly contentious interactions between the hukou system and both the urban/rural population and local/outsider divisions; these interactions are crucial to engineer Chinese society and a tool to better understand the growing inequalities among citizens in which informality plays an important role. Shaping urbanity goes beyond fixed categories of citizens listed in blueprints reflecting a perfect dream. Everyday concrete issues widen the gap between the dispossessed (urban unemployed, landless peasants and unskilled migrant workers) and the wealthy (middle-class or rich urbanites, shareholders of collective wealth in rural villages and successful migrant entrepreneurs).

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Architecture and New Towns Michele Bonino This chapter will reflect on the role played by architectural projects in the construction of Chinese new towns by observing new spaces in cities that differ not only in size, but also in administrative setup. This “on-site” observation is based on several research projects carried out between 2013 and 2018.1 The buildings in new towns often amaze us: whether they are copies of other buildings, propose new functional combinations or astonish us with their obsessive ordinariness. However, a more indepth study shows that they appear to play a secondary role in the construction of the city: even if the urban plan is often sophisticated, it fails to prompt a merger between the urban dimension and the architecture. It often simply defines urban grids and

than nuanced behind melanges and stratifications. This leads to a second paradox: on the one hand, this collection of objects is no longer controlled by administrations and governing authorities; on the other, they understand its clarity, effectiveness and potential instrumentality. As a result, they assign it the economic, propagandistic and commercial features that buildings more rooted in the urban fabric would be unable to express as clearly. The examples illustrated in this contribution will use ten new towns to show how these features can convey certain values: Leisure, Health, Nature, Public Life and Urban Space. Architecture and Leisure The Lanzhou New Area is a state-level new area established in 2012 currently being built in Gansu Province as a logistics outpost for the New Silk Road. Thousands of families are settling in a desertic area to work on this strategic hub. New Lanzhou is a glorification of the urban grid; it so dominates the area that some parts of the surrounding mountains have been carved out in order to complete it. Several quadrants of this grid are earmarked for entertainment and leisure: when one walks around the streets under construction in Lanzhou it looks like an oversized design choice, one that is intended to create a world for the many individuals who, when they live here, will probably never be able to move. Lot by lot, quadrant by quadrant, construction is underway on amusement parks and artificial lagoons with bridges and watchtowers; the latter stretch as far as the tourist area, where an entrepreneur has built life-size replicas

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

boundaries, creating huge lots that can easily be assigned to developers interested in acquiring building rights. Even now, despite the warning signals sent to the Chinese economy by speculative mechanisms, building rights are one of the main sources of income for local administrations. We ignore the kind of architecture that will be built on each lot, since the choice lies with the individual promoter or builder. Of course, in some cases thoughtful planners who are aware of the problem are mindful of architectural organisation when designing lots – for example, in Zhengdong, where Kisho Kurokawa’s design reflects qualitative forms and features of a twentieth-century urban project. In the end, however, even in this case there is a missing link. Paradoxically, this situation exposes the architecture to such an extent that it is enhanced rather

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of some of the most important monuments travellers would see if they went on a world tour: the Parthenon, the Sphinx, the Colosseum and the Taj Mahal. (Fig. 1) All for the benefit of the new inhabitants. As in many other new towns, a civic centre will be constructed for every X number of lots to be built in the SinoSingapore eco-city in Tianjin; this is

Fig. 1 Lanzhou New Area, Gansu Province, 2016. The Parthenon and the head of the giant robot will dominate this touristic park.

the result of an agreement (2008) between the governments of China and Singapore to jointly develop a socially harmonious and environmentally

friendly new town. These small buildings share the same layouts and characteristics but reveal important contrasts when they are actually inhabited. On the one hand, the internal layout appears to be “scientifically” designed based on standards established according to the number of visitors and areas available for all sorts of recreational activities, from ping pong to mah-jong, and every age group, from children to the elderly. On the other, the soft, reassuring architectural language often alludes to traditional architecture and facilitates the spontaneous use of open spaces around the building, even if the spaces were not actually designed to be collectively used. In a new town wishing to physically materialise the urban sustainability concept, the attempt to promote a social dimension through the calculation of quantity and performance actually produces the best results when it envisages an unforeseen use of public spaces.

Architecture and Health The Chongli “Snow Town” in Zhangjiakou Prefecture is one of the two mountain venues of the next Winter Olympic Games in 2022. This event will have permanent repercussions. The Government is taking advantage of the sports event to promote a more sustainable lifestyle amongst Beijing’s middle class in line with the expectations of a rapidly growing economy. A new high-speed rail link and motorway will connect the capital with the city under construction in the mountains 300 kilometres away, possibly marking the advent of a new evolution of the urban experience. People in Beijing currently live mainly indoors, restricted on a daily basis by the environment. This frustrates the expectations of a more cultured and discerning population that will, in the future, want to adopt a model based on outdoor life and physical exercise. This lifestyle will increasingly impact public spaces. Most of the houses in the Athletes Village in new Chongli have already been sold to people who will leave the capital permanently. Rather than a strictly functional venue, it is a manifesto of a “city of active health” sprawling along the valleys. There are opportunities for people to walk along public paths circling the buildings as well as continuous contact with nature between the urban spaces. 98

The Zhaoqing New Area acts as a buffer zone between the rich conurbation of the Pearl River Delta and the less developed western region of the Guangdong Province; the competitive strategy adopted in this area by local authorities was intended to attract investors and inhabitants, promising a slower, healthier lifestyle compared to the nearby megalopolises of Guangzhou and Foshan. This concept is always present in both the buildings and slogans promoting the city under construction. The task of physically materialising the notion of wellbeing and a healthy lifestyle is assigned to the big hospital (one of the first buildings to have been completed in the new urbanisation), the tropical countryside penetrating the spaces between the buildings, and emphasis on the size and public accessibility of the sports venues (e. g., the stadium with a wide ramp so that spectators can enter directly from the riverbank). Architecture and Nature A huge reservoir in Jinan West New Town in Shandong Province (with important works designed by Paul Andreu and Architecture Studio) has made it possible to create from scratch the sprawling Xiaoqing wetlands park where local inhabitants can walk and enjoy recreational activities not far from the Yellow River. In 2014, a competition of ideas involved some of the best designers and architects in China (Standard Architecture, Vector Architects, Pei Zhu, Teamminus, etc.). They designed roughly a dozen buildings to provide entertainment and hospitality inside the urban park: although their ideas have yet to be built, many of these projects share the same design approach. The nature in the park has been artificially created in less than a year; the architects considered it an available material, using it directly as a structure or a distribution

Fig. 2 The Forest Building designed by Hua Li (Trace Architecture Office) in the Grand Canal Forest Park, Tongzhou New Town, Beijing, 2016.

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

element or background for their projects. The components of the buildings are, in con-

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trast, necessarily artificial, yet provide space for nature: a roof covered with water, trees on terraces, etc. It is a mutual exchange emphasising how nature is repeatedly considered as a material to build cities – as it was in Chinese traditional cities. The Grand Canal Forest Park, bordering eight of the 1,800 kilometres of the Grand Canal, has recently been completed in Tongzhou New Town. (Fig. 2) Its role is to reconcile the new urbanisation with this important pre-existing structure: the longest artificial canal in the world. The slogan used by the Park to illustrate the canal to visitors says: “One river, two banks, six scenic areas, eighteen attractions”. The link between these two colossal works created by human hands – the city and the canal – is entrusted to nature. Better still, in this case, to its contemplative dimension. The eighteen attractions – bridges, platforms and lookouts – are described using evocative, inspiring names such as “picturesque spot on the island of the moon” or “joyful movement amongst the trees”. The attractions face the canal and the big worksites for the new municipal citadel. One of the pavilions is the Forest Building designed by Trace Architecture Office. It is a forest of lamellar wooden trees under which visitors can rest and contemplate nature protected by a wooden roof, but also by the branches and leaves of real trees incorporated into the new construction. In a single building, Trace materialises the status of the new city of Tongzhou where the artificial use of nature corroborates the popular Chinese metaphor of urbanisation as a natural process, and as such inevitable. Architecture and Public Life In Dali New Town a “Whispering Sea” was built in 2014 near the alpine fault lake known as Erhai Sea, located 2,000 metres above sea level in Yunnan Province. (Fig. 3) Whispering Sea is a large residential village designed by AECOM and Farrells. Situated on the hillside sloping down to the lake, the site includes a shopping mall and a hotel built partially underground. The promotional campaign, which greets visitors as they arrive at the International Dali Airport, uses a phrase attributed by the organisers to Ieoh Ming Pei: “between the mountains and the sea, the unusual delicacy and freshness”. The exhibition hall where the project is displayed contains not only models of the apartments, but also photographs of numerous VIP s who have visited the complex: the village owes its notoriety to its proximity to Dali, one the main Chinese tourist attractions (over twenty million visitors every year). However, Whispering Sea has a problem: there has been so much emphasis on the commercial aspect of the project that hundreds of houses were sold very quickly, however, more as a real estate investment than as genuine tourist accommodation. Gardeners and security personnel can be found at every corner, working on maintaining and controlling the complex. But the houses are empty: owners of individual villas are coming together to form a coordinated hospitality system and dispersed hotels are being created and supported by local authorities in order to breathe life into the village and promote the use of its shopping centres. In Pujiang New Town, the competition for the “Italian city” close to Shanghai was won by Gregotti International in 2001. Its orthogonal grid design with big blocks was con100

Fig. 3 A view of the Whispering Sea residential village near Erhai Sea, in Dali, Yunnan Province, 2015.

systems: the blocks earmarked in the project for public life instead appear to be gated communities. The southern part of Pujiang was also based on this urban plan, but it was never put on the market. In fact, a decision was taken to reserve it for the residents evicted from the area that was to host Expo Shanghai 2010. The residential buildings were immediately designed by local agencies: a far cry from the qualitative ambitions of the northern area, but at the same time free from market diktats. While the northern part of the city appears deserted and very private, in the south the streets are full of life. The community has adopted a simple architecture, but one which is ready to host all kinds of activities. Architecture and Urban Space Two radically different urban spaces co-exist not far from one another in Qunli New Town in Harbin (Heilongjiang Province). Although their designs differ, both have had to take into consideration the extremely cold weather faced for many months a year by the inhabitants of the urban area. One of the large lots destined for commercial or residential purposes is occupied instead by the Qunli Stormwater Wetlands Park designed in 2010 by Turenscape in Beijing. In the middle of the lot, nature has been

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

sidered not only customary in local planning, but also a design opportunity: a merger between Chinese and Italian urban models, in particular the Greco-Roman matrix and the square module of the Chinese agri-measurement system. Compared to the grids normally used in new town planning, the main novelty was a multiplication of mobility levels: apart from the main roads defining the grid, there are secondary streets allowing cars to enter the blocks at a controlled speed, and a third level with only pedestrian paths. These principles were used to build the northern part of Pujiang. However, they failed to anticipate an increase in the number of fences and surveillance

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Fig. 4 Traditional buildings in a shopping mall in Qunli New Town, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, 2013.

left untouched, pristine and wild. Platforms and light infrastructure have been placed around its borders to enhance contact with the city: in a place with extreme weather conditions, citizens are invited to interact directly and primitively with the open space. Not far away, a large, contemporary-looking building complex enclosing reconstructed traditional buildings has a long shopping mall and offers commercial activities: for all intents and purposes a public space, but in this case use and comfort are completely controlled. (Fig. 4) A fake city of Paris with its urban spaces and buildings has been built in Tianducheng New Town, also called “Sky City”, in Zhejiang Province; its construction began in 2007. It includes a replica of the Eiffel Tower, one-third the height of the original. Although the idea does not appear in the masterplan, the decision to propose the image of the French capital was a purely architectural choice inspired at the initiative of Zhejiang Guangsha, a developer who built homes in the central area of the new town. In this case, the architectural project was foremost in the minds of the local authorities. The overall iconic architectural image was approved well before deciding on the number of inhabitants, its activities or functions. The vision then helped to define the rest; it created a strong brand and speeded up the formation of an urban community. It offered buyers a clear-cut, recognisable identity. Although it was only partly successful due to the 2014–2015 real estate crisis, the attempt was an explicit example of the key role assigned to architecture. New Towns, New Practices? When considering these five values and how architecture can help express them in new towns, one cannot but note some gaps: in the case of “leisure”, between strict 102

Fig. 5 View of the riverfront in Binhai New Area, Tianjin, 2014 .

planning and the unpredictability of how a space will actually be used; as regards “health”, between health as an individual expectation and how it is publicly organised in urban space; as concerns “nature”, between the concept of urbanisation as a natural process and the use of nature as an artificial material; in the case of “public life”, between the expectations of a public city and the prevailing rules of a private market; finally, regarding “urban space”, between extreme modes of use ranging from com-

ubiquitous big museums located at the centre of new towns all around China) and as an act of urban repair: for example, the massive MVRDV library in the New Area of Tianjin Binhai, built in 2017, was to give new meaning to an urban area intended to replicate, in North China, the development seen in Shenzhen and Pudong Shanghai, which had remained largely underutilized. (Fig. 5) When reflecting on which architectural practices are possible in these cases, it’s clear that designers are not asked to provide univocal solutions – something which the current emphasis on problem-solving always seems to expect from architecture: one of the first tasks is to help harmonise these gaps or at least underscore them as opposite presences which could possibly co-exist. In this case, Chinese new towns appear to be a potential and fruitful field in which to discover and experiment with new architectural design practices.

1 The author visited the sites of the new towns mentioned in this paper as follows: Lanzhou New Area in November 2016; the Sino-Singapore eco-city in Tianjin in March 2013 and March 2014; Chongli in March 2014; Zhaoqing New Area in June 2016, September 2016 and January 2017;

Ji’nan West in August and November 2014; Tongzhou New Town in January and December 2016; Dali in November 2015; Pujiang New Town in November 2011 and March 2013; Qunli New Town in December 2013 and July 2018; and Binhai New Area in March 2013 and March 2014 .

II. Chinese New Towns in Policies, Narratives and Traditions

pletely controlled to totally primitive. And further contrasts could be identified. There is the recurring contrast between “culture” as an activator of urban dynamics (the

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The New Towns of Zhaoqing, Zhengdong and Tongzhou Filippo Fiandanese, Leonardo Ramondetti, Astrid Safina Tongzhou New Town, Zhaoqing New Area and Zhengdong New District are three new towns currently being built near Beijing, Zhengzhou and Zhaoqing. The three places are radically different in size, geographical location, design date, state of construction and the administrative level that initiated their planning. Tongzhou New Town (155 square kilometres) is considered one of the new poles of the Beijing Municipality in the Beijing Masterplan 2004–2020. With its transformation currently underway, some areas have already been built, others are under construction and still others are on the drawing board. Although the plan for the Zhaoqing New Area (115 square kilometres) near Zhaoqing (Guangdong) was approved in 2012, the area still looks like a big worksite. Finally, Zhengdong New District (150 square kilometres) near Zhengzhou (Henan) was designed based on the winning project of a competition launched in 2001 and is almost completely finished. In the following sections, these three areas will be taken as privileged observation points from which to discuss the role they are asked to play vis-à-vis the milieu where they are situated. In the past, functions performed in Beijing were decentralised in Tongzhou, a town now braced to host the Municipal Government in an attempt to not only reorganise the administrative heart of the capital in a frontier area, but also merge Beijing with the neighbouring areas of Tianjin and Hebei Province. Zhengzhou uses two expansion areas, Zhengdong and Zhengbian New District, to experiment with different ways and forms of empowering an inner area, not only by strengthening certain centralities, but also by trying to establish more capillary infrastructures to promote greater regional integration. Finally, Zhaoqing also perpetuates saturation logics and dynamics typical of the Pearl River Delta in an attempt to be part of the development of this sprawling agglomeration. In the study we have undertaken, our decision to focus on these three towns was not aimed at providing a comprehensive picture of the numerous, identifiable situations or general features of the construction of new towns in China. The three towns are not exemplary, but they do represent specificities we can use to debate the way in which the construction of new towns tries to reconfigure the structure and functioning of large consolidated regional conurbations.

Zhaoqing New Area. The Saturation of the Pearl River Delta Astrid Safina The Pearl River Delta is one of the most representative and emblematic examples of economic and urban growth in China in the last fifty years.1 Starting in the late seventies, economic growth and a continuous urbanisation process turned this mainly agricultural area into a densely urbanised region with a current average density of over five hundred individuals per square kilometre along its eastern edge (Ng and Tang, 1999) and a diffuse and increasingly dense urban system to the west. This makes the Pearl River Delta one of the most extended and populous-regions (Florida, Gulden and Mellander, 2008),2 as well as the most polycentric global city-region in the world (Bie, Jong and Derudder, 2015).3 This ambiguous polycentrism was based on a logic which, albeit aimed at reinforcing certain centralities, generated a capillary expansion made up of cities and villages that emerged in the eighties (Xu and Li, 2009). These urban areas have continued to expand, each on a different scale and at their own individual speed (Bie, Jong and Derudder, 2015). So in the last thirty years the entire Delta has been turned into a continuously inhabited centre (Wei et al., 2017) with a clear inner hierarchy (metropolis; big city; medium-sized city; small city; village) where several nuclei have gradually consolidated their national and global roles (Bie, Jong and Derudder, 2015).4 Zhaoqing is marginal to this enormous conurbation. It is a city of 665,000 inhabitants (Statistics Bureau of Zhaoqing City, 2016) located in an urban area of 85 square kilometres and situated 80 kilometres west of Guangzhou along the main infrastructures stretching up the Pearl River. However, it is positioned on the western edge of the Delta, an area that has never been part of the major processes in which this agglomeration has been involved. So its marginality is chiefly due to the topographic and geographic traits of the area, i.e., the fact it is difficult to access from the Special Administrative Zones of Hong Kong and Macao (Bie, Jong and Derudder, 2015).5 This has meant that compared to the rest of the region the city and western part of the Pearl River Delta6 have undergone less economic, urban and infrastructural development (Wei et al., 2017).7 As a result, Zhaoqing is still a compact urban nucleus surrounded by water­ ways, mountains and small rural villages, separated from the rest of the Pearl River Delta by vast areas of agricultural land. (Fig. 2) However, beginning in the nineties, several initiatives by the municipality were implemented to integrate Zhaoqing into the Pearl River Delta. In particular, these initiatives tried to link the settlements and infrastructures by promoting expansion eastwards, along the river. More specifically, in 1995 the municipality promoted the Zhaoqing City Masterplan (1995–2010) (Zhaoqing Municipal People’s Government, 1995), which involved not only doubling the size of the existing city by creating a new urban area (Fig. 1) linking Zhaoqing to the Dinghu District, but also enhancing the infrastructure network along State Road 321 between Guangzhou and Chengdu. The aim of this operation was to increase the urban density 107

10 km

Fig. 1 Masterplan of Zhaoqing City (2015–2030).

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of the agricultural land between Zhaoqing and the Pearl River Delta; however, the operation remained unimplemented in the decade that followed due to weak actions by the municipality and lack of provincial coordination. The situation changed at the turn of the century, a period when the provincial govern­ ment became a more forceful protagonist and promoted several initiatives to facilitate integration between several centres in the Pearl River Delta. These initiatives appear to be part of a “new season” during which the scale of the implementation of urban competition changed from intraregional competition between individual centres to regional competition between city-regions (Wu, 2015 a).8 In 2004, this situation led to the Pearl River Delta Urban Agglomeration Coordinated Development Plan (2004–2020) (Guangdong Provincial Government, 2004), promoted by the Guangdong Province and the National Ministry of Construction; the document recommended the development of a dual nuclei, polycentric and multilevel urban system.9 This plan was followed in 2008 by the Reform and Development Planning Outline for the Pearl River Delta region (2008–2020), again drafted by the provincial government.10 In the document, the Pearl River Delta was divided into three metropolitan areas, in turn made up of three major centralities; its objective was to reinforce internal integration between the three central areas by promoting coordinated actions on several levels.11 In this framework Zhaoqing became part of the Guangzhou-Foshan-Zhaoqing metropolitan area and together with Foshan was identified as one of the “two backbones with multiple poles that can promote the development of the peripheral areas and achieve advance urban expansion” (Guangzhou Municipality, 2010).12 In 2006, this new incentive prompted the Zhaoqing municipality to boost the expansion of the city towards the Pearl River Delta. It launched an international design competition for the Chengdong district situated on the eastern borders of the existing city. In the following two years the municipality drafted an official plan and annexed a proposal for a further urban expansion area called Dinghu New District. In 2010, the two masterplans were incorporated into the Zhaoqing City Masterplan (2010–2020) (Zhaoqing Municipal People’s Government, 2009), which also included the projects for the Zhaoqing Hi-Tech Area and the infrastructure system linking it to the Pearl River Delta (intercity track, expressway). In 2011, these preliminary operations led the Zhaoqing municipality to draft the Zhaoqing New Area Concept Planning, drafted by the China Urban Planning Design Institute of Shenzhen and officially approved in October 2012 (Zhang, 2016). The masterplan proposed a settlement of 600,000 inhabitants within an area of 115 square kilometres in the central part of the Dinghu district, 18 kilometres east of the old city of Zhaoqing (Zhaoqing New Area Development and Planning Bureau, 2012). The whole compartment was renamed a National Low Carbon Green Development Demonstration Zone, thus proposing it as a regional pilot project for ecological and environmental requalification (Lixin and Xi, 2015).13 The new Demonstration Zone can be spatially summarised in the slogan “one axis, two corridors and three spatial patterns” (Zhaoqing New Area Development and Planning Bureau, 2016). The central axis (one axis) stretches in a north-south direction for 12 kilo109

Fig. 2 Fish ponds in Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017.

3 km

Fig. 3 Masterplan of Zhaoqing New Area (2012–2030).

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Fig. 4 Construction of the road grid in Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017.

metres and accommodates the most important offices and commercial activities; the infrastructure grid for major mobility is based on this axis. The role played by the two corridors located on the north and south borders of the new area is to limit any future urban expansion; they are equipped with recreational and service areas situated in a very natural environment which is, nevertheless, also occupied by low-density residential settlements. Finally, the entire area is divided into three sub-areas (Fig. 3) with considerably different spatial and functional characteristics (three spatial patterns). The “Core Functional Area”, with a surface area of 60 square kilometres, is located in the west part of the new area.14 It will host the new administrative centre of Zhaoqing, the most important cultural, sporting and educational facilities as well as highdensity residential settlements, public spaces and parks, such as the Yanyang Lake, the wetland park of the Changli River and the waterfront along the western river (Xi Jiang). The second sub-area is called the “Healthy Liveable Area”; it covers an area of 50 square kilometres in the north-east part of the new area and includes agricultural fields and preserved and requalified rural villages (Lotus Village, Pengdongzhou Village and Bujicun Village). The objective here is to integrate agriculture and urban cultivation and to create “green industry”.15 The last sub-area is the “Port Logistics Area”, stretching for 10 kilometres; it is home to the main industrial and port activities and is intended to become an important river transportation hub within the Pearl River Delta. The municipality considers the Zhaoqing New Area – faithfully designed according to the infrastructural, (Fig. 4) economic and social plans drafted by the Guangdong 113

Province – as a model involving high-tech, low carbon energy industries and the promotion of environmental and cultural tourism. However, there are several grey areas in the promotion of this model, because if, on the one hand, it tries to achieve greater territorial integration, on the other it reclaims a protagonism reminiscent of traditional competitive logic in its attempt to shift the barycentre of the Pearl River Delta further west.

1 Even if the Pearl River Delta covers less than 1 % of the 21,500 square kilometres, incorporating four cities (Fosland area of China and is inhabited by 5 % of its popu- han, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Dongguan) and twelve counlation, it generates more than one tenth of its GDP and ties. In 1987, the State Council increased the economic a fourth of its exports (Statistics Bureau of Guangdong zone to 44 ,300 square kilometres and included seven Province, 2016). 2 The State of the World Cities report cities (Foshan, Jiangmen, Huizhou, Zhaoqing, Qingyuan, published in 2010 / 2011 by the UN Human Settlements Zhongshan, Dongguan) and twenty one countries (Chen, Programme has estimated that the population of the 2011). 9 The plan underscores the importance of cenPearl River Delta region is 120 million; the report also en- tral cities – Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai – and crevisaged that it will grow in the next few decades (UN -Hab- ates a development watershed (the estuary area of the itat, 2010). 3 Bie, Jong, Derudder (2015) maintain that Pearl River): three functional belts stretching from north “Nowhere else in the world can we find a conglomeration to south, and five economic development axes from east of so many economically significant cities woven so tightly to west (Bie, Jong and Derudder, 2015). 10 The Reform together within a distance of 150 kilometres. The region and Development Planning Outline for the Pearl River was polycentric in the past as it is now”. 4 In the early Delta region (2008–2020) envisaged an expenditure of nineties, over four hundred cities were administratively roughly two trillion RMB invested in more than 150 proacknowledged in the Pearl River Delta while the popula- jects to enhance major infrastructures and create a cotion of more than one hundred cities was between five lossal transport, energy supply and telecommunications thousand and ten thousand (Yin and Feng, 2012). Since system network. 11 The three metropolitan areas are: Guangzhou, capital of the province, was the city with the the Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou metropolitan area, the biggest population, it became the administrative centre. Guangzhou-Foshan-Zhaoqing metropolitan area and the The urban and economic expansion of Shenzhen, the “in- Zhuhai-Zhongshan-Jiangmen metropolitan area (Reform stant city” of China (Chen and de’Medici, 2010) and a con- and Development Planning Outline for the Pearl River solidated high-tech centre, is the second biggest city per Delta region 2008–2020). 12 According to the Develnumber of inhabitants, and economically the third most opment Plan of Guangzhou, Foshan, and the Zhaoqing important city in the region (Shen, 2008). Finally, Hong Economic Circle (2010–2020), the cluster of cities includKong is the global financial hub. 5 Situated to the west of ed the administrative regions under the jurisdiction of the Pearl River Delta, Zhaoqing is surrounded by an intri- Guangzhou, Foshan and Zhaoqing, with a total land area cate hydrographic system overshadowed by the western of 26,232 square kilometres and a permanent population river (Xi Jiang), mountainous areas such as the Dinghu of 23.813 million. 13 In 2015, the population registered Mountain and natural woodland reserves. 6 Historical- in the districts of Duanzhou and Dinghu (districts with ly speaking, urbanisation, infrastructure and the econo- the urban settlement of Zhaoqing City) was equivalent to my in the west part of the Pearl River Delta have been 665,600 individuals, distributed as follows: 494 ,000 in less developed than in the area to the east (Wei et al., the Duanzhou district and 171,600 in the Dinghu district 2017 ). Recent studies have demonstrated a megalopolis (Statistics Bureau of Zhaoqing City, 2016). 14 The “Core exists and extends from Hong Kong to Jiangmen, linking Functional Area” is currently (November 2017 ) the only the major regional urban centres on the east bank of the sub-area under construction and the only sub-area for delta. Cities are less developed on the west bank but are which a detailed urban plan has been drafted together nonetheless beginning to show signs of a young urban with a plan for the landscape and control of the waterconurbation spreading between Macao and Guangzhou ways Only conceptual plans and macro-guidelines esalong a secondary development axis. 7 This interpreta- tablished by the Zhaoqing City Masterplan (2012–2030) tion is confirmed by data regarding the GDP of Zhaoqing (Zhaoqing Municipal People’s Government, 2012) cur­ (30.3 billion dollars in 2015, according to official statis- rently exist for the remaining sub-areas (Healthy Liveable tics), while the GDP of Shenzhen was almost nine times Area and Port Logistics Area). 15 A study performed in higher, reaching 269.5 billion dollars that same year (Sta- 2017 by the Research Centre of Architecture, History and tistics Bureau of Guangdong Province, 2016). 8 In 1984 Culture (South China University of Technology) found Guangzhou was defined a coastal open city. The following thirty rural villages within the perimeter of the new town, year the Pearl River Delta economic zone was established. of which fifteen are historically and culturally important The Pearl River Delta economic zone covered an area of buildings.

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Zhengdong. Empowering the Inland Metropolis Leonardo Ramondetti While the coastal region of China has for many years been the privileged venue for the massive, rapid urbanisation of the country, inland territories tell another story.1 Many of the central plains are still largely characterised by minor agglomerations, built over a rather long period of time and using small infrastructures to model the land. Some of the major centres which over the centuries have performed chiefly administrative functions are located in this enormous inland area, largely characterised by diffuse urbanisation (Ren, 2013; Wu, 2015 a).2 Beginning in the twentieth century, and especially in the last three decades, these areas were included in new infrastructure policies focusing on the design of road and railway networks which, bypassing large areas of the territory, actually involved very few places, often very far from one another.3 In this framework, Zhengzhou claimed its role as an infrastructure hub due not only to its geographical location, but also to the infrastructures already in place and to unprecedented demographic growth. In fact, beginning in the eighties, the city was subject to what Liu, Zhao and Xu defined in 2008 as an “expansion phase” when the urban population grew enormously, increasing from 1.3 million in 1980 to 4.5 million in 2010, with a leap in the urbanisation rate from 34.1 % to 69.7 % (Zhengzhou Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 2017). During this period, the “spread pie expansion” that had characterised the city in previous decades continued (Liu, Zhao and Xu 2008, p. 62). However, the use of urban plans was reinforced in order to encourage and regulate urban expansion, exploiting a logic that envisaged the construction of Zhengzhou in different areas and different stages.4 Zhengdong New District is the apotheosis of this season. In 2001, the municipality launched a competition for the construction of the new town for 1.5 million people. The plan, implemented according to urban entrepreneurialism logic (Wu, 2015 a), promoted the creation of a new urban pole formed by a central business district, a new railway station and a technology park (Li, 2010 a). Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associates won the competition; they proposed to create a polycentric space divided into thematic nuclei connected by several big vehicle roads.5 The metabolist-style project proposed to divide the land area into five clusters separated by “ecological corridors” hosting the most important mobility infrastructures (Li, 2010 b). The New City CBD (south) and the New Sub CBD (north) are located in the main cluster, situated in the north-west part of the new town. Both are characterised by a double ring of highdensity buildings connected by a pedestrian, air-conditioned shopping street. While the New City CBD nestles in a park separating it from the existing city, the New Sub CBD is in the middle of a large artificial lake (Long Hu Lake). These two centres are connected by an axis (a central canal) bordered on either side by buildings used for commercial and other activities. The land in the remaining portion is divided into lots using 115

3 km

Fig. 1 The scheme of Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associates for the masterplan of Zhengdong New District (2001–2009).

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a regular grid envisaging residential settlements with increased density at the edges of the area. The second cluster in the southern and eastern part of the area is bordered by existing road networks leading east from the city centre. The project envisaged that a new railway station be placed here to separate the residential area to the north from the High Tech Industry Area in the southern part of the lot. The three remaining clusters are located along the east green belt and are occupied by the Sport City Cluster (north), the Long Zhi Lake Resort Residential Cluster (centre) and the Research City Cluster (south) (Li, 2010 b). From 2002 to 2009, several Chinese design institutes began to work on the individual nuclei6 while international designers competed to be assigned the construction of buildings or parks (almost always in partnership with a constellation of state institutes and groups of local architects).7 At the end of this process, the major cluster and the two CBD s (Fig. 2) were the only parts of the original project that remained; all other sections had been repeatedly modified. The “ecological corridors” were downsized, the south cluster was revamped to host the new high speed railway station, and the clusters along the eastern green belt were redesigned by the Zhengzhou Urban Planning and Design Institute as a single nucleus where the University Park and Science and Technology Park is located. Instead, a regular grid was used as the basis for the design of the rest of the area. Although still under construction, Zhengdong looks like the end result of an outdated idea that considered the construction of monumental centres as a way to empower vast regions. (Fig. 1) In fact, in 2005, national policies began to change, in turn affecting the methods employed in urbanising new areas. In particular, the Eleventh and Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2005–2015), and the “Central Rise Strategy” (Wang, 2007) passed by the central government, emphasised the need to develop inland regions by strengthening “agglomerations” created by coordinating centres of different sizes in order to generate regional polarities (large, medium, small cities and townships) (Fang and Yu, 2016). What ensued was a substantial redesign of the network created in previous decades: the network intensifies, cities increase in number, and points become clots.8 In this new framework, Zhengzhou becomes more important due to its role as the capital of the Central Plains Urban Agglomeration (or Zhongyuan City Group); it is a “Regional Level Agglomeration” (Fang and Yu, 2016) made up of nine “prefecture-level cities” (Zhengzhou, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Xinxiang, Jiaozuo, Xuchang, Pingdingshan, Luohe, and Jiyuan), 23 cities and 413 townships in an area of 5.8 million hectares. A territory that produces 3.06 % of China’s GDP and is home to 45.5 million inhabitants (3.39 % of the population in China) of which 30 % (13.7 million) is considered “urban population” (Fang and Yu, 2016).9 In 2006, this change in perspective led the Zhengzhou and Kaifeng municipalities, the Zhongyuan City Group, and the government of the Henan Province to promote Zhengbian New District, a new urban project intended to merge the cities of Zhengzhou and Kaifeng. Zhengbian New District is the result of these new policies defining the shift from a centripetal urbanisation to a centrifugal urbanisation in relation to the gradual regionalisation of forms of economic competition (“the monomer (enterprise) competition gradually evolved into a regional competition” 117

Fig. 2 Central Business District of Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, 2017.

10 km

Fig. 3 The linear expansion between Zhengdong and Kaifeng, Zhengbian New District Masterplan (2009–2020).

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(Wang, 2007, p. 2)). This new urbanisation is a linear, 80-kilometre-long city covering an area of 40,000 hectares (Fig. 3) between the cities of Zhengzhou and Kaifeng (Wu, 2015 a); it spreads out in an area with a current population of 4.5 million inhabitants, of which four million are in the Zhengzhou municipality (mostly in the area of Tian­ xiang City and Zhongmu County) and the rest in the Kaifeng jurisdiction (Wang, 2007). The new addition is radically different to the previous one: a series of localised projects united in a big, sprawling shape. An international competition was also launched for this expansion. In 2009, it was won by the London-based studio Arup with a project titled Planning for Low Carbon Urban Systems: The Zhengbian New District Plan, which won the prize awarded by the International Society of Cities and Regional Planners (ISOCARP) in 2010.10 That same year, the project was included in the Regional Strategic Plan of the Central China Economic Region, in turn part of the National Main Functional Area Plan approved by the National Reform and Development Commission (NDRC) in 2011 (Wu, 2015 a). This weakened the original project which appears to be a watereddown scheme dividing the area into zones capable of accommodating thousands of smaller projects: a galaxy held together by large infrastructure belts placed longitudinally along the space.11 In conclusion, the most important transformations now underway in Zhengzhou are the result of these two last seasons, most of which still have to be interpreted. If in 2015 Zhengbian New District was considered an example of how “urban entrepreneurialism became hegemonic in so-called socialist countryside planning” (Wu, 2015 a, p. 79), today this project appears to primarily represent new policies which not only and no longer invest in the creation of strong polarities, but attempt to redesign more sculptural and pervasive spaces. The numerous projects under construction emphasise this slippage. The masterplan of Zhengdong New District is still a tool to self-promote the city; a “window display” prepared by important international architectural studios, reflecting the need to provide precise visions where all scales and every detail are meticulously controlled, and are extremely inflexible as a result. On the contrary, by focusing on different levels and increasingly varied degrees of specificity, the many designs and studies developed for Zhengbian created a loose, malleable space. The plan for Zhengbian is currently an indistinct tool, capable of containing everything: industrial districts, eco-cities, new regional polarities, agricultural cities, large stretches of countryside and big infrastructure belts.12 The relationships that this polymorphic figure will establish with Zhengdong, Zhengzhou and Kaifeng are extremely important for the development of this central region: how and to what extent will these relationships be localised, fragmented or continuous? What currently exists is a heterogeneous series of neighbouring urban materials located in an extremely unstable landscape. An iridescent mosaic in which big mobility infrastructures are the only recognisable symbols.

1 Regarding coastal region and inland territories, ref- ties and seventies: the coastal region (yanhai), includerence is made to the “three lines” policy (san xian) ing the provinces of Beijing, Tianjin, Liaoning, Shanghai, which divided China into three macro-regions in the six- Jiansu, Zhenjiang, Fujian, Shandong, Guangdong and the

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Guanxi Autonomous Region; the border region (bianjiang Urban Planning and Architectural Design of Zhengdong or byanyuan), including the Inner Mongolia Autonomous New District in Zhengzhou City (2001–2009) published Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Xinjiang Au- in 2010 by the China Construction Industry Press. 8 See tonomous Region, Gansu, Qinghai and the Ningxia Auton- on this issue, the illustration by Chuanglin Fang and Danomous Region; and the inland region (neidi), made up of lin Yu in The New Spatial Pattern of China’s Urbanization the provinces of Shanxi, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jangxi, Based on “Cluster along the Axes” (Fang and Yu, 2016, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan (Kirk- p. 218) or those by Dingliang Yang as regards “townizaby, 1985, p. 139). Between the fifties and the eighties the tion” policies (Taylor-Hochberg, 2017 ). 9 Chuanglin Fang three regions were treated differently by the central gov- and Danlin Yu (2016) maintain that the area “(…) is a ernment in terms of the distribution of funds and initia- strategic urban agglomeration that serves strategic suptives; this culminated in the “third frontier” policy (Kirk- port function for driving the development of Central Chiby, 1985; Wu, 2015 a). 2 According to Xuefei Ren, the na. (…) The key regions are Zhengzhou-Kaifeng [Zhengmain Chinese urban centres “were predominantly admin- bian] New District and Luoyang New District, focusing on istrative centres and their political functions were more creating developmental axes along the Longhai and the important than their commercial function” (Ren, 2013 , Beijing-Guangzhou railways. By fostering new developp. 17 ). One emblematic example of the inland regions is ment axes, building up the core area along the LongKaifeng, the capital of the Song dynasty and seat of the hai economic belt and China’s major modern integrated Henan provincial government until 1957. 3 For example, transport hub, we shall be able to create a demonstrathe representations of the National Urban System Plan tion area for coordinated development between indus(2005–2020) drafted by the Ministry of Housing and Ur- trialization /urbanization and agricultural modernization, ban-Rural Development (MOHURD ) in 2005 and the Na- and civilization inheritance and innovation area of China.” tional Main Functional Area Plan drafted by the National (p. 210). 10 The Zhengdong plans also contain the base Development and Reform Commission (NDRC ) in 2006 elements for the new expansion thanks to a masterplan (Wu, 2015 a). 4 In the early nineties, the Zhengzhou mu- for the Zhengzhou-Kaifeng industrial belt dated 2007. nicipality drafted two plans for separate macro-areas: Two plans were drafted for the Strategic Studies of the the Zhengzhou high-tech industrial development zone Integration of Zherngzhou-Kaifeng Industrial Belt (pre(1991), an area of 18 ,600 hectares in the north-west part liminary studies): Plan I Research Schemes from Chinese of the city, and the Zhengzhou economic and technolog- Academy of Social Science, Plan II Research Schemes ical development zone (1993), an area of 12,500 hectares from Chinese Urban Planning Association. This was folin the south-east part of the centre (Liu, Zhao and Xu, lowed by the drafting of two masterplans – Master Plan2008). 5 In 2001, the international competition for the ning of the Integration of Zherngzhou-Kaifeng Industrial masterplan involved the drafting of six schemes by the Belt: Plan I Schemes from the Tsinghua Urban Planning following groups: PWD Engineering Group (Singapore), and Design Institute; Plan II Schemes from Zhengzhou Arte Charpentier (France), COX Group, SASAKI Corpora- Urban Planning Design & Survey Research Institute – foltion (Australia), Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associates lowed by the Regulatory Detailed Planning of the Inte­ (Japan) and the China Academy of Urban Planning and gration of Zherngzhou-Kaifeng Industrial Belt drafted Design (China) (Li, 2010 a). 6 The competition was fol- by the Zhengzhou Urban Planning Design & Survey Relowed by: the detailed plan of the Start-up Area and the search Institute (Li, 2010 e). In 2007, the Zhengbian InLonghu Area by Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associ- dustrial Development Plan was also published. One year ates and a revised plan of the university park and science later, this plan led to the Zhengbian Urban-Rural Reform and technology park area together with two schemes: the and Development Experimental Zone. Only in 2009 did first by Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associates, the this contorted and increasingly codified process lead to second by the Architecture Design Institute of South Chi- the launch of an international competition won by the na University of Technology. Then came regulatory plans London studio Arup (Zhengzhou City Planning and Defor specific areas: the Regulatory Detailed Plan of the sign Institute, 2009). 11 The interpretation of Zhengdong Extension Area of Zhengdong New District; the Regula- as an archipelago and Zhengbian as a galaxy was protory Detailed Plan for Longhu Area by Kisho Kurokawa nounced by Arata Isozaki at the 13 th International Exhibitogether with the Zhengzhou Urban Planning Design & tion of Architecture at the Venice Biennale (2012). 12 On Survey Research Institute, and the Regulatory Detailed this issue, see New Zhengzhou to Kaifeng railway project Plan for Longzihu Area by the Zhengzhou Urban Planning published on: http://www.zzupb.gov.cn/GuiHuaGongShi/ Design & Survey Research Institute (Li, 2010 b; Li, 2010 c). GongShiContent_54 EB4 DE0 -F2E6 -46F8 -8 EA6 -569 FC33 7 Most of the competitions and projects either complet- D0 C88 .html (Accessed: 12 November 2017 ). ed or still underway are illustrated in five books by Ke Li,

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Tongzhou. Suburbanisation and Decentralisation Filippo Fiandanese Tongzhou New Town is situated in the eastern suburban expansion area of Beijing. It is part of an administrative district that played an important role in the decentralisation processes which have led to the expansion of the capital since the fifties.1 These processes peaked in November 2015 when the Central Government announced that most of the Beijing municipal offices (currently located in the city centre) would be transferred to the vast area of Tongzhou New Town before 2017 (Hu and Lin, 2015).2 (Fig. 1) Tongzhou and its interdependence with Beijing date far back in time. The city is the north terminal of the Grand Canal and the point where the canal intersects the continuation of Chang’an Avenue, the east-west axis of Beijing.3 For centuries, this made it an important port for goods and people along the main waterway between Beijing and Hangzhou (Needham, 1971). The history of Tongzhou changed radically after the Civil War and the advent of policies aimed at converting major urban centres “from ‘consumptive’ to ‘productive’ cities” (Wu, 2015 a, p. 25). The general guidelines of these policies were established in the first masterplan for Beijing, adopted in 1954, but above all in the plan that followed in 1958. The latter, influenced by the indications provided by Soviet experts, was intended to turn Beijing not only into the political centre and capital of the country, but also into an important industrial area (Li, Dray-Novey and Kong, 2007) thanks to the construction of “decentralised clusters” (fengshan jituan) (Wu, 2015 a, p. 29). These clusters became forty satellite cities (weixing cheng) located in the settlement zones of State Owned Enterprises (SOE s) (Gu, Wei and Cook, 2015). Tongzhou is defined as a satellite city with chemical, manufacturing, textile, pharmaceutical and food production facilities. Beginning in 1985, the industrial role of the city was further consolidated when manufacturing activities were decentralised from the central districts in Beijing (Zhou, 2012). The situation began to change in the eighties: economic reform and the presence of China on the international stage sparked broad changes that radically affected the destiny of the city. In the nineties, the Chinese government decided to promote Beijing as a global city. The Beijing Master Plan (1991–2010) envisaged the creation of “development zones” and “high-tech parks” for the capital and the reduction of the number of satellite cities from forty to fourteen (Gu, Wei and Cook, 2015). Above all, it established the location and features of the CBD in Chaoyang, in the eastern part of the capital. These decisions had serious repercussions on Tongzhou, which became a commuter town thanks to high-speed connections and proximity to the new financial district of Beijing.4 During this period, the real estate market boomed in Tongzhou (Feng, Zhou and Wu, 2008), so much so that the district government used the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001–2005) to forcefully promote real estate operations by turning former industrial sites into residential areas. In 2003, half of all the apartments sold in the Beijing 123

Fig. 1 The new Beijing Municipal Offices under construction, Tongzhou New District, Tongzhou, Beijing, 2017.

municipality were in Tongzhou; between 2011 and 2008, 93.6 % of “total constructed floor area” was earmarked as residential, with only 5.5 % allotted to commercial enterprises and a mere 0.4 % to offices (Zhou, 2012, p. 254). Another attempt to radically redesign the capital was made when China became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001 and Beijing was chosen as the venue for the 2008 Olympic Games. The Beijing Action Plan was launched in 2002. Two years later, the Beijing Master Plan (2004–2020) (still in force) was drafted by the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning & Design and approved by the State Council in 2005 (Gu, Wei and Cook, 2015). Decentralisation was again proposed, this time summarised by the slogan “Two axes, two corridors and multiple centres” (Wu, 2015 a, p. 145). The plan materially embodied the idea to revive the historic north-south axis and build eleven new towns, each with its own economic specialty. These new cities are positioned along two corridors outside the “core city”: to the west, an ecological corridor to preserve nature areas; to the east, an economic development corridor where new activities were to be developed.5 Once again, the proposed spatial layout was meant to move beyond the monocentric structure of Beijing and solve overpopulation in central districts (Wu and Liu, 2006). Three more important new towns were to be built along the development belt: Shunyi, a manufacturing centre; Yizhuang, a high-tech development centre with a large Economic Development Zone (Gu, Wei and Cook, 2015) and Tongzhou.6 The masterplan established that by 2020 each of these three cities were to accommodate a population ranging from 700,000 to 900,000 individuals. Tongzhou plays an important role in the layout proposed in the Beijing Master Plan (2004–2020); it is centrally located in the “development corridor” and at an intersection between the latter and the extension of the east-west axis of Beijing. This role was confirmed by the masterplan for the Tongzhou New Town (Fig. 2) drafted in 2005 by the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning & Design (BICP). Great emphasis was placed on redefining the road grid network and new park areas along the banks of the Grand Canal (Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning 2005). Compared to the dynamism of the new towns of Shunyi and Yizhuang, the development of Tongzhou is moving forward very slowly, likewise the current economic development strategies envisaged for the city (Yang et al., 2013).7 After a period of impasse, in 2010 the Tenth Congress of the Municipal Committee decided to imbue new momentum into what was an incomplete transformation. It bestowed the status of a new “international modern city” on Tongzhou and in 2015 the Central Government chose it as the seat of the Beijing municipal offices (Hu and Lin, 2015).8 This decision represents the high point of the decentralisation process envisaged by the urban policies Beijing had begun implementing in the fifties. At present, this process is also part of a macro-regional strategy (Beijing People’s Municipal Government, 2016 a). In line with the mandate of the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, the redesign of the new town became part of an attempt to redefine the structure of the capital; this involved revamping the role of the central districts and the relationship of the new town with Tianjin and the Hebei province thanks to the creation of the Jing-Jin-Ji Global City-Region.9 Tongzhou, located on the eastern edge of the Beijing Municipality along the border to Hebei 126

3 km

Fig. 2 Masterplan of Tongzhou New District (2004–2020), Tongzhou, Beijing, updated 2016.

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Province, indeed appears to be strategic for greater regional integration along an axis which, as an extension of Chang’un Avenue, will host all the political and economic powerhouses of Beijing (Shuishan, 2013): from Tiananmen Square, through the main CBD of the capital, and on to the future sub-centre of Tongzhou. In 2016, the symbolic importance of this axis prompted the Beijing Municipality to launch an international invitational competition. Twelve teams participated, each made up of an international studio and either a design institute or Chinese university department.10 The land area specified in the competition is the same 155 square kilometres already earmarked in 2004 by the Beijing Master Plan (2004–2020). However, the population of the new town was increased by 1.3 million inhabitants (Beijing People’s Municipal Government, 2016 a), a much greater density than originally envisaged. Each competing duo was asked to completely redesign the site and provide detailed plans of the six areas included in the tender notice.11 The decision to divide the new town into six different areas is indicative of a decision to build a heterogeneous urban ensemble that could, in some ways, reflect the differences already present in the district. The new town under construction appears to be a sort of collage of different situations located along the Grand Canal (Fiandanese, 2017). An ensemble of diverse spaces made up of different kinds of settlements, including hutong, danwei, towers and residential sites surrounded by huge infrastructure belts dotted with large park areas. Even if we focus only on what has been labelled the heart of the new town, near the intersection between the Grand Canal, Tonghui River and other smaller rivers and waterways, large swathes of land are characterised by: the presence of the future CBD towers (with the biggest underground complex of services offered by the Beijing Municipality); a gradual reduction in density along the south bank of the Grand Canal (where the height of the buildings is much lower); the presence of a historic site surrounding a recently restructured seventeenth-century pagoda; a clubhouse complex and luxury villas arranged around green areas and waterways; the Beijing Tongzhou Canal Park on the opposite bank of the Grand Canal; and, finally, the confluence of five rivers where a monumental landmark is meant to be built (and is continually promoted in developers’ brochures).12 Further east, surrounded by areas which have yet to be transformed, the imposing Municipal Government complex is currently being completed.13

1 Tongzhou, previously a county, has been a district of the Beijing Municipality since 1997. The district covers an area of 906 square kilometres and includes four subdistricts, ten towns, and an ethnic township. 2 Shifting the seat of a municipal government of an important city to a new town is not a novelty in China: one example is Hangzhou, where in 2001 the extension of the municipal boundaries was an opportunity to plan a new town on either side of Qiantang River. The town was designed to host a new CBD and become the new seat of government (Qian, 2011; Wu, 2015 a, p. 107 ). 3 The structure of the city of Beijing has historically revolved around a north-south axis where the main political and religious sites are located.

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After changes were made to the city at the end of the Civil War, the construction of the monumental Chang’an Avenue created a new east-west axis that cut through the historic axis of Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of the city. For more information regarding the history of the axis, see Shuishan, 2013. 4 Zhou (2012, p. 265) estimates that in 2007, 270,000 commuters employed in the CBD in Beijing lived in Tongzhou. 5 The model adopted as a reference is not new. In fact it reproposes the Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme de la Région de Paris (SDAURP ) drafted in 1965, and also adopts its concept of a regional structure with villes nouvelles in the Parisian region located along two parallel corridors. 6 For

more detailed information about Yizhuang New Town and its Economic and Technological Development Zone, cfr. Wu, 2015 a, pp. 103–117. 7 While no important industrial parks were built in Tongzhou, the Beijing Yizhuang Economic Development Zone (BYEDZ , high-end manufacturing) was created in Yizhuang and the Tianzhu Park (logistics and automobile manufacturing) was set up in Shunyi, both with national status. They were joined by Zhongguancun Science Park (ZSP ) in the Beijing municipality (Yang et al., 2013). 8 The official website of the district states: “By the end of 2009, the seventh Plenary Session of the Tenth Municipal CPC Commission made the following very clear: “concentrate every effort, focus on Tongzhou, with the help of international and domestic resources, accelerate to form a modern international city adapting to the development of capital as quickly as possible”. Available at: http://en.bjtzh.gov.cn/n10073 695 /n 10073827/n 10073921 /c 10163655 /content.html (Accessed: 21 September 2017 ). 9 Promoting the merger of the Beijing Municipality, Tianjin and the Hebei Province is one of the objectives of the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) which, amongst other things, envisages transferring “nonessential functions” away from Beijing. cfr. Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 2016 , pp. 107–110). The Jing-Jin-Ji Global City-Region is presented in all its magnificence: “BeijingTianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration, the world class urban agglomeration with the strongest national innovation capacity. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration includes 10 cities, namely, Beijing, Tianjin, Tangshan, Langfang, Baoding, Qinhuangdao, Shijiazhuang, Cangzhou, Chengde, and Zhangjiakou. […] Its total land area is 182,500 square kilometres, accounting for 1.9 % of the national total. In 2010, urban construction land area (builtup area) accounted for 7.59 % of the national total. Population accounted for 6.30 %. The urban population accounted for 11.11 %. Its economy accounted for 9.06 %.” (Fang and Yu, 2016, p. 203). 10 The twelve duos were:

Foster + Partners with the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design; Ove Arup with the Shenzhen Urban Planning Design Institute; AEDAS with Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute; AECOM with the Tsinghua University Group; KPF with the Turen Urban Design; ISA with the Tongji University Urban Planning and Design Institute; SOM with the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design; Hassell and MVRDV with the Tianjin University Urban Planning and Design Institute; 2 Portzamparc with the Tsinghua University Urban Planning and Design Institute; Nikken Sekkei with the South-East University Urban Planning and Design Institute; Callison RKTL with the China Architecture Design and Research Group; and SWECO with the Hongdu Urban Planning and Design Institute. 11 Although we still don’t know who the winners of the six competition topics are (November 2017 ), they involve a total land area of 4 ,824 hectares (out of the 15,500 hectares of the whole new town territory). They are, from north to south: Tongzhou Business Park (602 hectares); the Canal Business District and the area on either side of the Tonghui River (905 hectares); the area of the future high-speed train station (472 hectares); the area where the Municipal Government offices are currently being built (1,058 hectares); the area around the industrial facility of the East China Chemical Industry and Trade Co. (776 hectares); and the Zhangjiawan Industrial Zone (1011 hectares) (Beijing People’s Municipal Government, 2016 b). 12 The four-floor underground complex covers 2.1 million square metres. The four floors accommodate the “utility tunnels” with the infrastructure networks, parking areas and tunnels for vehicle traffic, cfr: Federighi and Fiandanese in this book. 13 The extremely geometric complex runs along a north-south axis, an obvious reference to traditional rules of construction for monumental Chinese buildings. Surrounding the government site with canals and green areas was another way to emphasise the link with tradition; in fact their design is reminiscent of the design of traditional Chinese gardens.

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III . Spaces

The selected spaces are almost everywhere; they are continuously seen and used, and have their own functional and aesthetic centrality. They are the exhibition halls selling parts of the city at every street corner. They are the high-rise apartments on the top floors of buildings. They are the underground spaces: under each new town is a new town. Finally, they are the big and small parks that create a fluid spatial layout which, in other respects, is extremely rigid.

Fig. 1 Models and plans of the new town in an exhibition hall in Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017.

Exhibition Halls Maria Paola Repellino Chinese new towns are both built and illustrated in the same place: pictures, maps and renders, on display along the perimeter of the worksites, present the new city under construction; three-dimensional models, documents and drawings, on display in the exhibition halls, have little lights and small flags indicating the planning strategy, the layout of the future transport infrastructures, the location of public buildings, landmarks or, more simply, the apartments already sold and on view in the sales centres.1 More and more images both inside and outside the exhibition and sales centres portray a continuous dialogue between built and represented spaces. To illustrate the city, the mock-ups in the exhibition halls use a rather unimaginative procedure and approach: they present the choices made, assure people that these were the right choices, legitimise projects and strategies, build consensus and outline the future in an allusive yet effective manner in order to attract investors and buyers. Showcasing the urban future was neither invented by the Chinese, nor is it a novelty. Freestone and Amati (2014) emphasise that the different planning exhibitions that existed in the first half of the twentieth century were each important in their own way. They were transitory, representative spaces used during itinerant or permanent international events focusing on housing design or specific sites. Leftover materials (photographs, pamphlets, books) are useful tools for illustrating the evolution of modern planning culture. Even some contemporary urban centres in Europe fulfil the same function: for example, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris hosts a permanent exhibition entitled “Paris, la métropole et ses projets”. The exhibition showcases a 37-square-metre interactive maquette of the vast areas currently being transformed, the new infrastructure networks and the emblematic architectures of the cities of tomorrow. Despite their differences, all these spaces are tools used to communicate and promote urban policies and projects, either by public authorities or the private agencies that finance them.2 They often present and illustrate a generic city of the future or focus on specific urban topics. And yet the different methods and practices used to exhibit urban spaces reveal the erratic distinction and often ambiguous superimposition of exhibition and sales, of utopian experimentation and real estate promotion, of marketing strategies and the search for ways to solve the “ills” afflicting the city. Exhibition halls in Chinese new towns (Fig. 1) are part of this ambiguous framework: they mix forms of display inspired, on the one hand, by political strategies or goals and,

III. Spaces

on the other, by a desire to showcase the market and its role in the construction of these towns. Apart from government exhibition halls, “created as part of the relentless effort by local governments for place promotion, and cast the fantastic urban future envisioned by the state upon their admiring visitors, foreign or domestic” (Fan, 2015, p. 2891), new towns also host the exhibition halls set up by developers. In these spaces, the drawings, maps and especially the scale models of the buildings and compounds serve a much more prosaic yet undoubtedly important purpose: selling the homes.

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Apart from merging built and represented space – making it difficult to imagine Chinese new towns without their corollary of illustrative images – these exhibition halls not only reveal the relationship between policies and market, but also the role played by urban planning and architecture (maps, drawings and models), i.e., combining visions, economic practices and urbanisation policies. Characteristics, Roles and Functions Exhibition halls can be divided into three groups based on their role, accessibility and target audience. Obviously this is a simplified classification, since roles and functions often overlap. The first group includes the government exhibition halls open to the public: most of the rather limited literature on exhibition halls in China focuses on this group (Tang and Gu, 2009; Zhang, Mei and Chen, 2010; Qian and Wu, 2012; Zhang, 2017). They “are specifically designed to prepare the mass audience and to cater to high-level officials for its future vision, to legitimate government plans for (re)development, to promote/ glorify mega events, to present an edited local history, to spread a particular propaganda, and to manipulate/placate citizen participation” (Fan, 2015, p. 2893). These halls present and promote the ongoing urbanisation processes and the “virtues” of planning. Their use is linked to the City Planning Act (1989), which assigns precise tasks and functions to urban planning and, probably even more so, to the transformation of inter-institutional relations, the increasing fiscal autonomy of local governments and the redefinition of public/private relations and the “entrepreneurial watershed” of urban policies.3 The first urban planning exhibition hall opened in Shanghai in 2000. It was followed by the Chongqing Urban Planning Exhibition Hall and, in 2004, by the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall. In 2007, China had more than twenty exhibition halls, a number that was to increase in the years to come until it surpassed five hundred in 2013 when several of these spaces were opened in cities of different levels and significance (Qian and Wu, 2012).4 Although rather simple in design, government exhibition halls are huge. Usually located in the city centre, they can be easily accessed by public transport. In addition, each hall has its own dedicated website. They are normally built by municipal governments, but a district government can also build its own hall for its district. A specific agency created by the authorities is usually entrusted with management. These exhibition areas increasingly look either like city museums (indeed, some halls have areas dedicated to pedagogical scholastic activities, cfr. Fan, 2015), or like a public showcase to promote urban development by celebrating important events and projects – for example, the large permanent exhibition area dedicated to the 2008 Olympic Games on the fourth floor of the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall. Detailed maps and models illustrate the plans for the city of Beijing and the construction of the Olympic sites that helped create the city’s international image. In Spring 2007, a temporary exhibit of the results of the international competition for the urban design of Tongzhou was organised in the exhibition hall in Beijing.5 Presenting the plans for Tongzhou in the heart of Beijing was highly symbolic: the new town was not only earmarked to be the seat of the new municipal government in 2017, but the redesign of the new town is part of the spatial and functional reconfiguration of the capital aiming to achieve 134

greater integration with Tianjin and the Hebei Province. The new administrative centre of Beijing will thus be shifted a little closer to the barycentre of the Jing-Jin-Ji mega-region. The public and symbolic role of this group of exhibition halls is also conveyed by the Zhengdong District Urban Planning Exhibition Hall designed by AZL Architects; in 2011, construction of the hall was completed in the first ring of buildings east of the CBD in Zhengdong.6 AZL Architects designed a building opening onto the city.7 A wide flight of steps acts as the main entrance, leading to a series of open spaces and finally to the rooftop terrace. The intimate interior spaces contrast with the permeable public corridors. The glass sheets positioned in different directions along the façade create a dynamic effect. The end result is a pure volume set into the now completed new town. But Zhengdong continues to change, develop and grow eastwards. Plans are continuously updated, and the exhibition hall is preparing to host new ex­ hibitions. The new city-territory of Zhengbian consists of a heterogeneous series of projects linked by infrastructure arteries. The exhibition hall is once again a showcase to promote the urban vision, designed on different levels by important international companies. Several models of the urban plan of the Zhengdong New District Long Hu Area Sub Central Business District – one of the key features showcased in the hall – illustrate several volumetric sections of the ring of buildings around Dragon Lake. Eight famous international designers, including Christian Kerez, Eduardo Souto De Moura and Mathías Klotz, were invited to present projects for each of the office buildings to be built in the ring. Six large-scale models in the middle of the hall are scale reproductions of the designs proposed for the urban development of Baisha District, immediately east of Zhengdong. The plan envisages the transformation of a 42-square-kilometre area (presently mostly rural) to accommodate an estimated population of 500,000 in 2020. Each of the otherwise heterogeneous urban solutions for the area between the new town and Jialu River – running through the site in question – place the buildings along the water’s edge. The second group of exhibition halls are the government exhibition areas not open to the public. The latter are used to not only present the urban vision of the municipal government to potential investors, important guests and provincial or central government

Some areas inside these buildings often host other government functions, normally located in out-of-the-way cities, for example in Urumqi, Xi’an, Shenzhen (Fan, 2015) or Zhaoqing. The Zhaoqing New Area Planning Exhibition Hall, opened by the Zhaoqing municipality in October 2012, is located on the first floor of the offices of the Administrative Committee of Zhaoqing New Area.8 The three-dimensional model in the middle of the exhibition area (1,200 square metres) is a scale reproduction of the new urbanisation project (2012–2030). In the background, a promotional video narrates the city of tomorrow: an “ecological”, “ideal” city with an excellent standard of living.9 The wide roads, subway lines, new green areas and new residential towers in the urban model of the Zhaoqing New Area emphasise its innovative design, its ability to not only attract businesses, but also promote cultural tourism in a natural landscape underscoring values and resources (waterways, woods and hills).10 Detailed plans and designs in

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authorities, but also to allow “assessment” of its contribution to national policies so that the political careers of local officials can either be penalised or boosted (Qian, 2011).

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Fig. 2 Models of the buildings under construction in an exhibition hall in Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, 2017.

the adjacent rooms illustrate the key features of the new town: the transportation and water networks, environmental sustainability and high-tech districts. The pledge displayed in the exhibition hall justifies the urban expansion in light of the much broader territorial programme.11 Using maps and diagrams, Zhaoqing affirms its role as a protagonist in the urbanisation of Guangdong by emphasising the rapid links between the new town, the existing city and the global city-region of the Pearl River Delta. This has allowed the Zhaoqing municipal government to obtain financial backing from the National Development Bank and the Guangdong branch of the Bank of China; it has also attracted private and international investments, leading to constant modification of the plans in order to accommodate the specific requirements of the projects. Private exhibition areas make up the third group of exhibition halls; these areas are linked to the projects and strategies of the developers and real estate companies, e.g., China Vanke Co., Greenland Holding Group and Poly Real Estate. These exhibition centres are located very close to the sites where the projects will be built. Since they are basically sales centres, they are situated wherever apartments and offices need to be promoted and sold. (Fig. 2) Always present during project implementation, they are continuously updated whenever changes are made. Like any other showroom, their 136

layout is simple: a central corridor leads from the exhibition area (with a model) to a bar and a place for interested parties to gather information and conclude sales/purchases. These temporary centres are easy to reconvert: once their commercial function is fulfilled, they are turned into service areas for the new settlements under construction, a role already illustrated in the models on display. The Poly Garden Presenta-

qing plain.12 The entire project covers a 140,000-square-metre area with a built area of 360,000 square metres. It is located in a barycentric position between the high-speed train station and Dinghu Mountain.13 Construction of the six tower blocks began in 2014 and will be completed for the Provincial Sport Games to be held in Zhaoqing in 2018. The design of the interior spaces merges traditional Chinese cultural features and classical architectural motifs.14 The glass dome above the octagonal central hall and the use of lavish materials give the rooms a majestic aura.15 The homes sold in this sales centre promise comfort and luxury. Buying a home means buying social status. The large model not only portrays the complex on sale, but the entire city. In fact, the residential complex is surrounded by public buildings completely immersed in the countryside: museums, schools, a hospital and sports centres. The meticulous design

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tion Centre, developed by the state-owned developer Poly Real Estate, is an exhibition area designed to present and sell the Poly Garden residential complex in the Zhao-

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Fig. 3 Entrance of an exhibition hall in Tongzhou New Town, Tongzhou, Beijing, 2017.

of the landscape enhances the lush vegetation portrayed as conveying the original memory of the site. Even the title of the real estate operation conjures up the “green” nature of this urban pledge.16 The idea of a “comfortable middle-class lifestyle” (Goodman, 2014 b) is projected from the domestic to the urban dimension. Multi-storey residential buildings are found in the middle, organised in a closed gated community according to the now established model of a park isolated from the public street by a few scattered buildings. The project includes heterogeneous but recognisable elements that are already part of our collective imagination. Each time, however, the buildings are able to impose the affirmation of a central site in every context; they are capable of liquefying the surroundings and coagulating them in the magnificence of a tower complex organised either along axes or around waterways and sinuous green corridors. Dozens of workmen with yellow helmets are available to help anyone who wants to go up a tower and visit a “standard” apartment – a 1:1 scale model of what is pledged on paper.17 While developers realise their ambitions, the new middle class in China tries to find the right house, the one that best represents the fact that they have come up in the world. Promoting and building the urban image plays a key role in the success not only of a neighbourhood, but also of a new town. The pledge is revealed to the city using glitzy, large-format images, scattered throughout the new development area. The promotional brochures of the new residential complexes are handed out at every crossroads. Real estate posters (Fig. 3) include evocative but fairly unrealistic images, a short description with the measurements of the apartments and a telephone number. 138

During this phase, the pledge is directed towards individual potential buyers, and does not expand to include the common urban dream (to which the buyer can subscribe by calling a different telephone number). These interrelated processes – real estate promotion, urban marketing and reinvention of the memory of the site – help to sell these new neighbourhoods as the residential model not only of new towns, but also of an increasingly competitive real estate market. Public and Private Exhibition halls can be considered an architectural type with precise characteristics: size, location, exhibition contents, forms, functions, initiatives and management methods. Despite their differences, exhibition halls all use the same language to convey and sell new towns. They have big exhibition areas with a spectacular model at the centre showing the urban development on a 1:500–1:1000 scale. The visual repertoire includes not only planning documents, but also slogans, perspective views, multi­ media installations, videos and brochures with extremely communicative and persuasive content. A large multimedia map shows different levels of the influences on and links in the new town. Axes, arrows and circles with different sections either illustrate major transportation infrastructure or the connections between the new urban centre and other places (e.g., the axis linking the CBD in Beijing to the one in Tongzhou). Other maps show the plans for future connections with cities in other parts of the country or the world. The urban dream takes on a regional, national and global dimension. Detailed models and designs reveal the expansion of the urban areas under construction, the ways the land will be used and the infrastructure yet to be completed: motorways, subways, hospitals and schools. Finally, they guarantee that all this will be built. Perspective images extol the virtues of the new urban development hubs: neighbourhoods with fake traditional architectural languages or high-tech areas. An urban planning exhibition hall can be metaphorically compared to a theatre, with the play being the pledge of a new urban state and the “plot” depending on the sequence

by the objects on display to the surrounding territory, and then to the global context to which the buildings intend to create links and by which they are legitimised. The display transmits a story capable of immediately attracting and persuading visitors and investors. The masterplans indicate the cities’ functions, objectives and land uses (for the next twenty years) and specify the desired results. The Chinese urban dream is created by implementing a sort of “imagined urbanisation” and by convincingly

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in which the documents are displayed in the exhibition area. In many ways, the structure of the plot appears to share the logic of nested Chinese boxes. Not only literally, i.e., when an object is directly incorporated into another: masterplans and futuristic visions are presented both inside and outside the exhibition hall, and the city is reproduced in increasingly detailed scale models; but also temporally, as if the plot was in three chapters, conjuring up a glorious past, reassuming the present and projecting the future, thus reflecting changes in the city. And finally, narratively, with a story unfolding within a story. The materials on display (Fig. 4) tell the tale of a character – an apartment, a neighbourhood, a new town – which in turn tells another tale: of a city, a metropolis, a region. The context spreads dimensionally from the area illustrated

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Fig. 4 Samples of various construction materials and technologies used in the new town on display in an exhibition hall in Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, 2017.

representing it. Simulations fascinate and convince people, thereby dissipating the complexities. The first objective to be achieved after providing so many elements is to narrate a shared prosperity. Emotions dominate technical issues. Putting new towns on display is a crucial step on the path to success; it is something more than a promotional or commercial manoeuvre: the cities illustrated in exhibition halls are a specific product intended for a heterogeneous public and inspired by multiple, complex reasons.

1 The term exhibition hall encompasses all different kinds the official description of Zhaoqing New Area Planning of exhibition areas in Chinese new towns, be they “urban Exhibition Hall (Zhaoqing New District, 2017 ). 10 Cfr. planning halls”, “urban construction exhibition halls”, “city Development Plan of Guangzhou-Foshan-Zhaoqing art and exhibition halls” or “sales centres”. For more infor- Economic Circle (2010–2020) (Guangzhou Municipality, mation about the use of these terms, cfr. Fan, 2015. 2 For 2010). 11 In 2010, Zhaoqing (and therefore Zhaoqing a comparison between exhibition halls in China and other New Area) was included as a national development area international contexts, cfr. Qian, 2015. 3 The City Plan- in the Development Plan of Guangzhou-Foshan-Zhaoning Act specifies that urban planning must establish qing Economic Circle, part of the implementation of the the size, economic orientation and structure of the city; Outline Program of Reform and Development Plan of the achieve economic and social growth objectives; draft “ra- Pearl River Delta Region (2008–2020) (National Develtional” urban plans; and build infrastructures and settle- opment Reform Commission, 2008). 12 Construction bements to satisfy the needs of urban growth (Building in gan on the building in May 2015 and ended in September China, 1990, Article 1). Urban planning is part of a plan- 2016. The 950 -square-metre exhibition commercial area ning system centred on Five-Year Plans (the last is the is divided into an area for the model (104 square meThirteenth Five-Year Plan 2016–2020). These plans com- tres), a bar/coffee area (93.6 square metres) and the main bine dozens of national plans and hundreds of sectoral hall (210 square metres). 13 In 2012, the Zhaoqing Poly and local plans. Regarding the pro-growth environment Investment Co. bought the lot of land worth 600 RMB / created by the ensemble of reforms implemented since square metre from the government (interview with Deng the nineties, cfr. Wu, 2015 a. 4 According to Qian (2015), Shaomei, Marketing Manager, Zhaoqing Poly Investment new policies focusing on greater social development have, Co., Ltd., 10 May 2017, Zhaoqing). 14 The Zhaoqing Poly since 2014 , reduced the distribution of these forms of Garden Sales Centre was designed by David Chang Design urban exhibition. 5 Regarding the characteristics of the Associates International. The project earned the bronze competition for the Tongzhou New Town, cfr. Fiandanese, A’Design Award in Interior Space and Exhibition Design in this book. 6 The building covers a rather compact Category, 2016–2017, cfr. A’Design Award and Compesite (3,410 square metres) and has a total floor area of tition, 2017. 15 Cfr. interview with the architect David 8 ,450 square metres (AZL Architects, 2011). 7 AZL Ar- Chang (Society of British and International Design, 2017 ). chitects won the invitation design competition “Zheng- 16 The residential areas of new towns are usually characzhou Zhengdong Urban Planning Exhibition Hall & Public terised by a specific theme, a brand chosen by the develUnderground Parking” launched by the municipal govern- oper responsible for attracting potential buyers. For more ment in 2009. Requests for the competition contract no- information regarding themed communities, cfr. Bosker, tice are reported in Guo, 2011. 8 The Zhaoqing New Area 2013. 17 After the developer has built two thirds of the Planning Exhibition Hall was opened on 27 October 2012. building, they can legally begin to sell the apartments to During the tenth Zhaoqing Jinqiu economic and trade fair self-finance the rest of the investment. The average cost of held the same day, Zhaoqing New Area signed thirteen the apartments varies from 5,000 RMB /square metre (in projects for a total investment of 30.95 billion RMB . Seven 2016, during the initial sales phase) to 7,000 RMB /square of these projects (total investment, 13.65 billion RMB ) in- metre (2017 ) (interview with Deng Shaomei, Marketing volved public structures mainly in the culture and crea- Manager, Zhaoqing Poly Investment Co., Ltd., 10 May 2017, tive industry sector (Zhaoqing New District, 2018). 9 Cfr. Zhaoqing).

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High-Rise Apartments Alessandro Armando, Francesco Carota Although demand for housing differs, and promoters and operators group together in different ways as public and private actors, high-rise buildings are the most widespread building type in residential real estate projects in Chinese new towns (Wu, Xu and Yeh, 2006). Unlike many studies on Chinese housing units that focus on demand, consumer preferences (Huang and Yi, 2010; Zhang, Wang and Lin, 2013; Tu, Li and Qiu, 2016) or the financing system (Zhang, 2000; Li and Yi, 2007; Zhang, 2010), this chapter will concentrate on the houses currently on the market. It will examine how they are designed and produced as well as any recurrent characteristics. Using several buildings in the new towns in Zhaoqing, Tongzhou and Zhengdong (Fig. 1) as examples, we will establish what determines the typological features of these housing units. The data required for this study was gathered not only by analysing promotional brochures and Loushu (real estate magazines), but also by interviewing the directors of real estate companies. We will begin by describing how big real estate agencies operate in the land market and develop their real estate operations, and then go on to illustrate some of the basic features of these housing units, their interior layout and the logic behind the composition of the towers. The third part of the study describes the high-rise tower complexes, which nearly always create a settlement system with a modicum of functional and distributive autonomy vis-à-vis the city. Finally, in the conclusion, we will raise several issues as to whether or not the apartments in high-rise buildings are saleable objects and architectures. We will ask ourselves where, and under what conditions, they can be considered commodities.

real estate giants, either as private companies or as part of public/private consortia (Li, 2010). Some of these consortia, e. g., Country Garden, China Vanke Real Estate Co. Ltd., China Poly Real Estate Co. Ltd., also play an important role in the construction of new towns. Despite the marked differences between these companies, we decided to analyse specific case studies and identified several elements used by these companies to create residential supply. While developing the Poly Garden settlement in Zhaoqing New Area, in 2012 the China Poly Real Estate Co. Ltd. bought the land use rights of a 140,000-square-metre plot of land from the Zhaoqing municipal government.3 The China Poly Group is a state-owned company created and still operating under the supervision of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council. It includes a branch dedicated to real estate investment (China Poly Real Estate

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Actors and Actions in the Construction of High-Rise Apartments: An Empirical Analysis After the introduction of political and economic reforms in the early eighties, many actors – including real estate promoters and local government agencies – entered into the real estate market in order to satisfy an increasing demand for housing, especially in urban areas.1 The housing policy of real estate operators developed in parallel to the birth of a land and housing market, the effects of which are ubiquitous even in new urban development areas.2 In fewer than forty years, several financial promoters became

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Fig. 1 View from the top of a high-rise apartment in Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, 2017.

One Meter Sunshine

Ocean Orient

Runcheng Time

Wan Wei’s Home

Megahall MOMA

Star Alliance Bay

Heavenly City

Xinhua Canal Bay

Jasmine Mansion

Fig. 2 Apartment floor plans in Zhaoqing New Area (left), Tongzhou (centre) and Zhengdong (right).

Co. Ltd.) and another branch specialising exclusively in construction (China Poly Construction Co. Ltd.). A public-private partnership – very common in more recent new towns (Shen and Wu, 2011) – allows a company to purchase the land rights of a specific site and invest in the construction of infrastructures and facilities. By doing so, both the local government and the private company can encourage other agencies to invest in the transformation of the area, thereby increasing the value of user rights on the previously purchased land. The site of the Poly Garden project is strategically located in the new city. It is situated roughly 8 kilometres from a new high-speed train station on the line running between new Zhaoqing and the provincial capital, Guangzhou, and 8 kilometres from the Dinghu Mountain Scenic Area, an important tourist and leisure site inside the new urbanised area. The new settlement is also near several facilities: a school complex to the north, a sports area to the south-east and, to the west, an administrative area built by the China Poly Group for the Zhaoqing municipality. The task of the company’s investment sector is to initiate the design process during its negotiations with local government and then perform a feasibility and profitability study on the project. This often takes places during decision-making processes and approvals involving several hierarchical levels of the company.4 Immediately afterwards, the marketing sector takes over: based on market analysis and a cost assessment, it establishes the consumer target for the “product” and then defines some of its 146

architectural and stylistic features.5 The promoter creates a brand that can be used for several different sites; the brand provides an extremely detailed description of the configuration of the object on sale: “We give the architects the standards and restrictions, in particular about the apartments specified in the contract notice so that the technical project corresponds to the objectives and respects market demands”.6 In fact, standardised building types are extensively used by promoters and builders for two reasons that are easy to imagine. First, they reduce the risks inherent in the operation because they have often been successfully market tested in previous projects (Friedman, 1993; Hooper and Nicol, 1999, 2000; Jenkins and McLachlan, 2010). Second, they reduce costs and the time it takes to design and execute construction (Ball, 1983, pp. 166–167, 1999). After establishing type and distribution, the building projects are repeatedly reviewed by employees working in the promoter’s subsidiary company.7 They are then approved by strategically higher hierarchical levels of the company. In collaboration with the promoter’s regional offices, the subsidiary company is responsible for the management and approval of the design documents by the local government office, the Bureau of Planning and Land Resources. During this process, an architectural studio – not part of the subsidiary company – is assigned the role of expert consultant (Friedman, 1993); the latter is responsible not only for creating representations that respect the dictates of the marketing operations, but also for drafting the final documents. Recurring Features, Composition and Characterisation of High-Rise Apartments: A Multi-scalar Observation Stage One: The Apartment A comparison between the layouts of several housing units (Fig. 2) in buildings located in new urban expansion areas – already completed or under construction – reveals minor differences in their spatial and architectural features. Furthermore, several elements are repeated in different and often spatially and temporally remote contexts and buildings. An initial element is their dimensional characteristics and therefore the size of the

government regulation passed in 2006, and the consumers targeted by the real estate promoter (Shen and Wu, 2011).8 In fact, the task of the company’s marketing department is to establish the size of the apartments based on analyses of existing markets, statistical forecasts, and consequent positioning of the product on the market.9 Poly Garden in the Zhaoqing New Area is an excellent example. According to the marketing manager, “the apartments will accommodate part of the urban population moving here from big cities in the Guangdong province, such as Shenzhen and Gaungzhou”.10 In actual fact, when we studied the most common apartment sizes in the new towns in question we found that they appear to be tailored to satisfy demand by the part of the population defined in China as ordinary people.

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apartments and each room. Although the size of these units strongly influences their architectural type and structure, it does not appear to be the result of a broader political and social project or an ad hoc architectural design based on individual requirements. Instead, unit size appears to be the result of a mix between respect for the

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Fig. 3 Apartment floor plan (duplex), Poly I Cubic, Guangzhou.

Fig. 4 Apartment floor plan, Vanke Cloud City, Guangzhou.

In the early twenty-first century, the ordinary people category became quite important in the Chinese real estate sector due to the so-called “New Housing Movement”. The programme, illustrated in the “Shanghai Manifesto”, was launched by several big real estate promoters headed by Wang Shi, founder of the China Vanke Real Estate Co. Ltd. (Li, 2010). Since then, the commercial supply of apartments previously developed primarily for the higher social classes has been earmarked for a broader slice of the population, people who were simultaneously forced and encouraged to purchase new apartments on the market. The apartment size we selected reflects a fairly consolidated formula of the Chinese market; it ranges from 88 to 144 square metres. The layouts used in the new towns we studied varied little in size and had fairly similar features to buildings constructed just a few years earlier. On the contrary, in some contexts they appear to provide a product already superseded by new building types. (Figs. 3, 4) After 2014, market trends 11 in so-called “first level cities” (or more generally in densely urbanised areas) began to include duplex apartments with double height rooms as well as very small apartments, built to satisfy the demand for cheaper housing.12 Even the size of each room in the housing unit reflects previously established features. On the one hand, they respect the regulations of the China Building Code on size; on the other, they try to satisfy the new expectations of consumers 13 – for example, socalled master bedrooms, big ensuite bedrooms measuring around 30 square metres. The apartments, and therefore the position of the windows, are always built in a northsouth direction, so much so that the east and west walls are blind (often on both sides), even if windows could have been inserted. The most popular apartment layout includes a directly connected kitchen and living room, separated by a double sliding door to enhance natural ventilation and provide relative spatial flexibility. This layout may not simply reflect emphasis on aeration in the rooms. In fact, several authors believe it 148

Fig. 5 Apartment floor plan, Poly Garden, Zhaoqing New Area.

Fig. 6 Floor plan of apartment with several hallways, Megahall MOMA , Tongzhou.

is inspired by a culturally established layout where living and dining rooms were once joined to create a single, naturally ventilated room in the middle of the apartment (Lee, 2015). Dayrooms usually face an area used as a veranda, in turn ostensibly inspired by the typical housing models adopted before the reforms (Lü, Rowe and Zhang, 2001, p. 172), but still necessary to satisfy customs and habits. Another open space in Chinese houses is called kong zhong hua yuan, which we could translate as a “courtyard” or “sky garden”. (Fig. 5) This space is liberally exploited by real estate promoters who consider it to be included in the document Ordinance of Urban Real Estate Development and Management as 50 % of the calculation of the GFA (Cao, 2015). Official documents report it as being an accessory space, but it is often sold as a “room” and therefore as a supplementary surface area in the calculation of the value of the housing unit.14 A small hallway between the entrance door and the communal corridors between the apartments is another characteristic feature of several housing units (for an example, see the Megahall MOM A project for Tongzhou). (Fig. 6) Although it acts as an entrance for leaving shoes and overcoats before entering the

Stage Two: The Tower From the point of view of layout, the apartment tower has become an established typology which even the operators describe using easy-to-repeat formulas such as yi lou er yu, yi lou san yu, yi lou si yu, yi lou liu lou (respectively: one staircase [for] two, three, four or six apartments).16 This type differs from other experiments in high-rise

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apartment, the hallway is a recurrent feature in all housing units. A book by Lu Wei, designer for the China Vanke Real Estate Co. Ltd., illustrates how this simple module and its configurations actually depend on a rationale handed down over the years and then standardised and established within the company.15

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public buildings constructed during the early years of the reform (1985–1991), when towers often had several apartments grouped along axes arranged radially around a hub (Lü, Rowe and Zhang, 2001, pp. 242–246). Fig. 7 illustrates the types of towers in our sample. In some areas, two towers are placed side-by-side to increase the resistance of the high-rise buildings to horizontal forces. This results in considerable savings in both resources and costs.17 The features of the tower basically depend on the combination of stairs and apartments on a typical floor; likewise, the layouts of the floors influence the typical arrangement of the units as well as their importance in the tower itself. For example, top-floor apartments in the Poly Garden buildings in Zhaoqing New Area have great views and better exposure. As a result, they can be sold for 30 % more than the apartments on lower floors.18 Generally speaking, many of the dimensional parameters and relative combinations reflect accurate calculations of profitability. For example, the height of a building appears to be dictated primarily by careful assessment of the balance between the costs of certain solutions (required by fire safety regulations for buildings with more than eighteen floors) and the sales revenue of the resulting number of apartments. Far from being influenced by initial, morphological or symbolic regulations, the height of the towers becomes a dependent variable enabling economic optimisation of the process.19 The buildings in Poly Garden (Zhaoqing New Area), River East International (Tongzhou New Town) and Star Alliance Bay (Zhengdong), as well as many others, invariably have eighteen floors and are probably a good example of the most popular buildings in post-reform China (Xue, 2010). Furthermore, having once determined the height, the promoter is authorised to sell the apartments while construction is still underway; however, twelve of the eighteen floors must first be completed, i.e., two thirds of the building. In this way, companies can use their initial revenue to finance the investment,20 while transfering part of the financing and risk of the operation not only to the workers, but also to consumers (Stein, 2012, p. 84).21 Stage Three: The Community The intrinsic features of the new apartments and their proximity to outside infrastructure features are not the only aspects that affect their quality and marketing. Internal facilities are the greatest influencing factor. For example, in the sample we studied, facilities include a laundry, a nursery, a swimming pool and a park with a games area and sports equipment, primarily reserved for future residents. In the Poly Garden project in Zhaoqing New Area, even the exhibition hall and sales office will be used as a flexible space for cultural activities and conferences once all the apartments have been sold.22 It is no coincidence that these facilities are amongst the first to be exhibited in the publicity brochures used to sell the new housing units. In fact, although the facilities physically present in the area around the new apartments in high-rise buildings do, at least partially, determine their value, they are part of a very popular modus operandi used by real estate promoters. They began to be used after a document was published by the State Council in the late eighties specifying “that real estate companies should be organized to try comprehensive development in small cities and satellite cities and cities’ new district and area and the redevelopment of old cities” (Lü, Rowe and Zhnag, 150

Fig. 7 New residential towers in Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, 2017.

2001, p. 229). Hence, what often makes a product and therefore an apartment “unique, is the fact it is part of a certain lot with all the features that are part of the project target. An apartment is therefore tangible proof of the merger of the promoter’s business strategies” (Shen and Wu, 2011) and the consumer’s ambition to acquire a certain social status (Fleischer, 2007). Material aggregation, sales strategies and the social aspirations of buyers keep it all together, from the single housing unit to the entire block. In fact, it has a rather significant effect on the form of the city, often characterised by placing several separate but different superblocks close to one another (Duanfang, 2006; Monson, 2008).

example, although the apartments are good quality, rather big, and are destined for the middle class, they are assembled in extremely dense, repetitive towers. Nonetheless, buyers consider these last two features as less important than others. Prestigious

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Some Theoretical Considerations For argument’s sake, we decided to consider the housing unit not only as a privileged object of study, but also as an integrated component of a much bigger process. Today, we can state that it is not designed as an independent object – since its features depend on activities and decisions foreign to the project – but is sold as if it were. In some ways the construction of high-rise buildings does not produce sales units, but instead sells parts of its construction and transformation as if they were a unit. Some of the unique features of the projects and buildings in this study are particularly noteworthy: for

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Fig. 8 Construction site of high-rise building, Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017.

apartments or apartments destined for the upper middle class can be part of a highrise building with eighteen floors if they have several key features (e.g., a master bedroom or sky garden). Is it possible to try and explain this phenomenon without turning it into a mere question of culture – or worse, the alleged lack of design quality? Is it possible that the concept of architectural quality depends on a context of rules and institutional structures rather than just on socialised representations or imagery? Asking these questions allows us to consider the value of a building and its design quality in relation to the role it plays in the construction of social reality, rather than the intrinsic material qualities of the object. So let’s start with a problem of social ontology and theorise that these buildings and their designs are social and material objects and that they depend on socially-built “status functions” (i.e., regulations, laws and other kinds of founding acts) (cfr. Searle, 1995; Ferraris, 2012). In this framework, what is a high-rise building and the apartments in it? Can it be likened to a commodity, and if so, does this kind of “commodity” differ from a similar (i.e., materially comparable) apartment, for example, in Italy? Let’s try to answer these two questions, and then go back to the first one. The construction of a building is a material transformation of space (Fig. 8) which, by definition, cannot be reproduced. This means that a building differs from other commodity-objects in that it cannot move. A building is motionless since it is anchored to the ground or, better still, because it modifies the Earth (Smith and Zaibert, 2001). For Karl Polanyi, commodities are “objects produced for sale on the market” and “markets, again, are empirically defined as actual contacts between buyers and sellers” (Polanyi, 2001, p. 75). Polanyi believes that land, labour and money can never really be commodities, and yet for these entities “the commodity fiction, therefore, supplies a vital organizing principle in regard to the whole of society affecting almost all its institutions in the most varied way” (Polanyi, 2001, p. 76). Even if we judge land to be a “commodity fiction” vis-à-vis the market, we can still consider the relationship between land and building in many different ways, starting with the latter’s material and technical features. For example, a building that can be completely disassembled could be defined as an object rather than an alteration of the land (even though no demolition of a building is completely reversible). In this case, we could maintain that a building is an object, a product, sold and bought and therefore a commodity for all practical purposes. However, this still does not apply to high-rise buildings (which intrude enormously on space, are equipped with substructures and require not only extensive excavation but also surface infrastructures that are anything but reversible). The possible

rights of use for limited time periods and regulates the conditions by which a real estate market can exist (Haila, 2007). What is bought and sold is, first of all, the right to use a portion of space upon which it is then possible to build. In our study, the building (not the land) is subject to other buying and selling transactions; the minimum unit is the apartment. Since the building is constitutionally separate from the land, it

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distinction between land and building involves both material conditions and a series of status functions (e.g., ownership and use rights) that affect the two entities within a certain institutional context. Urban land in China belongs to the State; the latter grants

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is easier to equate the apartments to commodities than it would be if their purchase also involved the property rights of the land. Actually, the concept of the commodification of a housing unit is a major issue in academic literature analysing the general conditions of land regimes and the real estate market after the economic reforms of the early eighties (e.g., Wu, 2010, 2015 b). High-rise buildings are potentially destined to be bought by a very diverse range of individuals: ordinary people who are already residents but want a change; residents in big cities who decide to move to smaller cities with a better cost/quality ratio; people who move to live and work in the city but do not officially live there and for whom buying a house (for example, due to a new family status or a permanent job) is a tool for obtaining an urban hukou.23 One way or another, the high-rise buildings in this study fit programmatically into these categories, with a combination of suitable offerings. Such a diversified supply suggests that – at least for the size of the new towns we have examined – a Chinese new town is a rather inclusive system where the desired “quality” is first and foremost the promise of urban living. Let’s now summarise (and try to answer our first question): owning an apartment in a high-rise building means owning a housing unit, but never the land on which it is built. It may also mean acquiring not only a status that will help attain an urban hukou for the place where it is located, but also other privileges such as the facilities in a specific “community”. As a result, the quality of the housing units and the complexes where they are located do not refer to a set of requirements that need to be recomposed in a specific place, but to the tangible status of the objects (an inhabitant who becomes a citizen, or a citizen who further improves their status). For example, the fact that a person wants a bigger bedroom (to feel more comfortable, have more space, etc.) is not the same as wanting a “master bedroom”, considered the modular “quality” solution representing a specific status. This is the context in which these apartments can be considered commodities, because it is not space that is purchased, but a set of customs and even a status, one which is not only symbolic, but also implicitly bureaucratic and administrative.24 The remaining question is linked to the definition of architectural design: what does designing a high-rise building mean, and especially its apartments? Would a designer be involved in the same way if the building were not in China, or does the Chinese institutional context create special conditions which need to be considered by architects? In many ways, the repeatable models used to design building complexes – from the configuration of the towers to the interior layouts of the apartments – appear akin to what happens (and has happened in many different ways) in intensive residential construction in the West. And yet, as regards the Poly Garden settlement, we could theorise that repeated, modular solutions do not reduce or negatively affect the value and quality of the outcome. In fact, some options – such as personalised apartments, variations to accommodate special needs and flexible layouts specifically designed for the client – do not seem particularly important. It is therefore possible that a repeatable layout satisfies the specific status of commodity assumed by the apartments in question, as well as being the perfect answer to market expectations. As a result, designing the layouts is an assignment that could be performed not only by architects but by 154

1 In China, the urban population reached 710 million in 2014 , 4 .2 times the population in 1978 (Wu et al., 2016). 2 Before reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, there was no land or housing market in China. Houses were assigned based on a welfare system managed by state companies. In the eighties and nineties, a real estate market began to emerge after the implementation of numerous political and economic reforms and deep-rooted social transformations (see, for example, Ping Wang and Murrie, 1996; Wu, 2013 a). 3 The promoter does not purchase the land; the State leases the land to the promoter for a certain period of time, depending on what it is to be used for (seventy years for a residential project) (Ping Wang and Murrie, 1996). 4 Interview with Costance Cheung, Marketing Manager, Country Garden Real Estate Co. Ltd., 3 April 2017 in the offices of the Country Garden Real Estate Co. Ltd. in Dongguan. 5 id. 6 These words were spoken by Derek Fang, Director of Design in the engineering and design sector of the China Vanke Real Estate Co. Ltd. 7 Subsidiary companies are created specifically to manage individual projects. They normally belong to a single promoter or are created after a joint venture has been established between two different actors. The subsidiary company normally has a design department, an engineering department and a marketing department. 8 These new measurements refer to the regulation dated 24 May 2006, later referred to as Law 70/90. According to this decree, 70 % of the approved floor area has to be built in apartments with a GFA of less than 90 square metres (Cao, 2015). 9 Interview with Rouren Zhang, employee in the Marketing Department of Guangzhou Poly Real Estate Co. Ltd., 15 June 2016, Guangzhou. 10 Interview with Deng Shaomei, Marketing Manager, Zhaoqing Poly Investment Co., Ltd., 10 May 2017, Zhaoqing. 11 In this case, we refer to apartments of less than 40 square metres, for example in Guangzhou Vanke Cloud City. 12 On this issue, several examples were promoted by the promoter, i.e., the Poly I Cubic in Guangzhou, but also apartments built by China Vanke Real Estate Co. Ltd. in consolidated urban areas, such as the Blue Ocean project in Guangzhou. 13 Available at: http://chinahousing.mit.edu/english/resources/ BuildingCode.html (Accessed: 10 January 2018). 14 Inter­ view with Guo Xiaosian, an architect specialised in interior design. The meeting took place in the offices of the Design Institute of the South China University of Technol-

ogy, 22 June 2017. 15 The book analyses the different configurations of the entrance area (Lu, 2016). (Fig. 6) 16 Interview with Guo Xiaosian, an architect specialised in interior design, working at the Design Institute of the South China University of Technology, 22 June 2017; interview with Chang Li, an engineer working in the centre for research on housing industrialisation at the China Vanke Real Estate Co. Ltd., 8 March 2017. The meeting took place in the offices of the China Vanke Housing Research Centre in Dongguan. 17 Information obtained from an internal document drafted by the China Vanke Real Estate Co. Ltd.; interview with Chang Li, an engineer working at the centre for research on housing industrialisation founded by China Vanke, 8 March 2017. The meeting took place in the headquarters of the China Vanke Housing Research Centre in Dongguan. 18 Interview with Deng Shaomei, Marketing Manager at Zhaoqing Poly Investment Co., Ltd., 10 May 2017. The meeting took place in the Poly Garden Sales Office. 19 Interview with Guo Xiaosian, an architect specialised in interior design. The meeting took place at the Design Institute of the South China University of Technology, 22 June 2017. 20 Interview with Deng Shaomei, Marketing Manager at Zhaoqing Poly Investment Co., Ltd., 10 May 2017. The meeting took place in the Poly Garden Sales office. 21 Real estate promoters often delay paying the contractors, thereby causing them to assume some of the risks of the operation. In turn, the contractors are slow to pay their workers, who are often unregistered migrants with very few opportunities to exercise their rights (Stein, 2012, p. 84). 22 Interview with Deng Shaomei, Marketing Manager at Zhaoqing Poly Investment Co., Ltd., 10 May 2017. The meeting took place in the Poly Garden Sales Office. 23 Regarding the establishment of the hukou, and the way it is being redefined, cfr. the chapter by Graezer-Bideau and Pagani in this book. 24 But not equated to commodities: there will be no difference between these two terms as long as growth and speculation continue. The commoditisation cycle of the housing units in question should be studied in relation to the development and growth of the future real estate market. At a certain point, these housing units will once again be “only” part of space. For more information about the concept of “commodity pathway diversion”, cfr. Appadurai, 1988 .

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many others, just like other transactions and elaborations that take place in the field of marketing or by re-proposing custom-stratified models that use standard solutions. Equating the design of an apartment with the design of an industrial product does not generate any specific negative effects. Its features can be established based on quality standards that are repeatable, but also adjustable depending on desired performance and differentiated pricing.

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Undergrounds Valeria Federighi, Filippo Fiandanese According to a report by McKinsey Global Institute (2009), one hundred million Chinese citizens “benefited from power and telecommunications upgrades” between the late nineties and 2005: today, China is a world leader in infrastructure investment. In addition, fiscal decentralisation and land use reform have made it advantageous for local administrations to invest in infrastructure development capable of creating added value from the leasing of plots of land (Wu and Gaubatz, 2013). These practices are even more important when it comes to building large, new urban settlements where underground construction is a crucial part of the overall project. Underground infrastructure is the solid platform upon which urban buildings are grafted: although the design of the infrastructure is the premise required to achieve market efficiency, specific conditions have an enormous impact on the relationship between what is above and below the surface. This text will empirically examine three case studies and available literature in order to analyse the relationship between urban projects and underground projects, where the latter legitimises the former. Zhaoqing New Area (Guangdong Province), Tongzhou New Town (suburban area east of Beijing) and Zhengdong New District (Zhengzhou Municipality, Henan Province) will exemplify the relationship between urban project and underground project and how this relationship becomes more complex depending on the number of infrastructure connections present in the underground project: the five connections in the Zhaoqing New Area illustrate infrastructure organisation in a third-tier city; the seven connections in Tongzhou reveal a more complex relationship in a new town ready to host the new Beijing Town Hall; the multiple crossconnections in Zhengdong are a special case, i.e., they represent an integrated project in which the underground and the city are designed to function together. Infrastructure becomes the premise for the construction of new towns. It not only promises a new urban condition expressed by the pervasive presence of physical infrastructure elements and represented in the models and brochures illustrating the new towns to potential buyers, but also its future invisibility, guaranteed by an advanced technological set-up and the possibility to successfully merge the underground projects with the city on the surface. Five Connections, One Levelling: From the Mock-Up to the Tower Two separate areas have been organised on the vast worksite in Zhaoqing so that potential investors can visit the site. (Fig. 1) In the first area, visitors use a multi-story, steel frame platform to get a bird’s-eye view of the site, monitor progress and learn more about the project from several info panels. In the second area, a few kilometres west, visitors can examine a 1:1 scale mock-up of an infrastructure section module. (Fig. 2) The latter allows potential investors to not only understand the impressive concrete tunnel system (cast on site) housing the main infrastructure arteries of the settle­ 156

ment, but also to appreciate its size thanks to a map showing the layout of the main network. Information on building techniques is provided by two additional mock-ups showing the formwork and design of the iron frame. Standard accessories are displayed in an area where visitors can even enter the mock-up, undoubtedly the main attraction during their visit. There are obvious reasons why visitors and potential investors are shown an accurate, full-scale reproduction of a utility section: the concept of modernity has to go hand-in-hand with an efficient utility network. However, while the multi-story platform allows visitors to monitor the development of the city, the mock-up area is dedicated to an element which, once complete, will be almost entirely invisible, as we will see later on. Gandy (2014) argues that the modernity of a city’s infrastructure can basically be measured by the degree to which it is invisible – “the modern town was based on a concealed infrastructure” (Vigarello, quoted in Gandy, 2014, p. 14) – and that, on the contrary, in a “horizontal city” of the Global South “everything is fully available to the gaze” (Appadurai, quoted in Gandy, 2014, p. 6). Paradoxically, less developed infrastructure is more visible while more innovative infrastructure is less visible. Exposed bundles of wires and open-air sewers – seen in the unregulated megalopolises of the Global South – reveal the lack of integrated projects and the political resolve to combine the requirements of an expanding market with the explosive force of a growing population. Instead, in this case levelling turns the urban and supra-urban project into a primary tool (Zhu, 1994, quoted in Wu, 1997; and in Wu, Xu and Yeh, 2006). Levelling is a popular practice in Chinese real estate development processes. Prior to 1990, private real estate operations were reserved exclusively for production purposes. That year, two legislative measures paved the way for the creation of a “land market” that literature traditionally describes as being divided in two: a “primary land market” (Wu, Xu and Yeh, 2006, p. 33) regulating the transfer of “land rights” from the State to investors, and a “secondary land market” (ibid.) regulating the transfer of land rights to multiple players: investors and final users.1 Dividing the market into primary and secondary tiers is, in some ways, problematic (Haila, 2007), but it does allow the effectiveness of levelling to be appreciated as a way to use the creation of infrastructure to produce value.2 Cheap labour and the relative ease with which the State could acquire vast swathes of land made the process financially viable; it also decentralised political power (Wu and Gaubatz, 2013, p. 3), encouraging local and provincial officials to use land development to access incentives provided by central government.3 Literature (Vogel, 1989) cites Shenzhen as the first integrated project that used levelling, thereby allowing it to achieve the “five connections” (Vogel, 1989, p. 137) needed to build a city: roads, electricity, telecommunications, gas and a sewage system. Although access to water in Guangdong is significantly better than in other regions of China (OECD , 2010), infrastructuralisation is still synonymous with modernity and a coveted urban life-

As part of the Development Plan of Guangzhou-Foshan-Zhaoqing Economic Circle, Zhaoqing adopted the slogan to look towards the sea, “catching up with cities in the east”.5

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style.4

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Fig. 1 A man bends over to examine the subsoil on a construction site, Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017.

Fig. 2 Scale model of the underground infrastructures, Zhaoqing New Area, Zhaoqing, 2017.

Investment in the infrastructure development of the Zhaoqing New Area totalled 8.1 billion R MB ; this was one of the main tools used to convey a promise that considers first-tier cities along the coast as a development model.6 A perfect example is the full-scale model of the infrastructure section, proudly exhibited at the worksite: the added value of an infrastructure system built using cheap labour, and a platform designed to develop the city while remaining entirely within primary land market transactions. Every five years, the central government publishes a series of guidelines for transportation and infrastructure systems. However, the design and construction of infrastructure networks lies entirely with local (municipal) governments that use “Municipal Construction Commissions” or similar agencies as management tools (Wu and Gaubatz, 2013, p. 177). As in Shenzhen, the infrastructure project in Zhaoqing exploits – as best it can – the opportunities provided by building on completely levelled territory; the infrastructure project progresses at the same pace as the city project. The drafting phases of the city’s masterplan are all part of the primary land market: negotiation and the ensuing decision-making process take place between an institutional actor and a limited number of private or public-private actors whose interests may influence the project. The latter is in turn finalised so as to obtain the political and financial backing that may then be implemented during the stages that follow.7 Dinghu District in the Zhaoqing New Area is a transportation hub capable of successfully positioning the city in the Guangzhou-Foshan-Zhaoqing triangle. One of the areas most affected by infrastructure investment is situated between the high-speed railway 160

connecting the city to Guangzhou, the highway linking the new area to the old city and the river used to transport goods. The density of the network reflects the objectives in the masterplan; in particular, real estate development is chiefly concentrated in the area next to the high-speed train station and in the central area where big residential development projects are being constructed.8 Another significant fact is that there appears to be no subway network: only one line is apparently planned between Zhaoqing and Foshan, further consolidating the Zhaoqing New Area not only as the gateway of the city towards the east, but also as part of an interurban system currently being boosted, rather than as a comprehensive settlement.9 As mentioned earlier, the ostentatious mock-up is inversely proportional to the visibility of the infrastructure network that disappears, just as it does in the modern city described by Vigarello (quoted in Gandy, 2014, p. 14). The underground network in Zhaoqing is expected to run for a total of 45 kilometres. The tunnels will pass under the pedestrian section of the main roads in the city, making it possible to first build the road on the surface (also useful for the worksite) and then the underground utility infrastructure.10 The tunnels are divided longitudinally into four conduits and will accommodate the electricity network as well as the drainage, gas, sewage and telecommunications systems. They will also provide additional space for future uses.11 Although the tunnels are invisible, their presence will be marked by other above ground infrastructure elements. For example, the air vents (chunky concrete parallelepipeds) that provide entry to the tunnels for maintenance purposes will be visible every 200 metres. Another element is the futuristic office tower where the infrastructure network will be digitally monitored. The tower, located between the hotel/congress centre and the stadium in the eastern part of Dinghu District, will act as a visual landmark for the city district dedicated to the service sector. Wu and Gaubatz consider that “to be globally competitive, cities also need to provide a wide range of new, additional infrastructure services” (2013, p. 182). The tower is a materialisation of what is invisible, i.e., the infrastructure network. As such, it acts as a symbol of modernity, monitoring and efficiency. During the current construction phase, this task is performed by the full-scale model of the section with four tunnels. Like the water towers in the protomodern city described by Kaika and Swyngedouw, the tower in Zhaoqing is an “urban dowry of networks” (2000, p. 129); it is a fetish element that not only compensates for the invisible infrastructure network, but also allows it to be celebrated.

will extend for 2.1 million square metres on four levels under the 16 square kilometres of the central area of the new town. It is the largest of the underground complexes envisaged in other districts in the Beijing Municipality. In fact, it is bigger than the 600,000-square-metre underground complex on five levels in the CBD area in Chaoyang district, and the 100,000-square-metre parking area designed to accommo-

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Seven Connections, One Levelling: Preparing the Ground for Transformation In Tongzhou New Town, the plan for the most ambitious underground complex in the Beijing area has paved the way for the construction of the future sub-centre of the capital, prior to the construction of the city’s core zone. The underground complex

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date 3,500 cars under Quanmen Street in Dongcheng district (Delmastro, Lavagno and Schranz, 2016). The utility tunnels with electricity, telecommunications, gas and sewage networks will occupy the lowest level. These orderly, efficient, integrated corridors, illustrated in the official documents presenting the new town, are juxtaposed against the straight lines of old infrastructure corridors (Beijing People’s Municipal Government, 2016 a). The other levels will host businesses, parking areas and three automobile tunnels to help alleviate surface traffic; the tunnels will also pass under the Grand Canal.12 So, apart from the five connections described by Vogel (1989), this sprawling underground complex will have a sixth connection. It will be an inhabitable space which, thanks to the business areas, will also create a city underground. In addition, the four underground levels will intersect with a seventh network covering an even larger area: the subway. Until 2014 only a single subway line – the Batong Line – connected Tongzhou to Beijing; it was an over-ground extension of Line 1 running under Beijing’s east-west road axis. Since 2014, a second line – number 6 – reaches as far as Tongzhou, this time under­ ground. Arriving from the north, it connects several places that are still worksites: the Business Park, the CBD , the riverfront, the future high-speed train station, and the area where the Municipal Government of Beijing will be relocated. The map of the new transportation lines contained in the last new town masterplan shows that, in the future, Tongzhou will not be just the terminal station of subway lines arriving in Beijing. Currently, Lines 6 and 1 – that already connect Tongzhou to the centre of Beijing – and the eastern extension of Line 7 (under construction) run parallel without intersecting each other. In the next few years, these lines will be connected after the construction of Line 18 (also known as R1), which will run parallel to Line 1 in the central districts of Beijing. When it reaches Tongzhou it will split to allow all the lines to be connected. The planned interchange stations will be located in the main hubs of the new town: the CBD , the site of the Municipal Government, the high-speed train station and the Universal Studios theme park (under construction). The presence of multiple interchange stations will strengthen and structure the new decentralisation centre. Sections and renders of the underground complex are frequently used not only in the publicity brochures illustrating the new constructions in the central area of the new town, but also in the models on display in the exhibition halls. The image of a city with an integrated infrastructure network providing efficient sewage and water systems, as well as an underground traffic tunnel, is used for both Tongzhou and Zhaoqing; it is the promise of new, more efficient urban living with an impressive, completely hidden invisible network. As indicated by Gandy (2014), the invisibility of infrastructure attests to its modernity. The underground complex is, once again, the feature enabling the Municipality to successfully launch the construction of a new town. The engineering project is basically in line with Klingmann when she writes: “whereas modern architecture was evaluated by its ability to increase production efficiency and early postmodern architecture by its aspiration to convey symbolic value, current architecture must be assessed by its economic potential to raise the perceived value of its beneficiary, be it a single client, a corporation, or a city” (2007, 8). 162

X Connections, One Levelling: Between the Visible and Invisible

Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) have explained how infrastructure networks have always been “opaque”: “they have undergone important historical changes in their visual role and their material importance in the cityscape” (id., p. 121). The two authors focus in particular on the role of water and the infrastructure needed to transport it. They studied “the dialectics between the economic/functional role of urban networks on the one hand, and their aesthetic/ideological and cultural position and representation on the other” (id., p. 122). They also observed how water supply infrastructures initially played a “commodification” role before becoming “urban fetishes” during the early stages of modernity (i.e., bearers of a notion of progress), only to decline and finally end up as simple engineering devices. We could, with great caution, theorise that underground transport networks may evolve in a similar manner. Considered thus, Tongzhou and its completely invisible road tunnels and parking areas – independent from what is above ground – are emblematic of the evolution of urban projects that conceal the infrastructure required for it to function, making it de facto invisible. The situation in Zhengdong is different: the underground project is part of an integrated plan to try and create a powerful relationship between the parts above and below the new town.13 In this case, the underground is neither invisible nor hidden, but is instead an integral part of the urban concept proposed by the project. The Zhengdong masterplan by the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa follows a clearly metabolist design with references to Chinese culture (Xue, Wang and Tsai, 2013, p. 226). It envisages a polycentric space with hubs connected by several aboveground roads. The underground areas of the hubs in Zhengdong are connected on several levels by a capillary network of infrastructures designed to boost the efficiency of urban transportation. These connections are located on two or three underground levels, depending on their position. They host a variety of services: public and private parking areas, storage facilities, entertainment facilities, subway and pedestrian paths (seen in the CBD ).14 Total investment in the development of these underground spaces runs up to 91.9 billion R MB (Li, 2010d, p. 9). These areas will be developed in phases, thereby allowing the administration to use the income from Phase One to finance the realization of the following phases.15 Unlike the Tongzhou masterplan, where underground spaces mainly play a service

success of its supporters, but also triggered a series of adaptations and adjustments which, however, left the initial idea intact and discernible thanks to the iconic nature of the hub system. The Zhengdong project proposes a solution that tries to unambiguously outline and predetermine all spaces in the new urban organism, both above and below ground.

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role and appear in representations as typical sections without a horizontal or 3D extension, in Zhengdong the underground project is developed with a precision equal to that of the aboveground project. The urban design of the new eastern district of Zhengzhou is a clear case of what Klingmann (2007) calls “brandscape”: the immediacy and communicability of the design, together with its recognisable name, are the qualities that won Kurokawa the commission and not only decreed the market and political

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In Zhengdong, the attempt to create a strong link between the underground space and the space above is reminiscent of several projects for new urban centres in post-war Europe, especially France, and the urbanisme de dalle solutions used to create “urban surfaces” separating technical networks, vehicular traffic and pedestrian areas.16 In France, avant-garde technical research and the political agenda worked successfully together; technocratic culture in France exploited radical proposals to build new cities based on unusual imagery.17 Large pedestrian areas were designed, for example, in the Le Mirail district of Toulouse or in the civic centres of Évry and Cergy-Pointoise, two of the first villes nouvelles in the Île de France (Vadelorge, 2014; Wakeman, 2016). La Défense is, however, one of the more famous examples of urbanisme de dalle. Here the “urban surface” makes it possible to place not only the parking area and vehicular traffic underground, but also the RER train station running between the business district and the centre of Paris (Lefebvre, 2003). The numerous solutions that were developed, and especially the Défense project, revealed a readiness to consider the complex infrastructuralisation of a city as an element of urban architectural projects: a complex network system branching out under the dalle and creating an underground hub wherever the establishment of a centre was wanted. Gandy (2011) believes that infrastructure is a decisive factor in the urban landscape. Infrastructure elements represent an extremely interesting shift from the modern to the contemporary city; they range from the “technological sublime” of the urbanisme de dalle, to the urban pastoral romanticising objects created for purely functional reasons (id., p. 65). In Zhengdong, we see echoes of the sixties and seventies, but the experience of the Modern and its design research on infrastructure appears to no longer influence the underground design of new urban centres such as Tongzhou, which now focuses only on the invisibility of what is underground (even though it appears to respond to a decentralisation logic incredibly similar to the ones that inspired the birth of many of the French new towns mentioned earlier). The underground city of Zhengdong, with its echoes of the sixties and seventies, is traversed by significant stratification and complexity. The underground city project reflects its over-ground counterpart. It shares its logic and operating principles and, unlike the infrastructure tower in Zhaoqing New Area, does not need fetish aboveground elements to celebrate its modernity, because its underground is an integral part of the city, and the city itself is the aboveground element. As a result, the underground shopping streets inside the SOM tower participate in, and benefit from, the iconic nature of the skyscraper as much as they do from the lakefront or nearby park. They help create a truly three-dimensional urban structure that functions through hubs connected on several levels, exactly (and in many ways paradoxically) like the situation generated by the metabolist principles adopted fifty years ago.

1 The State owns urban land, while right of use is trans- use the term “market in land-use rights” rather than “land ferred through sales contracts (see Wu and Gaubatz, market” (Haila, 2007, p. 5). 2 For Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2013). This is the reason Anne Haila suggests that we “Water, gas, electricity etc. cannot be delivered, priced or

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was promoted to an important position in central government (Xue, Sun and Tsai, 2011, p. 441). The first book of the five written by Li (2010 d) and dedicated to the design and development of the Zhengdong area contains the masterplans that were part of the first competition. He goes on to focus on Kurokawa’s winning competition entry. The second book discusses the design of services – transport, infrastructure and air safety. He does not specify the source of the drawings in the book, but it is reasonable to assume that they are not part of Kurokawa’s masterplan, even if they were later revised and adapted. A feasible theory is that several local and non-local institutes developed detailed plans for green areas, transportation, air safety and the underground (Li, 2010 d). 14 At present, Zhengzhou has two subway lines, but four more are either under construction or being designed. 15 Starting in 2002, the first phase involved the construction of the infrastructure in the CBD area. In 2006, while excavations were underway to create a lake in the CBD area, construction began on the infrastructure in the Longhu Area. In 2015, the infrastructure network in the Longhu Area was started, while excavations for the Dragon Lake started in 2017. 16 The traffic problem was obviously a key point in the preparatory studies for the construction of new towns in Europe after the war. For example, a report by the Buchanan Commission published in 1963, entitled Traffic in Towns, registered a revolutionary increase in the number of motor vehicles and proposed that some areas be closed to traffic (Ministry of Transport (MT ), 1963). The report was very popular in France, where it was translated in 1965, just when the first villes nouvelles were being planned. It became an extremely important reference text and inspired the success of urbanisme de dalle (Lefebvre, 2003). A definition of dalle is as follows: “Le sol artificiel surélevé et destiné aux piétons dans certaines réalisation de l’urbanisme (villes nouvelles, nouveaux quartiers), après la deuxième guerre mondiale. L’idée remonte à Leonardo de Vinci (…) [et] fut reprise au XX e siècle par E. Hénard. (…) Cette vision de Hénard, demeuré à l’état de projet, fut reprise et développé, en particulier par L. Hilberseimer et Le Corbusier (…), mais appliqueé seulement aprés la deuxième guerre mondiale” (Montal, 1988 , p. 191). 17 One of the first and most radical examples of urbanisme de dalle is the well-known project (1961) by Candilis, Dony, Josic and Woods for the Le Mirail district in Toulouse (Joedicke, 1968; Avermaete, 2005; Wakeman, 2016).

III. Spaces

sold without a prior connection of the customer to the respective network. The exchange value of networks stems from the indispensable character of this connection to exist for both the market and the urban to function” (2000, p. 123). 3 The City Planning Act dated 1989 “gives the right of regulating developments to local governments” (Wu, Xu and Yeh, 2006, p. 14). Local governments are rewarded based on the GDP growth they are able to produce; real estate development is still the most successful engine behind GDP growth – although the validity of this data is questioned by many authors. 4 According to the Zhaoqing Statistical Yearbook 2015 (Statistics Bureau of Zhaoqing City, 2015), “purified tap water” is the source of drinking water for 77.04 % of households in the municipality. Amongst the urban population in the municipality, this statistic includes nearly the entire population (96.45 %), while it drops to 62 .19 % for the rural population. 5 Available at: http://english.gz.gov.cn/ gzgoven/ s3711/201110/862992.shtml (Accessed: 16 September 2017 ). 6 Available at: http://www.zqxq.gov.cn/ xwzh/xqyw/201608 /t20160810_395404.html (Accessed: 16 September 2017 ). 7 See Wu, Xu and Yeh (2006 , pp. 74–82) for an overview of the various combinations of institutional and non-institutional actors in the purchase and transformation of urban land. 8 The area north of the railway and the area closest to the river will continue to host the existing villages; likewise, the island of Yangzhou is not affected by the municipal infrastructure project and is considered an independent item. 9 Data and information about the lack of a metropolitan infrastructure project (apart from the line to Foshan) were confirmed by our guide during our visit to the worksite in May 2017. 10 Construction on the tunnel began in 2015. When the authors last visited the site in May 2017, a total of 15 kilometres were already completed. 11 The fullscale model is divided into three canals. The info panel at the site, however, specifies that a visiting provincial party official suggested an additional one be dedicated exclusively to sewage. 12 Available at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2011-01/12 /content_11837913.htm (Accessed: 17 September 2017 ). 13 The project was approved in 2001. In 2003, a parcel of land was purchased at an auction for 2.65 million RMB /mu (660 square metres), a record price for the region (Xue, Wang and Tsai, 2013, p. 229). In 2010, its value had risen ten times since 2003 (ibid.). Thanks to this successful project, the local official responsible for implementing the Zhengdong project

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Fig. 1 Park along the Tonghui River, Tongzhou New District, Tongzhou, Beijing, 2017.

Urban Parks Bianca Maria Rinaldi The acute environmental crisis that has hit China in recent decades has challenged the country’s rapid and uncontrolled urban growth, prompting the elaboration of more sustainable urban development strategies (Sjøstedt, 2013, pp. 10–14; De Meulder and Shannon, 2014; Brombal, 2017 a). While the parameters of urban transformation still remain dimensionally imposing, contemporary scenarios for urban development focus increasingly on environmental concerns (Brombal, 2017 a; Brombal, 2017 b).1 Recent new town projects are compelling symbols of the radically different approach guiding urban growth. By assigning open spaces a crucial role in the overall urban plan, new towns reveal the “green” strategy, which – as defined by central government guidelines on implementing development – will be a prime feature of future urbanisation (Brombal, 2017 a). China’s objective is to develop a virtuous urban model, focused on sustainability and capable of tackling environmental risks (Provoost and Vanstiphout, 2011, pp. 14–17; Sjøstedt, 2013, pp. 40–41).2 To some extent, the elaboration of a new urban development paradigm is driven by China’s intention to actively participate in the international debate on climate change and environmental protection (Brombal, 2017 a, p. 326), two topics that are increasingly characterising contemporary design approaches to urban landscapes. In the last twenty years, international debate on urban growth and landscape architecture was dominated by a sense of urgency to develop design solutions that combine urban development and environmental risk. The latest theoretical formulations highlight the need for a closer alliance between nature and the city, and have given open space design an instrumental role in this process and even proposed very radical forms of integration between open space, vegetation and the urban system.3 As a result, urban landscapes have progressively lost their purely aesthetic role and become instrumental in defining strategies capable of responding to current and future challenges of urbanisation.

projects in new towns, discussing them as the emblems of a nation that aims to play a leading role in responding to environmental concerns on the global stage. By breaking with the past, and by heavily investing in open space design, China intends to promote urbanisation processes based on sustainability and environmental awareness.

III. Spaces

In this theoretical framework, urban landscapes in new towns – either built or under construction – aspire to be the Chinese answer to our environmental emergency. Considered to be devices that help adapt the city to climate change and improve resilience, urban open spaces are designed as alternative solutions to the complex issues of water resources and stormwater management. Parks, gardens and other green areas are embedded deeply into the urban project; they are designed as multifunctional infrastructures capable of amalgamating an aesthetically pleasing public space for leisure activities with the need to improve the quality of the urban environment. This essay examines the innovative features and problems associated with urban landscape

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A Global Urban Sustainability Model A tangible example of the new Chinese high density city concept is the ambitious, experimental Sponge City programme; it is the most recent of several government initiatives which, since early 2000, have been designed to make the country veer towards more sustainable urban development, albeit without achieving appreciable results (Saiu, 2015, pp. 125–126; Romano, 2017, pp. 5–7). Launched in 2015 and regulated by the “Construction Guidelines for Sponge City”, the programme is a result of the Chinese Government’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) in which urban sustainability and environmental protection are considered the basis for any planning process (Brombal, 2017 a, pp. 317–321). The Sponge City programme was intended to alleviate the impact of urbanisation on the natural environment, addressing China’s water shortage in particular. The programme lists a complete range of measures to be implemented for safeguarding water infrastructures and integrating stormwater management in the urban environment; the aim is to mitigate the risk of flooding and ensure water supply by regenerating aquifers (Yu et al., 2015; Li et al., 2016; Liu, Jia and Niu, 2017).4 Initially tested in sixteen existing metropolises, the new guidelines of the Sponge City programme will be applied to all future expansion areas (Li et al., 2017), thereby giving new towns a key role in the conservation of intact ecosystems and the creation of a resilient city model. The Sponge City programme is based on a new joining of urban and natural systems implemented by embedding a continuous network of green areas in the urban organism along with several different landscape-based infrastructure features capable of responding to adverse environmental and climatic conditions. By adopting an ecological approach, Sponge City is able to temporarily retain, treat, cleanse and filter stormwater, thereby facilitating slow runoff and rainwater collection and reuse. The aim is to reinforce existing environmental systems and protect or recreate compromised natural processes (Li et al., 2016, pp. 298–299; Ren et al., 2017; Xia et al., 2017). From the formulation of functions that a Sponge City has to perform, a different concept of urban green emerges, one embodied by a complex catalogue of open space types. Large-scale strategies include designing urban parks, restoring wetlands, creating urban forests and reclaiming and renaturalising river areas. Intermediate-scale projects include creating ponds, retention basins, retaining buffers and filtering trenches. More specific small-scale projects include rain gardens, green roofs and small garden areas around buildings. The overall objective is to ecologically optimise urbanised areas by focusing on increasing soil permeability through the restoration of a dynamic rain­ water retention and drainage system. At the same time, the green open area networks designed for new towns also respond to social needs: land reclamation and water resource management are coupled with the desire for aesthetically enjoyable open spaces for leisure and recreational activities. One source of inspiration for the Sponge City concept is Kongjian Yu, founder of the landscape architecture studio Turenscape based in Beijing. Turenscape’s approach to open space design is shaped by its goal to reconcile rapid and drastic urban trans­ 168

formation processes with the conservation or, more often, the restoration of compromised environmental systems and the protection of natural resources and processes. To solve China’s water crisis, Yu proposes to recreate lost ecological systems and preserve different habitats, integrating them into the urban environment.5 Describing his design method, Yu coined the term “ecological infrastructure”. He uses the concept to define a “structuring landscape network” focusing on “water management… biodiversity conservation … heritage protection and re-creation [and] public space conservation” (2013, p. 21). To illustrate the role of this ecological infrastructure in flood control and rainwater recovery, Yu talks about the idea of a “green sponge” (2016 a, p. 173). He explains how the public open spaces designed by Turenscape are capable of “cleaning and storing urban stormwater that can be integrated with other ecosystem services including the protection of native habitats, aquifer recharge, recreational use and aesthetic experience while at the same time, supporting urban development” (Yu, 2013, p. 42), thereby providing areas for recreation and leisure. The Qunli Stormwater Park is one of the first examples of the “green sponge” concept. It was completed in 2010 by Turenscape in Qunli New Town, a new urban district in the east suburbs of Harbin in northern China.6 The large park, covering an area of roughly 34 hectares, is an environmental regeneration infrastructure, a public space project, and “a means of fostering urban development” (Balmori, 2014, p. 16). Designed to recreate a wetland compromised by urban growth, the Qunli Stormwater Park consists of an outer ring with ponds and mounds enclosing an untouched wetland core left alone so that natural processes can take over. The different functions of the outer ring ensure the development and conservation of the new ecosystem. The ring acts as a buffer zone between the urbanised area and the wetland; it recreates natural dynamics and acts as a filtrating, cleansing system collecting urban water and channelling it to the core wetland. It is also a public park. The pedestrian paths, skywalks, rest areas and viewing platforms in the outer ring allow visitors to enjoy the various areas of the park and view the evolution of the new wetland and its seasonal dynamics. The Qunli Stormwater Park is a form of environmental compensation for the impact that intensive urbanisation has had on the delicate original ecosystem of the wetlands. However, one of the objectives of the urban park project is to rehabilitate and promote recent urban development. The many ecological benefits provided by the Qunli Stormwater Park help to build an image of the Qunli New Town as a new paradigm of informed urban development.

and the ecological programme. This approach has been used in the Zhaoqing New Area project located east of the old city of Zhaoqing in the Pearl River Delta. The new urban expansion is inspired – and heavily influenced – by the unique natural features of the site, characterised by a complex morphology and by numerous rivers (Fig. 1) running

III. Spaces

Zhaoqing New Area, Zhengdong New District and Tongzhou New Town: The Ecological Approach to Urban Parks Whereas a natural landscape was recreated in Qunli New Town after urban development had destroyed the original environment, all the more recent new town projects are based on integrated planning, combining the urban system with the landscape

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Fig. 2 Daily life in a park of Tongzhou New District, Tongzhou, Beijing, 2017.

through the woodland areas and extensive agricultural landscape. The 2012 masterplan proposed to introduce large, radial systems of continuous green spaces and a network of rivers and ponds within the urban system. The resulting linear structure of open spaces is designed to be an extension of the natural and rural landscape in the new urban areas: great clumps of trees, upgraded agricultural land, recreational and sports areas, and parks and other public spaces (Fig. 2) are inserted between the buildings.7 The green area system thus intended to act as “connective tissue” for the new city; the construction of which was inspired by renewed care for the environment and sustainability based on an approach very similar to the theories of Landscape Urbanism. While the objective of Zhaoqing New Town is to be a new model of sustainable urbanisation, the ecological approach to the design of public parks in new towns is apparent in the radically reviewed design of the open spaces around Dragon Lake in Zhengdong. Originally designed by the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa and approved in 2001, the Zhengdong masterplan is based on an imposing system of waterways – the backbone of the new urban expansion. Fed from the overexploited Yellow River and other nearby rivers and streams, the water structure includes a meandering canal (the north-south canal running between the two new Central Business Districts; the New City CBD to the south and the New Sub CBD to the north); two round, artificial reservoirs in the heart of the business districts; and Dragon Lake, a big artificial lake with irregular shores where the dense residential area has been built. Kurokawa’s water system was a purely aesthetical and iconic gesture; its formal monumentality and symbolism reflected the grandiose ambitions of the central government for the new urbanisation of Zhengdong, which was to become the financial capital of central China and an extremely important hub for the whole country (Xue, Wang and Tsai, 2013, pp. 223–232). The role of water in the urban design of Zhengdong proposed by Kurokawa was vehemently criticised for its indifference to the local natural environment and its disregard for the limited water resources of the metropolis and, more generally, China (Xue, Wang and Tsai, 2013, pp. 226–228; Wu, 2015 a, pp. 95–96). Subsequent projects for the Dragon Lake area transformed the originally planned water system into an ecologically significant infrastructure, focusing on improving the water situation and environmental quality of the new metropolis.8 The design strategy adopted for Dragon Lake and adjacent areas involved redesigning the shores of the artificial lake and inserting a continuous system of green spaces into the built areas. It also introduced an ecological development ring as a transition element between the urbanised area and the lake. Thanks to a series of wetlands inserted into the ring, treated water flows into Dragon Lake while a forest area of roughly 130 hectares, called Forest Park, was created on the west banks of the artificial basin. Forest Park was built along the old riverbed of the Yellow River in an area crossed by three of the annular infrastructures serving the new town; the park is a cultural, recre­ ational and ecological destination that adapts to, and improves, existing conditions (Tang and Chen, 2013). The dense vegetation in the park plays the same ecosystemic role as urban forests and helps to reduce possible flooding.9 The new morphology of 172

Fig. 3 Park along the Grand Canal, Tongzhou New District, Tongzhou, Beijing, 2017.

gentle mounds in Forest Park is superimposed on the road infrastructure network, crossing the latter in several points and creating a link between the park and Dragon Lake. By doing so, and despite the fragmentation created by the existing infrastructure system, the park appears as an uninterrupted and dynamic landscape. It acts as a continuous ecological corridor facilitating the movement of animals in different areas of the park, even as far as the artificial basin. To emphasise its role as an urban park, gardens, orchards, meadows and areas for active and passive recreation have been interleaved in the woodland (Tang and Chen, 2013). The urban parks around Dragon Lake exploit the compositional possibilities provided by the stormwater management, recovery and treatment measures that inform open space design in the dense metro­ polis. On the contrary, many of the smaller green areas in the new residential neighbourhoods of Zhengdong continue to reflect a conventional compositional strategy with an outdated formalism. Their design prioritises a cosmetic approach, thereby

zhou New Town, currently being built east of Beijing, aims at applying the Sponge City concept to the entire urban organism by inserting a designed, diffuse system of green open spaces into the urban fabric.

III. Spaces

manifesting an indifference to contemporary research on open space design that increasingly focuses on integrating ecological measures into urban landscape projects.10 In Zhengdong, environmental mitigation measures have been applied in a site-specific manner to an urban project which, although variations have been made over the years, is finished and almost completely implemented. On the contrary, the plan for Tong-

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The guidelines provided by the Beijing Municipality for the redesign of Tongzhou emphasise the need to establish a hierarchy of open spaces within the urban structure, each different in size, performance and role (Beijing People’s Municipal Government, 2016 a). The programme proposes a “low-impact development and construction mode” at the local scale as well as the implementation of measures to boost soil permeability, thereby facilitating the diffuse drainage of rainwater and surface runoff. Extensive, continuous green areas will, on the urban scale, help to recreate ecological networks along rivers and main streams, while a large, continuous ring of wetlands and woodlands with recreation areas will help to control flood waters and safeguard natural processes. (Fig. 3) The public space projects built along the Tonghui River exemplify this approach; they merge areas for recreation with a system of revegetated riverbanks that can be submerged during flooding. On a broader scale, the proposed projects in rural areas outside the new urban development focus on improving the quality of the soil and restoring a water network contaminated by agricultural use (Beijing People’s Municipal Government, 2016 a, p. 18, pp. 29–31). The plan drafted by the Beijing Municipality thus proposes a system of green areas within the urban structure, facilitating the transition between the built and the still highly rural environment around it. Beyond the Rhetoric of the Green The introduction of measures to improve the environmental quality of new urban developments, and translating them into open space design, is an attractive propaganda opportunity for the Chinese central government. The role entrusted to Tongzhou’s construction is that of a manifesto of the efficiency of the government and its ability to use targeted urban policies to respond to environmental challenges. The Sponge City programme was drafted shortly before the New Urban Agenda (2016), adopted by the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development held in Quito in 2016 and implemented by UN Habitat. The guidelines of the New Urban Agenda prescribe that cities become more “ecologically sustainable” by adopting “green and water networks as the basics for the urban plan. (…) This network should underpin every urban plan, combining ecology, flood prevention, water retention with public space and leisure” (Provoost, 2016). As one of Beijing’s key satellite cities and the future seat of municipal government offices, Tongzhou was chosen to be part of the capital’s complex decentralisation project. It quickly became renowned for its focus on environmental issues and, in particular, for the generous system of green areas within the urban system. The design strategies for the Tongzhou open space system are based on the careful application of all measures defined in the Sponge City programme; they are, therefore, in line with the suggestions proposed by UN Habitat for a more sustainable urban development. Indeed, China has never failed to respond to programmatic documents establishing global sustainable development policies; it was the first country to have adopted Agenda 21, integrating its guiding principles into the country’s development strategies as far back as 1994 (Romano, 2017, p. 56). Nevertheless, although the Beijing Masterplan 2004–2020 envisages the decentralisation of the capital through the development of several new towns (and therefore also of Tongzhou) and emphasises “green, low-carbon development, and sustainabili174

ty” (Cartier, 2016, p. 197), the ambitions of the Chinese capital to become a polycentric regional metropolis clash with the actual conservation of natural resources and respect for local ecosystems (Cartier, 2016, p. 182–183). The project for the Xiongan New Area – a new town designed to accommodate 2.5 million inhabitants to be built roughly 100 kilometres south-west of Beijing – threatens to further destroy the already extremely damaged Baiyangdian Wetlands, one of northern China’s major water resources and one of the few wetlands that still exists in a region with very little water. Despite reassurances by the central government regarding the conservation of the original fragile ecosystem and its biodiversity and the alleged role of the construction of the new town in improving water quality in the Baiyangdian Wetlands, the foreseen gigantic urban expansion could impoverish the aquifer supplying the wetlands (Chen, 2016; Yu, 2016 b; Phillips, 2017 b). In a country like China with its incessant, pharaonic transformations, the hyper-exploitation of natural resources and progressive destruction of ecosystems continues to weigh on urbanisation processes. One thing still remains to be proved: that the effective application of the new ecological paradigm, deeply rooted in the key role of open space design will govern urban development projects.

III. Spaces

1 See the in-depth analysis of the National New-Type are: Qianan (Hebei Province), Baicheng (Jilin Province), Urbanization Plan (2014–2020) in Brombal, 2017 a. Zhenjiang (Jiangsu Province), Jiaxing (Zhejiang Province), 2 The importance of environmental sustainability in re- Chizhou (Anhui Province), Xiamen (Fujian Province), cent urban development projects is revealed by the so- Pingxiang (Jiangxi Province), Jinan (Shandong Province), called “eco-cities” that are flourishing in different parts Hebi (Henan Province), Wuhan (Hubei Province), Changde of the country: new settlements characterised by a (Hunan Province), Nanning (Guangxi Province), Chongunique – real or desired – urban quality, dictated by the qing, Suining (Sichuan Province), Guian New District (Guiability of the project to tackle a complex list of ecological yang and Anshun City, Guizhou Province) and Xixian New and environmental issues (Williams, 2017, p. 15). Regard- District (Xi’an and Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province). 5 Reing eco-cities in China, see also: Fook and Gang, 2010; garding Kongjian Yu’s and Turenscape’s design strategy, Keeton, 2011, pp. 45–118; Shao, 2015, pp. 331–336. 3 In see Saunders, 2012. 6 Regarding Qunli Stormwater Park, addition to landscape urbanism, ecological urbanism see: Yu, 2013, pp. 42–46; Yu et al., 2015. 7 See the conand urban agriculture, water-based urbanism is one of tribution by Fiandanese, Ramondetti and Safina in this the theories behind this new city concept. It proposes book. 8 See, for example, the design proposals by the an urban form based on water and rainwater manage- SWA Group (unimplemented) and ASPECT Studio. 9 Rement measures and the reconstruction of ecological cor- garding the ecosystem services of urban forests, see: ridors. See for example: Feyen, Shannon and Neville, Breuste, Haase and Elmqvist, 2013; Edwards and Richards, 2008; Shannon et al., 2008; Shannon and De Meulder, 2017, pp. 63–64 . 10 Regarding the design qualities of 2013. See also other recent theoretical positions that fo- urban landscapes in the residential districts of Zhengcus on an ecological approach to urban design practices, dong, see the discussion on open spaces in the “Zhongyi – for example Mugerauer and Liao, 2012; Reed and Lis- Arkadia” district in Zhu and Feng-yu, 2011. ter, 2014 . 4 The sixteen metropolises selected in 2015

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Mapping New Towns Michele Bonino, Francesca Governa, Maria Paola Repellino, Angelo Sampieri

Scale

10 km

2 km

0,1 km

Where Are the New Towns?

The new towns in the metropolitan regions of the Pearl River Delta, Zhongyuan and Jing-Jin-Ji are scattered across a vast, heavily populated area. In Guangdong, they are part of a super-fast urbanisation process that has already saturated every available space. (Fig. 1) Instead, starting from the main hub of Zhengzhou, in the Central Plain regions, they stretch along the Yellow River, filling the gaps between key infrastructures and coagulating around stations and airports. (Fig. 2) The new towns in Beijing extend towards the sea: they cross through Tianjin and Tangshan and continue towards the coast, redefining boundaries and distances. (Fig. 3)

Fig. 1 Pearl River Delta city region.

Fig. 2 Zhongyuan urban agglomeration.

Fig. 3 Jing-Jin-Ji city region.

What Kind of Space Do New Towns Occupy?

In Zhaoqing, Zhengzhou and Tongzhou, new towns wriggle through as best they can. Where buildable land is still available, they occupy it to the fullest. Where there is no space, they demolish and rebuild. The new town in Zhaoqing is eliminating what remains of the agricultural land between Dinghu Mountain and the plain crossed by the Xi Jiang River. (Fig. 4) Between Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, a new town stretches along the 100 kilometres separating the two existing cities; in this vast plain dotted with old villages, it designs a new urban layout made up of well-connected hubs and infrastructures. (Fig. 5) Since there are no empty spaces in Tongzhou, a new town has been built by replacing parts of the old city. (Fig. 6)

Fig. 4 Urbanisation along the Xi Jiang River between Zhaoqing and Foshan.

Fig. 5 Urbanisation between Zhengzhou and Kaifeng.

Fig. 6 Urban expansion in the east of Beijing.

How Are New Towns Built?

New towns impose new morphologies, new hierarchies and new operating principles. In Zhaoqing, a new infrastructure design based on wide streets, waterways and parks radically eliminates the old agricultural layout made up of canals, scattered villages and a series of fields and fishponds. (Fig. 7) In Kaifeng, the land and its relationships are redesigned by the orthogonal road network. (Fig. 8) In Tongzhou, the new monumental buildings, the CBD and the waterfront are the main features of a new town rising between the skeletons and ruins of the old city now being rapidly replaced. (Fig. 9)

Fig. 7 Settlement under construction in the central part of Zhaoqing New Area.

Fig. 8 Settlement under construction in the western part of Kaifeng.

Fig. 9 Settlement under construction around the intersection between the Grand Canal and the Tonghui River.

IV. Openings

When new towns are considered from the point of view of their relationship with the whole urbanisation process of contemporary China, they appear more interesting than when they are viewed from within their boundaries. This is not due to any original traits they may have when compared to the space around them, but rather to the way in which their contradictory assertion pries open a world, and with it the language to describe it. Considered thus, yes, new towns are new. They oblige us to radically rethink how to interpret and make the city.

The City Is Available. Chinese New Towns as a Backup Space Angelo Sampieri This chapter will discuss some of the characteristic features of new towns compared to the much broader issue of the transformation of contemporary urban China. Do new towns have specific characteristics? Is it possible to pinpoint recurrent features or general traits, for example, the rationale behind design choices as well as settlement principles and logic? This chapter argues that regularity is not created by morphological principles or the repetition of spatial structures, much less by the search for symbolic spatial strategies, as interpreted in relation to the production of the transnational architecture of the first decade of the twenty-first century (Ren, 2011, p. 171). The latter trend mushroomed in the second decade when new towns were branded as eco, hitech or science cities, once again in search of symbols for a local and global market (Williams, 2017, p. 20). To understand the system governing Chinese new towns and their relationship with the space around them, this chapter will not focus on issues such as form, organisation, functioning and symbolic traits, because an interpretation based on these issues all too quickly leads to a traditional urban concept. Chinese new towns are different to the city as we have known it so far; they are different to a space that is important in terms of population rebalancing, that represents a settled society, that builds densities and is the end product of a specific design culture. In the first part of this chapter, we will argue that Chinese new towns are small as far as cities go, at least looking at the three significant but not representative places taken into consideration.1 However, these new towns reveal themselves to be rather interesting spaces if we avoid interpretations that either link them to cities (thus exposing them to ruthless criticism), or consider them to be afflicted in an even worse manner by the same dysfunctional dystopias of urban expansion Mumford noted almost one hundred years ago. The second part of the chapter studies the way in which these bordered spaces are scattered throughout the larger urbanised area in China, but also the features of their infrastructuring and as yet undecided development programmes. A study based on these few distinctive traits leaves them open to interpretations that not only subvert many of the more common criticisms, but also paves the way for an unexpressed potential. Ultimately, most new towns are empty spaces. Big and small backup spaces ready to be inhabited. Based on this simple fact, we may perhaps be able to build a discourse and project around this ambiguous form of urbanisation and use it to challenge many other discourses and projects regarding cities elsewhere. Just Small Stuff New towns are just some of the many spaces that are changing the face of urban China. A drop in the ocean compared to the incredible urbanisation process that has swept across the country in the last few decades. A process that has reshaped the urban boom of the nineties (Ren, 2013, p. 25) into increasingly well ordered from below composi204

tions (Ma and Lin, 1993; Lin, 2007 and 2011), abandoning Special Economic Zones and open cities and pulverising the new urban space into a sea of development zones, new districts, new areas and new towns, brandished like weapons in the competition between old cities (Wu, 2015 a). Even without encroaching on the countryside, and thus maintaining a traditional division between city and countryside which in contemporary China has become completely non-spatial, there’s so much more than these big and small, well-defined spaces and infrastructures.2 So, what exactly are new towns, this “stardust” of projects variously organised in confined spaces? How important are they? Ultimately, how important are one hundred, two hundred, four hundred new towns in a country where one billion people will soon live in urban areas? 3 How important are they compared to the many other forms of expansion either stretching out from urban centres along infrastructure routes towards new train stations and airports, or grouped around main hubs and satellite cities hooked onto neighbouring cities; forms that densify and saturate the central and peripheral fabric of existing cities? They are a drop in the ocean in terms of population, surfaces, volumes, investments, etc. Tongzhou New Town covers an area of 155 square kilometres; plans specify that over one million new inhabitants are envisaged to take up residence before 2020.4 In the meantime, buildings are demolished and rebuilt; in fact, the new town represents a large slice of Beijing’s real estate market, in particular its residential real estate market (Zhou, 2012). Although these figures are undoubtedly impressive, the new buildings are part of an urban continuum spilling over the borders of the area envisaged in the plan as well as over district and municipal boundaries until they flow into a sea of much more important figures: 110 million inhabitants in the Jing-Jin-Ji Metropolitan Region covering a 200,000-square-kilometre inhabited area of land. What does Tongzhou represent in the middle of this built-up area that continues to grow and increase in size? A drop in the ocean. Similar to Zhaoqing New Area: 115 square kilometres inhabited by 600,000 people drowning in a conurbation – the Pearl River Delta – with figures far greater than the region stretching from Beijing to the sea. The new town is currently under construction. In the meantime, the old town and smaller neighbouring districts outside its boundary expand as far as they can and occupy all available flat space.5 Zhengdong covers an area of 150 square kilometres and has 1.5 million inhabitants, an important slice of the population of Zhengzhou. Here, much of the new town is almost complete and people are moving in. But that’s not all. Zhengbian extends and breaks it down into a composite city (Wu, 2015 a, p. 96) or a galaxy (the term used by Isozaki, 2012, p. 170) stretching for almost 100 kilometres eastwards to Kaifeng (40,000 square kilometres), a space where almost five million people have to be relocated.

However, it’s not just a question of numbers (and rough numbers at that), since they basically refer to forecasts that further complicate already imprecise censuses (Chan, 2010 a; Ren, 2013; Fang and Yu, 2016). In addition, the design of new towns is also

IV. Openings

Once again, this space pales compared to the much bigger conurbation of Zhongyuan (nearly fifty million inhabitants) compared to which Zhengbian will be just a sort of rarefied core.6 Again I ask: ultimately, what role does the well-organised perimeter of Zhengdong play within this hypertrophic external space?

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insignificant, i.e., not one of them uses a contemporary Chinese city model, nor do they exemplify any specific prevailing design culture. The new towns under construction are only a few of the transformation scenarios from amongst the endless other scenarios currently present in China where – here as elsewhere – tests are being run on the many ideas influencing the supply and demand of space (cfr. Zhu, 2009). After all, “Chinese cities are deeply embedded in transnational flows of capital, information, and expertise, and they will be continually shaped by these forces” (Ren, 2013, p. 115). Conservation and destruction co-exist in contemporary China; people love metropolises and the countryside; the smooth, pristine and well-regulated spaces of new suburban neighbourhoods, and the old spaces in consolidated cities; they celebrate living both in villages and towers, in hutong, danwei and xiaoqu.7 Furthermore, new towns are all different, so much so that it’s difficult for one new town to be a model for another. In each instance, what is more important is the search for new imagery, picked freely from here and there (Bosker, 2013). Fate is more important than choice. The less alike new towns are, the more they are competitive and successful. “Difference sells. When it comes down to it these places are more of a marketing tactic than any kind of social statement” (Sheppard, 2015, p. 155). Increased variety means that each one will receive more attention. Hence, new towns are not exemplary places that materially represent a city concept, much less are they a model of a settled society unlike, for example, the new towns built during the construction of modern cities in the West.8 Chinese new towns are therefore insignificant in terms of design, not because their spaces are un­ interesting or badly built, but because they do not exemplify anything, nor do they create any advanced urban project, unless one believes that advancement lies in technological innovation or ecological performance.9 In Tongzhou, the new town adapts to, and sometimes replaces, a rather large part of the existing city. Basically, however, nothing disrupts the current layout of big blocks nestling between mobility infrastructure, rivers and the Grand Canal. Although these dense blocks are mostly towers, their interiors vary enormously. The built space is surrounded by a complex pattern of public open spaces, roads, gardens and numerous parks along the waterways; every lake or river has its own waterfront. Unless the 2016 competition for the new town takes us all by surprise (the results have not yet been made public), the city under construction will be made up of urban blocks which will stop when they reach the more important buildings and green areas: the CBD , the new Beijing Municipality, parks and a few pre-existing buildings, including a hutong which is to be preserved. A new town? Perhaps. Some of its parts may possibly be new, for example, the ones built according to a plan that engulfs and reorganises what it finds, that respects nature and history and sometimes even turns them into heritage. But not in Zhaoqing. Here everything is new. The sprawling agricultural land where the new town is to be built has already been cleared to make way for new infrastructure: three main systems which, at least on paper, merge and are superimposed. They recall the archetypical town of Milton Keynes and its polyfocal grid influenced by context, morphology and function (Walker, 1982): the waterways create a jagged, open shape before flowing into the Xi Jiang River while roads and railways, i.e., mobility infrastructure, carve out regular blocks in a rather non-hierarchical grid that bends with 206

the river (despite a certain emphasis on the central axis). Finally, the system of natural open spaces breaths life into the city-park and acts as its support.10 In Zhengdong, the new town isn’t a park, it’s a machine. It’s the homage to Kikutake’s Marine City (1958) that Kurokawa did not pay when he designed the Yamagata Hawaii Dreamland resort (1966), a little more than a “miniaturist caricature” of the model (Banham, 1976), much less the Hishimo New Town project he designed that same year, or the Fujisawa New Town produced a year later (Xue, Sun and Tsai, 2011; Xue, Wang and Tsai, 2013; Wakeman, 2016, p. 266). These machines are also organised in clusters, islands which, when grouped together, create archipelagos. Zhengdong is the new town which, fifty years later, pays homage to the old metabolist maestro; it is reminiscent not only of the Japanese matrix, but also of several local approaches, for example an alleged socialist-style urban planning tradition made up of elementary compositions of separate units, or cells (Liang, 2014). What the project says about the present is not important; what’s important is that it functions. A few years later this “good” functioning was implemented in Zhengbian by freely exploiting other traditional models, for example, the entire heritage of linear cities developed in the West: first the Leonidov and Soria y Mata projects and then Hilberseimer’s New Regional Pattern (1949) and Malcomson’s Linear Metropolis (1956). By stripping the already abstract patterns of the original projects as much as possible, the new Chinese linear city project is reduced to a skeleton with “flesh on its bones” only in separate locations within areas that prevent interaction between the parts. A new town? A new town project? Or the minimum amount of infrastructure needed to organise a space that continues to dilate, dissolve and destroy all ties with old urban configurations? The new town is a park, a machine, an organism in the form of an archipelago or a galaxy; it is an entire region. All the many projects underway are very different. Num-

opers and those of general and specialised marketers (Fan, 2015). However, we are all too aware that these repeatedly presented layouts will be radically revamped by programmes and investments. After all, we’ve been told time and again that urban planning in contemporary China “is instrumental in promoting developments rather than in regulating urban constructions” (Liang, 2014, p. 41).11 The results of the Tongzhou competition are shrouded in mist; some renders show the towers as the most muscular landmarks in the city, in others they dissolve into parks. The plans for Zhaoqing are based on some (a few) invariants immersed in a fluid space capable of creating an

IV. Openings

bers vary, as do the design cultures that inspired them – so much so that it’s difficult to consider new towns as an ensemble. As an ensemble they are about to represent numbers that make a difference and establish themselves as projects representative of their age. But there’s something else that makes new towns a “drop in the ocean”, better still, that makes this kind of urbanisation an ambiguous, insubstantial phenomenon with little inertia: the continuous changes made to their plans. Today new towns are under construction, i.e., they are a space that is developing. However, this space cannot be considered as final. Likewise their continuously changing plans (Wu, 2015 a, pp. 192–196). Apart from a few general settlement principles, a few measurements, and a few boundaries, who really knows how new towns will develop? Public and private urban planning exhibition halls illustrate the layouts, as do the brochures of devel-

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atmosphere rather than a system of rules. The original plans drafted for Zhengdong and Zhengbian were extremely detailed, millimetrically defining forms and spatial measurements. However, these plans were radically altered when the buildings were materially constructed. So what sort of spaces will be created by these new towns under construction? Clarification isn’t provided by the constant flow of plans and projects. Like a game of mirrors, this flow multiplies and blurs the images, so much so that, until they are materially complete, these new towns basically remain a mystery, a prophecy. What Sort of Space Is It? Contemporary Chinese new towns represent a small space of transformation compared to the size of the cities under construction. They are endless, heterogeneous projects, ill-equipped to convey a precise idea of the city; the space they create basically remains formless until it materialises. It’s difficult to say what exactly is this small space, without a project or form; it certainly doesn’t correspond to anything we have so far called a city, even when it was a new town. The forms regarding new towns have always been important. They have always been not only a frontier compared to the cultures of urban projects, but also an attempt to produce a crystal-clear spatialisation of society. In addition, new towns have always strived to achieve a specific form, in other words specific projects to be completed within a set timescale (Secchi, 2005, pp. 133–147). Given the above, if we wished to define contemporary Chinese new towns and establish what sort of city they are, the first thing we could say is that they are not cities, at least not compared to the cities we have so far known and described. However, the issue here is not whether or not Chinese new towns are cities, and much less about which past ideas and forms of cities they retain. No, the issue here is to interpret these strange spaces we call new towns and establish why and if they are important. The way to achieve this goal is not to free these new towns from a trait ascribable to a city, but to free them from the explosive urbanisation process that in China involves building cities everywhere. Within this process, new towns create something different. A space primarily marked by three features: their perimeter, their infrastructure and the undecidability of their programme. To begin with, new towns are a delimited space. This delimitation can vary either during the construction process, or depending on investments and demand; in general, new towns tend to increase in size (Fang and Yu, 2016, p. 37). Within the big, complex space transforming contemporary urban China, the space occupied by new towns has been carefully designed, at least on paper. However, as we are all too aware, reality is very different; the perimeter can become almost imperceptible or completely invisible each time it falls within the existing city or along one of its edges. Take, for example, Tongzhou or Zhengzhou. However, when the plan, surface area and programme of the new town is approved, we know more or less where this boundary lies. Beyond it, the scenario changes, so much so that what is outside the boundary usually has to review its figures and “adjust” its plans (Fang and Yu, 2016, pp. 36–37). The size of the space inside the boundary (usually rather large) is not in question (Cao, 2015, p. 105). It’s useless to point out to what extent recent literature has insisted on the fact that new towns are 208

too big. It’s also true that in many cases the figures were wrong, that some new towns are empty, that others – such as Zhengdong – have a hard time attracting inhabitants and that still others are small inhabited pieces of land scattered within an almost deserted perimeter, one which could remain deserted for quite some time (Zhaoqing or Zhengbian).12 After all, “questions like how much is the reasonable size; how many people the new district will be accommodating, what will be the economic output, and whether there is appropriate resources and environment carrying capacity, etc., were either never asked or ignored because the government doesn’t have sufficient knowledge to care” (Fang and Yu, 2016, pp. 41–42). Although we don’t know when and how the new towns will be filled, what we can do is believe it is more than likely that they will be filled.13 After all, how else could the following statement be reiterated: “urban housing in China has not yet reached the absolute oversupply. With natural population growth in the urban areas and migration in the hundreds of millions from the country­ side, more housing is needed” (Cao, 2015, p. 106). These forecasts mitigate the strong criticism of speculation and land consumption and prompt debate regarding the need to leave space, even ample space, inside these perimeters, because the latter not only act as a constraint, but also as a limitation around a free field; urbanisation processes and dynamics change beyond this limit. Based on this logic, it shouldn’t surprise us when new towns are left unfinished or half empty. Filling them will take time. “China’s ghost cities are a temporary phenomenon” (Shepard, p. 200). “Projects are vacant but will be occupied in the future. The speed of occupation depends on the speed of local job creation and economic growth. (…) The two decades to sort out oversupply in Beihai City are a reminder of the patience needed” (Cao, 2015, p. 106). Who knows how long this initial phase will last, but during this time new towns will have to focus exclusively on investment, infrastructure and inhabitants. The infrastructure of delimited space is important. It includes mobility infrastructure (railways, roads and bridges), energy infrastructure (electricity and gas), drinking water supply, the sewage system, the drainage and flood control system, communication infrastructure (telephone and television), waste collection and disposal, nature infrastructure (parks, gardens, the planting of avenues) and obviously basic public utilities (Dept. of General Finance, Ministry of Construction, 2002). The public-private agreements used in reform era China to build these infrastructures and systems basically reproduce the well-known dynamics of the “marketisation of urban infrastructure”

the inevitably high costs and consumption of space and only afterwards on its design. Instead, new towns are an extremely interesting topic with which to study the quality of current investments, their physical characteristics and their duration. The delimited space of new towns is, after all, a space primarily marked by infrastructures which gradually increase in number and work to attract investments: first the railways or the

IV. Openings

(Wang et al., 2011). Literature on this issue is chiefly concentrated on identifying the problems caused by the relations between the central government, municipalities, private financiers, banks, the taxation system and the generation of local debt which is increasing in many areas, primarily in smaller municipalities (Li and Lin, 2011; Tsui, 2011; Li, Song and Chen, 2017). It is much less attentive to the spatial outcome of this infra­ structure-driven development strategy (Wu, Li and Lin, 2016, p. 55). The focus is on

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subway and its stations, then roads and supply lines, new waterways, new landscape infrastructures, first public services, etc. This simple, albeit not linear, process changes according to the context and is governed not only by endless variants (Wang and Dubbeling, 2013, pp. 198–199), but also by plans which, as mentioned earlier, change continuously. In Zhaoqing, for example, infrastructuring is very clear-cut during this phase: free ground, devoid of everything (agriculture, vegetation, villages), crossed by roads and infrastructure which, starting with the new station, stimulate the land and bring it to life in several scattered areas (the convention centre, schools, the hospital, the stadium, the first residential buildings for the poor and rich alike). In Zhengdong, where the new town has been completed, infrastructuring is still the most incisive feature of the metabolist layout. In Tongzhou, it facilitates the reinvention of the existing city. Finally, the infrastructures being built in Zhengbian are spread across an enormous area, thereby preventing contiguity between the parts. Here, it’s easy to see what remains of the city, of the space we considered to be a city: a huge, disjointed skeleton providing new, extensive availability of spaces that are not, however, interconnected. This situation testifies to the enormous detachment between this project and any myth or modern theory of continuity, permeability and isotropy.14 New towns are a delimited area governed by an infrastructure system generating inhabited spaces rather than relationships between spaces. Having defined the boundaries and framework, the area looks like an empty space ready to be occupied in many different ways, so long as all are compatible. Disconnection between the parts, and the fact they are often located at a distance from one another, helps ensure compatibility; in general, it creates a space full of empty spaces that can change quite freely. The undecidability of a programme and its possible reversal is the third strong feature of a new town, so much so that it resembles a production programme rather than an urban programme. The dynamic surface of new towns claims to change according to demand and opportunity, a little like the landscape theories and landscape urbanism of the late twentieth century (Corner, 1999; Berger, 2006; Waldheim, 2006), which stated that “the urban surface is similar to a dynamic agricultural field, assuming different functions, geometries, distributive arrangements, and appearances as changing circumstance demands” (Wall, 1999, p. 233). The unusual genealogies that were revived in those theories combined Victor Gruen and Ludwig Hilberseimer, the radical utopias of Archigram and Superstudio and the end-of-century programming by OMA , West 8 and FOA . They re-evoked Derrida’s conceptualisations by appealing to people to reason not in terms “of flexibility (…), [but] in terms of scales of undecidability, (…) with the right mixture of rigid structures, supple structures and self-organizing processes” (DeLanda, 1992, p. 153; Berrizbeitia, 2001, p. 124). In many ways, new towns appear to be a belated spatialisation of what was said at that time. The criticism expressed during that era also applies to new towns, especially the increased uncertainty of the programmes, their vague configurations and the fact that the market influenced planning: “uncertainty should not be confused with lack of clarity. (…) In the so-called structure plans, uncertainty is coupled with the difficulty created by the many players in the decision-making process. Objectives remain so gen210

eral and so superficial that no one can be against them. In fact, such planning methods have very little effect on the actual physical development that follows” (Smets, 2002, p. 90). These past concerns and urgings are ill-suited to contemporary China, where the link between programmes and spatial impact appears to have broken down completely (cfr. Wu, 2015 a). In fact, an undecided programme continually produces new and different morphologies. When figures, events and investments change, the relationship between programme and morphology breaks down into thousands of images of a gradually developing city; each image is equally plausible.15 This doesn’t mean that a programme is irrelevant while the physical space of new towns is being built, but simply that it is not measured and does not function in terms of morphological constructions. It simply uses them, when necessary, as verification and as a persuasive expedient. As far as everything else is concerned, the programme focuses exclusively on being consistent with a more general functioning of space and its ability to accommodate as many forms as possible.16 The City Is Available New towns create a rather insubstantial field for several reasons: what happens within new towns is insignificant in comparison to what happens outside their boundaries; the field is very heterogeneous, and new towns are so varied they cannot be part of a New New Towns Movement or a much broader project for contemporary Chinese cities. Furthermore, their forms and representations change constantly while being built. Apart from the few spatial features that make them interesting, nothing is static in new

bian, proximity between the parts is unimportant (the space is huge and rarefied), as are relationships, the morphological layouts of each inhabited district (or better still, all layouts are accepted) and the symbolic size of the city under construction. Instead, it’s important that the city be less symbolic, neutral, and that housing be based on this neutrality. There are, however, features that add a symbolic capital, one which China presumes to assert internationally rather than locally (Ren, 2011; Lin, 2013): the adjectives smart, eco, hi-tech, science or industrially themed, along with towers, water parks, and monumental axes designed by international architects and engineers “in styles from the West, the East, the past and the future” (Shepard, 2015, p. 156). What is important locally is increased comfort, wealth and wellbeing. This is ensured by new, enormous spaces and housing infrastructure. In short, it means creating a huge technical space which will first and foremost solve problems: it will import inhabitants, jobs, institutions and everything that is needed for as long as time dictates. Because undoubtedly it will take time. It is a space that doesn’t aspire to upset the existing equilibrium, generate friction, revamp ways of doing things, or assert a project. At this point, whether or not it will be inhabited, or perhaps be inhabited only partially, is irrelevant. What’s important at this point is the construction – riddled with risks and contradictions – of an inhabitable space.17

IV. Openings

towns: they involve the construction of infrastructure, within a perimeter, governed by a very loose programme. If, on the one hand, the field appears to be insubstantial, its spatial features are interesting because they force us to rethink the city based on just a few traits devoid of symbolic elements, morphological patterns and principles of continuity. Zhengbian is perhaps the place where this is easiest to see. In Zheng­

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The following are just some of the “urban pathologies” produced by the new availability of space (Sorace and Hurst 2016, p. 305): the destruction of ecosystems and consumption of land; environmental and economic unsustainability; accumulation of capital; uncontrolled urban expansion; subjugation of the market or, on the contrary, of the State; the dangers of miscalculation; the threat of the housing bubble; poor quality buildings; bad design ideas; social engineering; standardised lifestyles; the hard functionalism of the new built spaces; and the alienation it generates. In a nutshell, a sea of problems. And a sea of criticisms. But based on a weak argument not corroborated by reliable data, simply because the latter don’t exist. “Without the myth of future waves of rural migrants who will some day by some unspecified means afford new urban housing, what remains is the proliferation of urban forms divorced from urban practices and uses” (Sorace and Hurst, 2016, p. 305). Of course, we don’t know what will happen to new towns without new inhabitants. In the meantime, however, we are more than aware of the fact that rural migrants are anything but a “myth”, that their numbers are as huge as those of new constructions, and that most of them will soon be granted an urban hukou (Liang et al., 2016). Real figures will very probably remain a mystery, one of the many. The history of this incredible urbanisation process is likewise mysterious and incomplete; it is a history tainted by narratives that were (and still are) exceedingly influenced by “the Western environmental canon”, “the mantra small is beautiful”, the maxim reduce, reuse, recycle, and a more general scepticism of growth that eventually stigmatises everything (Ben-Ami, 2010, p. xi; Williams, 2017, p. 49). In fact, the issues that have influenced most of the recent debate about international urban design culture do not really apply to contemporary China: Small Scale Big Change (Lepik, 2010), Design Like if You Give a Damn (Architecture for Humanity, 2006 and 2012), participationism and elementarism in architecture (Elemental, 2012), Informal Stance (Federighi, 2018), and the trick of doing with less by using known codes, rules and simple grammar (Lehnerer, 2009). All this influences and builds sensitivity, as well as a few spaces. But what really counts in the transformations that are currently underway (in terms of numbers and the issues involved) lies elsewhere. How can we narrate this elsewhere without being influenced by moralism, prejudice and impressions? It’s very likely that this is the most important and difficult task we have to tackle. Starting with new towns, we have tried to provide a few interpretations, highlighting some of the features governing the spaces under construction. These basic features neither create a city nor ensure any form of future urbanity, at least as we know it. Instead, the features in question provocatively encourage us to assign the term “city” to a space in which dwelling primarily involves accepting radical uncertainty (which is also conflict, compromise and effort). Although we can disregard this provocation, and criticise everything used to defend other ways of considering the city and the softer, more measured methods used to build it, we cannot ignore that, new town after new town, this space that is available to be inhabited is materialising in the huge urbanised space in China. A huge, disjointed and multiform space in which new towns create a more orderly environment, almost a backup space. A space that sometimes fills up quickly, or on the contrary, struggles to find occupants, leaving most of it empty until such time as it is needed and useful. A backup space avail­ 212

able to be used when necessary. A little like medieval fortresses, where a residual piece of agricultural land was always left unoccupied within the walls so that it could be used during war or famine. This space was considered a surplus space (when it wasn’t needed), but in certain special circumstances it became a crucial feature and played a key role. In many ways, new towns appear to function as a backup space: disseminated, well bordered, and with minimum infrastructure, ready to be occupied in several different ways, when and if needed. Using new towns to emphasise forms of caution and foresight in the choices regarding urbanisation processes is undoubtedly a bit of a stretch. The latter are described everywhere as being violent, unsustainable and subservient to a particularly aggressive market which is anything but well governed. The desire to interpret them as being friendly or helpful is equally exaggerated. Considering them as generous, albeit in many ways equivocal quantities of new, available inhabitable space, is likewise going too far (when stories about forced migration from the countryside to the city narrate tales of uprooting, social engineering and alienation). And yet, we are able to tell the story of new towns because we can observe their spaces under construction: it is the story of a city which, prudently, builds backup spaces and gradually equips them according to the needs that arise. It is a simple story, in many ways traditional and certainly incomplete (like many other stories about contemporary Chinese urbanisation); it does not claim to solve the complexity and contradictions of new towns in a few comprehensive images, e.g., that of new towns as a scattering of backup spaces that can be adapted and used in different ways. A story, and an image, which nevertheless are ambiguously fascinating because they can be used to rediscuss and dispel many contemporary mythographies about the city and its design. First and foremost the mythographies which – in the name of resilient, sustainable transformation processes, the cult of protection and generation of heritage, and in virtue of processes participated and conveyed by many different rationales – have turned the city into an immobile, inert, contracted and closed space. A space that contemplates undecidability neither as a basic element of said transformation nor as an unexpected glitch, unless the way to neutralise it has been planned beforehand. In other words, an inhospitable city. These bloodless mythographies shatter against the ambiguously

1 The three new towns are: Tongzhou, in the Tongzhou district of Beijing; Zhaoqing New Area, 20 kilometres from the city of Zhaoqing in the Pearl River Delta; and Zhengdong, near Zhengzhou in Henan Province. 2 “Urban peri­ pheries of Chinese cities, the areas sandwiched between historical urban cores and the rural hinterland, are mosaics of different social worlds. (…) On the Chinese urban periphery, one can find residential new towns of massive scale, exclusive European-themed villas, migrant villages, brand-new university campuses, military-style manufacturing facilities and workers’ dorms, and oftentimes, agri­

cultural fields in the midst of urban construction as well. Heterogeneity of socio-economic composition, high population density, and dependency on public mass transit characterize the nature and process of urban territorial expansion” (Ren, 2013, p. 104). On these issues, also consider the post-suburbanization processes studied by Fulong Wu in Shanghai and Beijing, and primarily examined regarding the urban sprawl in the West (Feng, Wu and Logan, 2008 , pp. 482–498; Phelps and Wu, 2011); or again, the recent emergence of urban clusters (chengshiqun), the problems regarding their management (Wu,

IV. Openings

generous space of Chinese new towns, and the city once again shows itself for what it has always been: an available space.

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2016 a, pp. 1134 –1151), and the spatial implications of the spatial patterns”. See Safina in this book. 11 Regarding accumulation of capital in extra-urban areas (Shen and this issue, see Repellino in this book. 12 Regarding the Wu, 2017, pp. 761–780). 3 The estimates by Worldome- pathologies of Chinese urbanisation (Sorace and Hurst, ters, taken from surveys performed by the United Nations, 2016), and in particular the housing bubble phenomeDepartment of Economic and Social Affairs, Population non, see the introduction in this book. For a critique of Division (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ the phenomenon, see Shepard (2015); Woodworth and china-population) indicate 838 million “urban” inhabit- Wallace (2017 ). As concerns Zhengdong, although it has ants censused in January 2018 (57.9 % of the population; not yet been stigmatised like other cities, such as Ordos consider that in 2000 a little over half the inhabitants Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia, it has been extensively dewere censused: 459 million, 20.8 %). For at least a decade, scribed in international publications and ads as China’s forecasts strongly emphasised reaching one billion urban Largest Ghost City, available at: http://www.vagabondinhabitants, usually around the year 2030. However, journey.com/zhengzhou-zhengdong-china-largest-ghostmigration trends could significantly bring this date forward city (Accessed: 29 March 2017 ). 13 How to define a rea(McKinsey Global Institute, 2009; Miller, 2012). 4 The sonable size vis-à-vis the number of inhabitants is the Beijing Masterplan (2004–2020) drafted by the Beijing usual problem of censuses that are either not very reliaMunicipal Institute of City & Design envisaged roughly ble or out of date “A key point in such debates is whether 900,000 (Wu, 2015 a, p. 145). The competition launched urban housing as a whole has been oversupplied in the in 2016 increased the number of inhabitants to 1,300,000 absolute sense, i.e. there is more urban housing than (Beijing People’s Municipal Government, 2016 a). See there is urban population. Interviews in China in 2013 to Fiandanese in this book. 5 See Safina in this book. 6 The 2014 revealed that the number of housing units in urban projects are illustrated in the five books entitled Urban China was enough to house all the urban families. HowPlanning and Architectural Design of Zhengdong New ever, there is a lack of authoritative data on how much District in Zhengzhou City (2001–2009) (Li, 2010 a). See housing exists in urban China. The latest release of total Ramondetti in this book. 7 “The danwei is the compound urban housing floor area data by the Ministry of Conin the pre-form era. The xiaqu is the commodity housing struction was in 2006, which indicates that in 2005 total estate in the post-reform era” (Ren, 2013 , p. 88). For a housing floor area in cities and towns was 10.77 billion m2 possible morphological classification of contemporary liv- (MoC , 2006)”. (Cao, 2015, p. 105). 14 As interpreted in ing spaces, see Rowe, Forsyth and Kan, 2016. 8 In actual modern cities in the West and (in many ways in contifact, there are many attempts to build genealogies that nuity) with territories with dispersed settlements, where include the West and the East, past and present. Consider, infrastructuring, in the form of an isotropic network, did for example, the standpoints of the International New not impose prevalent directions, but presumed to connect Town Institute: “We shall therefore try to compare the everything to everything, thus deteriorating the subaltern current batch of New Towns with three periods in the relationship between the parts (on this issue, see: Sievhistory of 20 th-century urban planning and consider the erts, 2003; Secchi, Viganò and Fabian, 2016). 15 On this validity of such a comparison. The first is the pioneer- issue, consider “the holistic approach of multiple scenaring stage of Western urban planning between 1900 and io selection”, promoted by Wang and Dubbeling (2013) 1930; the second is that of the post-war reconstruction and cited by Wu (2015 a, p. 194), in regards to overcomof Europe between 1945 and 1960; and the third is the ing a linear approach to planning: “The complexity of the expansion of Western planning models to the colonial city also requires the planning stages of survey, analyand postcolonial East and South between 1950 and 1970 ” sis and design to be combined rather than to be made (Provoost and Vanstiphout, 2011, p. 23). 9 Like many au- one after the other. In linear planning, the existing and thors, INTI develops classifications aimed at recognising pervasive planning paradigm, surveys and analysis of the specific motives for new towns: “We have classified the planning area usually oversimplify the delicate, cultural cities in terms of the six main motives for the building of and complex reality of the city that eventually leads New Towns in recent decades: Eco-Cities: to achieve the towards cities that all look the same” (Wang and Dubbest environmentally friendly performance; Political Cit- beling, 2013, p. 198). 16 Consider the variety of urban ies: to represent (national or local) government; Enclave settlements in the Zhengbian galaxy: urban communities cities: to offer a retreat from the existing city; Economic organised along infrastructures, clusters of small centres Cities: to attract investment and kick-start the national grouped around a park, or the settlements built in regular economy; High-Tech Cities: to utilize technology as an at- grids of square lots, for example along the west border of traction; Shelter Cities: to house the masses.” (Provoost Kaifeng. 17 A position which is similar in many ways was and Vanstiphout, 2011, pp. 14–17 ). Other associations use expressed by Austin Williams regarding the construction in particular new towns and eco-cities (Fook and Gang, of eco-cities: “whether the Eco-label works, who cares? 2010). A more interesting attempt was made by Austin Eco-city construction might be for purely pragmatic ecoWilliams (2017 ), who tried to circumscribe, by associating nomic reasons but through the process China is making new towns and eco-cities, a new field of research in order and remaking the urban world into a possibility for milto critically examine more widespread forms of urbanisa- lions of poor labouring peasants to be able to provide tion. 10 The Zhaoqing New Area Development and Plan- themselves and future generations with more opportunining Bureau describes the project in a traditional manner ties” (Williams, 2017, p. 190). by using the slogan “one axis, two corridors and three

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Scaling Up and Scaling Out. New Towns and “the Standpoint of an Absence” Francesca Governa “At first glance it is not at all apparent where it is: where the centre of Yizhuang is; where its boundaries lie; or whether it has any morphological elements that might be considered urban as opposed to suburban” (Wu and Phelps, 2011, p. 416). This is a description of the new town of Yizhuang, one of the three new towns envisaged in the Beijing Master Plan (2004–2020) for the polycentric reorganisation of the urban region around the capital. The same disorientation, the same feeling of not even knowing the location of the “object” we are talking about (Where does it begin? Where does it end?) also holds true for the new towns of Tongzhou, Zhengdong and Zhaoqing.1 It’s difficult to even identify new towns, to tell them apart from other expansion and transformation areas next to boundaries on maps which, however, do not differentiate the ground between roads, towers, residential settlements, parks, etc. New towns are material objects, statements, images and masterplans. They are the solution to “urban crises” (Datta and Shaban, 2016), places to attract investment and economic activity as well as accommodate migrant workers; they are the places where the

Perhaps the most appropriate image to describe Chinese new towns “at first glance” is that of a chameleon city/non-city that changes, adapts and camouflages itself within the urbanisation where it is situated. According to Roy (2009), this is the image of the “twenty-first century metropolis” in which “margins become centres; centres become frontiers; regions become cities” (p. 827). This image can perhaps help us include Chinese new towns amongst the “spatial variations” of the city and use them as an observation point from which to question the “variegated geographies” of contemporary urbanisation. Like how “spatial variations in the form of capitalist development represent more than merely contingent ‘noise’ around some global-universal norm” (Zhang and Peck, 2016, p. 53), the same can be said (if not more so) of the “spatial variations” of the urban.3 The point is not to increase the number of recorded variations, but rather to acknowledge variation, multiplicity and contingency as the intrinsic properties of the urban (Brenner, 2016). In 2015, Brenner and Schmidt wrote: “the basic nature of urban realities – long understood under the singular, encompassing rubric of ‘cityness’ – has become more differentiated, polymorphic, variegated and multi-scalar than in previous cycles of capitalist urbanization” (p. 152).

IV. Openings

Chinese “urban dream” materialises (Taylor, 2015) and where national strategies are implemented. They are delimited, planned and ostensibly simple (or in any case simplified) spaces within a developing urban world; spatial and scalar “junctions” onto which city-regions and urban clusters are grafted. They are an “accident”, a negligible background noise in the overall urbanisation processes taking place in contemporary China.2 They are all this, and much more.

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This chapter will examine Chinese new towns from the outside. It will question the role played by the three new towns – Tongzhou, Zhengdong and Zhaoqing – in suburban expansion and the regional redefinition of urban spaces used to organise economic dynamics and the political strategies aimed at enhancing competition, sustaining the effects of agglomeration, alleviating the hyper-concentration of central cities and promoting polycentric urban development. The chapter will first present the characteristics of the suburbanisation of Chinese cities and the emergence of regional urbanisation forms, variously named urban clusters, polycentric urban regions and city-regions. It will then discuss the role played by new towns within these processes and the practical and interpretative difficulties associated with understanding the spatiality delimited and created by new towns in territorial categories.4 Tongzhou, Zhengdong and Zhaoqing are the non-representative but exemplificative places used to identify what McCann (2011) calls “a set of ‘actionable’ ideas” and under­ stand the spatial characteristics of Chinese new towns and the role they play in the always incomplete process of becoming urban of these spaces. Tongzhou, Zhengdong and Zhaoqing are therefore not considered to be a starting point, but a construct, an assemblage of potentiality and temporality of local, translocal, material and immaterial elements and relations (McFarlane, 2011) that overcome the predefined horizons of the city and its transformation.5 This chapter contains many questions and few answers: the questions inspired by Chinese new towns then spread further afield to question the city as an important interpretative category of current dynamics and, in particular, of “spatial ideologies that treat the urban as a pre-given, self-evident formation to be investigated or manipulated” (Brenner and Schmidt, 2014, p. 749). Urban, Suburban and Beyond In a 2016 article, Ananya Roy suggested that “the urban [be interpreted] from the standpoint of absence, absence not as negation or even antonym, but as the undecidable” (p. 822). The absence or undecidable to which Roy refers is the non-urban, i.e., what is outside the urban, “‘the constitutive outside’ of the urban and (…) the always incomplete processes of becoming urban” (ibid, p. 813). Roy’s buzzwords and her argument are chiefly based on observance of the (contested) links between the urban and the rural in India, in particular in the municipalities around the metropolitan region of Kolkata. However, quite apart from the specificities of the site (and the spatial, political and institutional dynamics of urbanisation in India), Roy raises a more general issue, i.e., the fact that this urban/rural distinction still persists even after Neil Brenner and Christian Schmidt (and others) predicted planetary urbanisation in several of their essays. In fact, according to Brenner and Schmidt (2014), “Today, urbanization is a process that affects the whole territory of the world and not only isolated parts of it. The urban represents an increasingly worldwide, if unevenly woven, fabric in which the sociocultural and political-economic relations of capitalism are enmeshed. This situation of planetary urbanization means that even sociospatial arrangements and infrastructural networks that lie well beyond traditional city cores, metropolitan regions, urban peripheries and peri-urban zones have become integral parts of a worldwide urban condition” (p. 751). In line with this thesis: “There is, in short, no longer any outside 216

to the urban world; the non-urban has been largely internalized within an uneven yet planetary process of urbanisation” so that “the urban/rural binarism is an increasingly obfuscatory basis for deciphering the morphologies, contours and dynamics of sociospatial restructuring under early twenty-first century capitalism” (Brenner and Schmid, 2014, p. 751). How do Chinese new towns become part of this urbanisation of everywhere and in everything? Are they ascribable to the absence and undecidable Roy talks about, part of that incessant and forever incomplete process of becoming urban (and understanding the urban)? Or are they a sort of prototype of a global urban future, “planned outposts” of the complete urbanisation of the world? As in India, in China, urban/rural dualism is a political and institutional sophistication created by different procedures, different figures in governance and different land regimes (urban land is owned by the State; rural land is owned collectively). Wu and Li (2018) write: “the city is seen as the more modern industrialised part, under the management of the state, while rural areas have a more self-sufficient and underdeveloped economy” (p. 145). There is a quite clear-cut urban/rural distinction that de facto excludes suburban space, or at least complicates comprehension of suburban space that is not limited to recording juxtaposition and the continuous urban/rural sequence, or to considering suburban space as a space transitioning from a rural to an urban status. Cities that spread out into the surrounding countryside, and the launch of suburbanisation processes, is a relatively recent phenomenon in China. It is linked to the economic reforms of the late seventies and to the role of public policies (and politics) in promoting urban growth as a key tool in the development and opening up of China to the global economy, institutional changes and industrial and infrastructure invest­ ments (Wu, 2015 a; Wu and Shen, 2015; Wu and Li, 2018). In addition, the characteristics of the settlement model of Chinese suburbia differ from the characteristics,

However, apart from the traits of suburbanisation “with Chinese characteristics”, what is important is the role played by new towns in suburban expansion as well as the influence of urban/rural dualism in the diffusion of new towns. Wu and Shen (2015) divide

IV. Openings

albeit in turn diversified, of the suburban expansions of Western countries (Zhou and Logan, 2008).6 On the one hand, these differences are reminiscent of the much greater density of the suburban expansions of Chinese cities and, on the other, of their greater socio-spatial heterogeneity. In fact, suburban spaces in Chinese cities are inhabited by different types of populations: the emerging middle class moving from central cities in search of a better quality of life in outer areas (Zhang, 2010); people shifting from rural to urban areas to find labour opportunities; people living in rural areas “annexed” to the city or “enclosed within” the suburban expansion (Shen and Wu, 2013).7 The presence of so many different kinds of individuals generates enormous heterogeneity in the urban fabric, with a mix of gated communities, villas and multi-storey towers, in turn earmarked for different population types depending chiefly on the density of the built, the services provided and their location. In turn, the latter is influenced by the expansion of mobility infrastructure – roads and subways – and the pervasiveness of the automobile as a private means of transportation.8

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Chinese suburban development into three phases. The first phase, “suburbs as stateinvested industrial space (1949–1978)”, corresponds to the era of satellite towns built around big cities to host state-owned enterprises (especially Beijing and Shanghai). During this phase, suburban space did not actually exist; it was merely a “collection of rural villages outside the formal state system plus some state farms and state-owned enterprises within the formal state system” (Wu and Shen, 2015, p. 305). The second phase, “industrial decentralisation and suburban residential development (1979–2000)” saw the advent of the suburbanisation processes associated with the commodification of land and houses, an increase in the urban population and the physical extension of settlements. During this phase, suburbanisation was passive (Zhou and Ma, 2000), in other words, almost exclusively driven by the strategies implemented by the Central Government to decentralise production and relocate populations by building residential settlements outside central cities. Following Wu and Shen (2015), the third phase, “administrative annexation and the development of new towns (2001 to the present day)”, is the period during which there is the shift from passive suburbanisation to active “market-oriented” suburbanisation. The variously implemented administrative annexation (Ma, 2002, p. 1560 et foll.) is important not only politically and institutionally, but also economically and spatially (Liu, Yin and Ma, 2012). Municipalities increase their power and economic and fiscal options by extending urban boundaries. At the same time, administrative annexation sparks massive urban expansion, validated by a planning system which, at various institutional levels, is nevertheless characterised by an expansionist approach. Wu and Li (2018) write: “Strategic urban plans often propose some ambitious new development by setting up a development zone, creating a new growth corridor, or annexing rural counties into new urban districts so as to open the space of growth, while the urban masterplan is used to prepare the land use of new towns and urban design creates a more specific image of new town. At the city-region level the urban system plans often encourage the development of vast rural areas between two nearby large cities” (p. 158). The third phase of the suburbanisation process is accompanied by the development of transportation infrastructures and is part of the “great urban transformation” (Hsing, 2010) based on “land-centred urbanisation” (Lin, 2007) and intense interregional competition, with a substantial lack of regional coordination. The construction of ports, airports, motorways, industrial parks, residential settlements, etc., lead to a merger between the actions (and interests) of local municipal and provincial government and the actions (and interests) of developers. It ultimately triggers a process which is frequently financially supported and politically legitimised by Central Government (Wu and Li, 2018). It is a “successful” process: the construction of the new town of Zhengdong, which literally means east of Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, led to an uninterrupted increase in land and housing values (Xue, Wang and Tsai, 2013). This success sparked a political fallout: the contribution by the provinces in achieving national growth objectives, specifically an increase in GDP, is one of the indicators the Central Government uses to assess the performance of local governments, with significant consequences on possible career advancement for provincial leaders (Wu, 2016 a; Woodworth and Wallace, 2017).9 218

Tongzhou is a good example of how the era of satellite towns evolved into the era of new towns. Tongzhou, located in the eastern suburban expansion of the capital, is one of the administrative districts of the Beijing Municipality. It is an outer suburban district where production has been located since the fifties, bringing with it an influx of inhabitants (1,428,000 in 2016; Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 2017). According to indications in the Beijing Master Plan (2004–2020), one of the three new towns is to be built in this district in order to organise the polycentric development of the capital, the decentralisation of population, and of “non capital functions” (Feng, Zhou and Wu, 2008; Gu, Wei and Cook, 2015).10 In the Master Plan, Beijing is divided into four areas – “core, development areas, new growth areas, and ecological conservation areas” – summarising the polycentric strategy in the formula “two axes, two belts and multiple centres” (Gu, Wei and Cook, 2015; Wu, 2015 a). The “two axes” correspond to the traditional north/south expansion axis of the capital and the new east/west axis along Chang’an Avenue; the “two belts” correspond to the “western ecological belt” and the “eastern development belt”, while three of the eleven “multiple centres” are called new towns: Shunyi New Town, in the north-east expansion, specialising in manufacturing; Tongzhou New Town, in the east expansion, specialising in residential housing and businesses (specifically, the location of the offices of the Beijing Municipality); Yizhuang New Town, in the southeast expansion, destined to become “a comprehensive high-tech and new-tech industrial growth pole” (Wu and Phelps, 2011, p. 422).11 The evolution appears to be linear. There are no differences, folds or fractures. The construction of the “urban world” around Beijing appears easy to control as well as being part of several phases that gradually complexify a situation which is, nevertheless, decipherable: the big city, suburbanisation, decentralisation, new urban centralities in suburban spaces, polycentrism. Zhaoqing New Area is different. It does not reflect the aforementioned linear evolution. Zhaoqing is “only” a new town. It was never a satellite town, nor has it been involved in functional and population decentralisation processes. The linear model, evolving from the rural to the intermediate suburban transition and then to the urban, ends here. There is no reference to a suburban transition as a shift from one owner-

“city” defining its role and functions, without having to fit into a suburban space. Old Zhaoqing is still a compact urban nucleus surrounded by rivers, mountains and rural villages; it is separated from the rest of the Pearl River Delta by vast, sprawling agri­ cultural land. The 115-square-kilometre area and 600,000 new inhabitants envisaged by the masterplan of the new town, with a variable layout and equally variable boundaries and magnitudes, are inspired by other mechanisms. Zhaoqing new town seems more like the “urban dream” of the municipality of a “small” city (665,000 inhabitants and a surface area of 85 square kilometres; Statistics Bureau of Zhaoqing City, 2016) that wishes to become part of the global urban network of the Pearl River Delta (global) city-region.12 Perhaps, in this case, the new town really has been planned only “for growth” (Wu, 2015 a).

IV. Openings

ship regime to another and, physically, to the merger of urban and rural settlements. Zhaoqing is a new town that has been planned, promoted and is being built without having to decentralise and accommodate (populations and functions), without the

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Zhengdong New Town nestles between these two extremes. It doubles the extension of Zhengzhou thanks to a “mega urban project financed through entrepreneurial land development” (Wu, 2015 a, p. 94) keenly promoted by the provincial government.13 The reasons legitimising and justifying this large expansion lie with the increase in the population of Zhengzhou: 4.5 million inhabitants in 2010, an annual growth of 9.4 %, and an urbanisation rate that rose from 34.1 % in 1980 to 69.7 % in 2010 (Zhengzhou Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 2017). Official documents state that the new town is required to build a “national central city” that will make Zhengzhou the new economic and infrastructural hub of central China. However, Zhengdong is only the first step. 150 square kilometres and 1.5 million new inhabitants are the spark that will ignite sprawling urbanisation, Zhengbian New District, including Zhengdong, Zhengzhou Economic Development District, Zhongmou County and then further east, for almost 100 kilometres, as far as Kaifeng (Wu, 2015 a). In Search of New Towns in City-Regions The suburbanisation phases identified by Wu and Shen (2015) describe the gradual opening of the market to urbanisation and suburbanisation processes and the financial and governance mechanisms used to merge this process with action by public authorities at all institutional levels. The suburbanisation process, “to convert the rural land outside the state domain into a manageable state asset that is sold in the land market” (Wu and Li, 2018, p. 151), is the outcome of a political initiative, regulated through plans, and often implemented in mega projects. The dissemination of new towns is part of this process, composing and redefining the relations between the State and the market: it is, in other words, a sophisticated strategy used to gradually turn the suburbs (as previously were urban spaces) into spaces of capital accumulation (Shen and Wu, 2017).14 This interpretation of the suburbanisation of Chinese cities is part of the traditional focus on the relationship between the State and the market vis-à-vis urban processes and regulation policies. However, this relationship has several specificities linked to the institutional set-up and process implemented to draw China “away from state socialism” (Ma, 2002; Yeoh, 2010 a; Ye, Yang and Wang, 2015). According to Wei (2001), in the field of regional policies in particular, but also in regional rebalancing policies, the changes that have taken place in China since the seventies were due to a triple combination of decentralisation and the institutional and fiscal reforms of the nineties; “marketisation” and the gradual adoption of market mechanisms in economic dynamics, also thanks to the acceptance of entrepreneurial logic by the State (especially the local states that control urban land and the transfer of land use rights; Wang et al., 2014); globalisation and the opening of the international market and gradual increase in foreign investments.15 The combination of “decentralisation, marketisation and globalisation” changed the configuration of regional development models (Wei, 2007) and restructured central power; this led to the emergence of the regional level as a privileged framework of state regulations (Xu and Yeh, 2010; Wu, 2016 a). This emergence involved the “scaling up” of urbanisation: regional urbanisation gradually became the best option for the urbanisation of China, while the control exerted by central government was defined at the city-region level (Ma, 2005; Shen, 220

2007; Li and Wu, 2012; Han, 2015).16 Starting in the late nineties, the development of new towns in suburban areas became part of this mechanism, a process that became even more vigorous from 2003 onwards. The construction (and promotion) of new towns was, politically speaking, a tool used by national government to counter the localism and exasperated entrepreneurialism of municipal growth machines. It was “a response to an increasingly stringent control of land by the central government (…) restricting the extent of land leasing and making it more difficult to release massive amounts of rural land for urban uses” (Wu and Shen, 2015, pp. 310–311).17 Starting in the twenty-first century, city-regions were openly used as a policy level in the official documents and strategies promoted by central government. As regards the establishment of an urbanisation strategy, the National Urban System Plan (2005–2020) assigned a key role to major cities and, above all, urban clusters and city-regions. The strategy was based on the integration of “manufacturing chains” and cooperation between several centres and their functional specialisation, thus creating certain differences in comparison to local competition and the implementation of mega-projects that had taken place during the previous period (Wu, 2015 a).18 The Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) considered city-regions to be the cornerstone of urban development and the restructuring of the national economy. The Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011–2015) reformulated the issue in terms of urban clusters, “a vital policy to improve the quality of urbanisation” (Ye, 2014, p. 202).19 Apart from promotional and marketing strategies, it is difficult to identify the role played by new towns in light of such ambitious but vague objectives.20 The fact that a link exists between suburbanisation and cityregions (and others) is anything but a foregone conclusion. To the contrary. According to Soja (2011), for example, the emergence of forms of regional urbanisation is not so much a continuation of suburban expansion, but a sign of the “relative decline of what can be described as a distinctly metropolitan model of urban growth and change” (p. 459). Although no one can deny that a city-region is “big”, it is possible to challenge the statement that in terms of the extension of the settlements and size of the population, a large urban area constitutes (and functions as) a city-region.

point of view: unlike the much more multifaceted and complicated (global) city-region of the Yangtze River Delta, it is located entirely within Guangdong Province (Li and Wu, 2018). Nevertheless, the development strategy of the Pearl River Delta (global) city-region differentiates, divides and creates hierarchies. In addition to the traditional division between the Pearl River Delta’s east and west areas created by the less

IV. Openings

The rationale behind Zhaoqing New Town, for example, appears to deny the role of the “city” as the centre of agglomeration and dispersion, and of metropolisation processes being the only path leading to development. The connections between the new town and old Zhaoqing are weak, almost non-existent: the new town looks elsewhere, towards the (global) city-region of the Pearl River Delta, towards Foshan and Guangzhou. The strategic regional document used to promote coordination between the different parts of the Pearl River Delta is the Outline Plan for the Reform and Development of the Pearl River Delta (2008–2020) drafted in 2008 by the provincial government of Guangdong. The Pearl River Delta (global) city-region is relatively simple from an institutional

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significant economic, urban and infrastructural development in the west, the plan introduces a policy distinction. Indeed, it divides the city-region into three separate metropolitan regions. Zhaoqing, together with Guangzhou and Foshan, is one of the three metropolitan regions, even though the city is considered inferior compared to the core area created by the Guangzhou-Foshan conurbation (Ye, 2014).21 Faced with the gradual erosion of the role of Guangzhou in favour of Shenzhen (the ultimate “fast city”), the provincial capital has focused on the west in its search for renewed centrality.22 In fact, the Guangzhou Urban Development Strategic Concept Plan (2010–2020) proposes to “connect the west”, albeit not in an exclusive manner. How can Zhaoqing, situated along the western edge of the Pearl River Delta, turn its marginal position to its own advantage and “lock on” this opportunity for connection? As part of the strategies implemented beyond Zhaoqing, what is the role played by the new town under construction? Liu and Wang (2016) highlight that in urban China the construction of new towns is one of the strategies used to promote the polycentric development of urban regions. Given the situation, Zhaoqing New Town seems to be the way in which this “small” city on the western edge of the Pearl River Delta offers to help Guangzhou: it offers the latter its space (115 square kilometres), start-ups and residential areas. An offer, a resource, but without a guaranteed demand. In fact, even the offer is generic and abstract. Zhaoqing New Town turns the non-spatial features of the (global) cityregion into a pattern of axes, corridors, roads, blocks, etc. By doing so it organises its own participation in the economic space of the region and, thus, in the competitive dynamics of the global economy.23 Beijing is different. According to Feng, Zhou and Wu (2008), suburbanisation processes are the main reason the urban agglomeration has assumed a polycentric structure that not only reorganises suburban expansion, but also stretches to Tianjin and Hebei Province, covering an area of approximately 80,000 square kilometres inhabited by 110 million people; this is the area where the global city-region of Jing-Jin-Ji is taking shape.24 In fact, Beijing’s prospects of developing into a city-region are inscribed in both the redefinition of the spaces of the global economy at the regional level and in the radical transformation of the capital where, between 2002 and 2012, there was a 335 % increase in infrastructure investment, the population rose by 46 %, and the GDP by 313 % (Zou, Mason and Zhong, 2015). Like the centre and south of China with their (global) city regions (Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta) (Li, Xu and Yeh, 2014; Li and Wu, 2018), the northern part of China is adjusting its own economic and spatial strategy, starting with Beijing. The Jing-Jin-Ji Co-operative Development Outline Plan for the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region (2015) specifies the four objectives of the regional strategy. Apart from the now usual (and reiterated) need to reduce pressure on the central districts of Beijing by shifting “non capital” functions and controlling the increase in the population, it indicates that cooperative development of the urban region should be based on coordinated environmental and transportation policies; technological and infrastructural integration; the creation of relations between research centres and enterprises in Zhongguancun (the Chinese so-called “Silicon Valley”, located in the northern suburban area of Beijing; Zhou, 2008) and the economic activities of Tianjin and the Hebei “poverty belt” (Cartier, 2016; Kan, 2016).25 The strategy suggests not only 222

a logic of centrality and decentralisation, but also recomposition, imbalance and connection. Here, again, the strategy is condensed in a formula “One Core (Beijing), two cities (Beijing and Tianjin), three axes (Beijing-Tianjin; Beijing-Baoding-Shijiazhuang and Beijing-Tangshan-Qinhuangdao where industry is to be developed), and four zones” (the central area around Beijing; the eastern area around the port of Binhai in Tianjin; the southern area with buildable land; and the north-west ecological conservation area) (Cartier, 2016). The Jing-Jin-Ji (global) city-region appears to reiterate the hierarchical-cooperative model envisaged by the Beijing Master Plan, but on a much bigger scale; it is a model with a rather unsophisticated spatial pattern and an equally unsophisticated functional specialisation of the various components. The envisioned polycentric model maintains hierarchical relations (albeit diluted and complexified) between the centre and suburban poles (the three new towns) on which, however, another urbanisation is superimposed. This urbanisation does not originate in and from the city, it shifts and jumps between boundaries, geometries and geographies. As regards the construction of the city-region of inland China, the “Central Plains Economic Region” that includes the whole of Henan Province and twelve municipalities and counties in the Hebei, Shandong, Shanzi and Anhui Provinces, the role of the new towns is not defined by its relationship with Zhengzhou. In the Central Plains Economic Plan (2012–2020), Zhengdong and Kaifeng are not towns (or even districts): they are the “growth pole” and “growth plate” on which to re-organise regional space and reconnect central areas and peripheral areas. Zhengbian New District is the pillar behind the competitive strategy for the complete transformation of a traditionally agricultural and rural region.26 This pillar includes roads, railways, subways, stations, etc. Infrastructure transcends all relationships with urban, suburban and rural spaces; it neither connects nor recomposes. Changing, shifting and moving on either side of their boundaries, Zhengdong and Kaifeng enhance differentiation and fragmentation; they unfold space and prepare it for what may come to pass (Sampieri, in this book).

apart from the mechanisms of land development and governance of urban expansion, and notwithstanding all the differences between the new towns of Tongzhou, Zhaoqing and Zhengdong and the fact that they do not represent anything, these towns embody the evolution of the urban (and urbanisation processes) that goes beyond the growth model encapsulated in a single (but nevertheless large) scale. It is not enough to consider these “new” spaces as suburban poles or insert them in an abstract pattern of city-regions. We do not need to invent new terms, we can simply use the ones that exist; we need to build relationships, open up interpretations and try to move beyond conceptual and theoretical closures (Brenner, 2018). A first step in this journey is to overcome the stubborn, reassuring yet weak illusion that urban transformations can be inscribed in general and generalisable models, no matter where they come from and what their characteristics are, and that these models can catalogue, describe, represent and explain the complexity of the world (and then possibly intervene).

IV. Openings

New Towns as Relational Spaces Wu (2015 a) writes: “In China, first and foremost, the new town is an investment and financing platform” (p. 163). But this is the “first and foremost”, the starting point. Quite

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The new towns of Tongzhou, Zhaoqing and Zhengdong appear to define relational spatialities (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Amin, 2004; Massey, 2005). They cannot be delimited; they are neither closed nor static; they continually shift the fine line of distinction between urban and rural until it becomes impossible to identify. The transformations that begin in Tongzhou, Zhaoqing and Zhengdong are both fluid and fixed; they constantly redefine the meaning of what is urban, suburban, rural or non-urban; they pierce and superimpose different spatialities. The urban/rural difference in the linear expansion of the Zhengbian New District, between Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, is pierced by housing practices. The new residential settlements in Zhongmou County stand at the very edge of the fields; their morphology is “typically suburban” (terraced houses), while the way in which they are inhabited is “typically rural” (the garages hold tractors, corn is hung to dry in the empty spaces in front of the houses). Rural and urban merge: Where are the differences? Can we still see them? Tongzhou New District is a new town that is part of a city. It replaces some parts of the city, modifying its urban structure and redefining its features and functions. It is also one of the new towns that reorganises the traditional monocentric structure of Beijing, turning it into a polycentric structure with different scales (and spaces): the scale (and spaces) of the expansion of the city and relationships between the centre and outer sub-centres; the scale (and spaces) of the global city-region and the relationships in a city-region which is nothing like a city, but contains bits and pieces of both the old and new city. Tongzhou New Town lacks for nothing: expansion and decentralisation, the old city overwritten by the new one, the metropolitan and regional scale, suburbanisation, and the (global)city-region. Roy (2009) writes: “The 21st-century metropolis makes a fool of census jurisdictions, of the mapping of city and suburbs, and confounds the easy narratives of regional change” (p. 827). The new towns of Tongzhou, Zhaoqing and Zhengdong appear to follow suit. Every scale (and every space) is not an independent entity. It relates to and is inseparably defined by other scales (and other spaces) as well as by existing or possible internal relations (Brenner, 2001). New towns connect and organise different and divergent rationales: from the market logic of land use rights to the global logic of economic competition, from the decentralisation of central cities to the radical transformation of rural areas. Likewise, principles and transformations are diverse and divergent, as are the continually formed and reformed spaces, annulling the differences between what is urban and what is not. New towns have neither the ambition nor the presumption to reform the differences and fragmentation of which they are part, and that de facto creates their layout and rigid zoning. They are not an automatic promise of territorial or systemic integration and cannot be inscribed in any given spatial hierarchy. New towns are spaces made of continuously evolving superimposed and intertwined spaces; they are thick with heterogeneity, fractures and relationships that go backwards and forwards in time and space. The material, virtual and immanent relations running through the places called Tongzhou New District, Zhaoqing New Area or Zhengdong New District define and redefine their nevertheless incomplete urban becoming; their relations constantly push them in new directions, overcoming all and every linearity and inevitability as well as every exclusive and certain reference to principles and models of modernisation, development and centrality. 224

(2014) critically present large-scale development projects, central business districts and residential compounds for “China’s new millionaires” as a widespread building frenzy of global cities. 8 In Beijing, “by 1990, the second and third ring roads had been completed, and by 2004 the fourth and fifth ring roads had been completed, with the sixth ring road under construction. Since the 1990 s, more then ten arterial roads radiating from the core to the suburbs (…) have greatly increased the accessibility of the suburbs” (Feng, Zhou and Wu, 2008 , p. 92). Changes in the value of land in the Beijing area, including the development of transport infrastructures and, more specifically, the location of subway stations, are presented in Zou, Mason and Zhong (2015). Statistics about car ownership are reported in Feng, Zhou and Wu, (2008): “There were only 1107 private cars in Beijing in 1985 (Zhou, 1996). (…) By the end of 2005, Beijing’s private motorized vehicles had reached 1.8 million, of which private cars amounted to 1.54 million” (p. 93). 9 In 2012, the Development Research Center of the State Council (cit. in Sorace and Hurst, 2016) also commented on the vicious circle: “short appointed terms in office, emphasis on GDP in assessing officials’ performance, the constitutionally defined state monopoly over the primary land market” (Woodworth and Wallace, 2017, p. 1273). This circle leads (or led) to “urban pathologies” in the race towards urban growth without regard for functionality, costs, principles of sustainability or local competition to promote mega-projects. 10 The traditionally monocentric structure of the city remained unaltered even during the satellite town season. Instead, the first telltale signs of change appeared in 1982, when a development model known as “dispersed constellation” was adopted, and then in 1992, when three hi-tech industrial zones were earmarked (Yizhuang, Zhongguancun and Shangdi) together with the CBD 6 kilometres east of Tiananmen, and the diffusion of large-scale residential settlements (Gu, Wei and Cook, 2015). Emphasis on the size of the population settling in Beijing was part of the last Master Plan indicating for 2020 the threshold of twenty-three million inhabitants (in 2016 the population of Beijing was 21,729,000 inhabitants; Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 2017 ). 11 Wu and Phelps (2011) consider the new towns around Beijing as the telltale signs of Chinese “post-suburbanisation”, representative of a “third generation” of new towns that “differs from previous generations in aiming to achieve a greater populationemployment balance” (p. 415). 12 In a report dated 2004 about the west side of the Pearl River Delta – PRD (Yeung, Shen and Zhang, 2004), Zhaoqing is described as an underdeveloped city with a development strategy focusing on the promotion of “a modern industrialized city with attractive environment for business, a garden city good for living and tourism” (p. 26). The following aspects are listed as the main atout of the city: “It has its own river port. It has convenient river, highway and railway transportation with cities in Greater PRD and other parts of China. As part of the PRD region, Zhaoqing has rich land resources and cheap labour for industrial development. It is an ideal place for hosting labour intensive industries from more developed cities in the PRD . The city also has

IV. Openings

1 For a more lengthy description of the new towns of Tongzhou, located in the eastern expansion of Beijing; Zhengzhou, in Henan Province; and Zhaoqing, in the western part of the Pearl River Delta, see the chapter by Fiandanese, Ramondetti and Safina in this book. 2 Regarding the relationships between new towns and the bigger urbanisation process of contemporary China, see also the contribution by Sampieri in this book. 3 Zhang and Peck (2016) distinguish between “variety of capitalisms” and “variegated capitalism approach”, emphasising in particular how the former approach suffers from the kind of “methodological nationalism” that induces the national scale to be considered as a closed, delimited entity and insisting on the need to introduce “national roles, functions and institutional ensembles (…) in those multi-scalar terms through which they are profoundly co-constituted” (p. 56). 4 City-region is a vague term used by international literature to summarise the “scaling up” of urbanisation processes, chiefly underscoring its economic characteristics (global city-regions as “spatial nodes” of the global economy and key political actors on the world stage; Scott, 2001) and scalar restructuring (Brenner, 2004). As regards the hypertrophic terminology used to describe urban change (city-regions, global city-regions, megacity regions, megapolis, megaregions, megalopolitan regions, regional galaxies, regional states, etc.), see Taylor and Lang, 2004 . Regarding the origins of city-regionalism, its dissemination as a “chaotic concept” (or “mysterious object”, Harrison, 2007 ) and the interpretative and political options of this vague terminology, see Rodríguez-Pose, 2008; Harrison, 2015. City-regions may be the “nodes” of the global economy, but they do not play this role everywhere. As highlighted by Roy (2011), while most cityregions in the Global North are used as models of “winning” cities, those in the Global South are (still) often stigmatised as uninhabitable and disorderly hyper-urbanisations, unreasonable concentrations of “urban megalomania”. 5 Interpreting Chinese new towns as “assemblages” involves focusing on the “indeterminacy, emergence, becoming, processuality, turbulence and the sociomateriality of phenomena. In short, it is an attempt to describe relationalities of composition – relationalities of near/far and social/material” (McFarlane, 2011, p. 206). 6 In China, as in other regions in South-East Asia, the suburban expansion settlement model is often associated with the “exception” of the desakota, a neologism coined by Terry McGee in 1991 and made up of the Indonesian words desa (village) and kota (city). Desakota described the urban growth model along the infrastructure corridors between bigger centres, mixing urban and rural features such as agriculture and industry (Wu and Sui, 2016). 7 In actual fact, it’s not only the new middle class that is moving out of central areas, but also people forced to move due to the transformation of these areas; the demolitions and expulsions in Chinese urban development are discussed, for example, by Zhang, 2004; Shin, 2013; and the report by the Human Rights Watch (2004). As regards the wave of evictions of migrant workers from Beijing in late 2017, see http://www.nytimes. com/2017/11/30/ world/asia/china-beijing-migrants.html. Timberlake et al.

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great development potential in tourism” (p. 40). 13 At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when the process leading to the construction of Zhengdong began to take shape, the current Prime Minister Li Keqiang was the governor of Henan Province. Shepard (2015) writes that his “speciality” was urban development (and the construction of new towns). 14 After all, “the spaces of the non-city have been continuously operationalised through the global history of capitalist uneven development” (Brenner, 2016, p. 123). 15 As regards the evolution of the theories concerning regional development and regional policies in post-Mao China, see Fan, 1997; Wei, 1999 and 2007; Wei and Ye, 2009. 16 Wu (2015 a) clarifies how regional revival involved urban regions rather than “the macro­ economic regional scale between the developed coastal region, the industrialising central region, and the underdeveloped western region” (p. 138). For a critical interpretation of regionalism that led to, and at the same time was facilitated by, the success of the global city-regions in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta, see Wei, 2007. 17 The government’s role in curtailing the entrepreneurialism of local governments did not only involve controlling the shift from rural to urban land, it included stopping the construction of “new city halls (2013), new towns without State Council approval (2014), and “weird” architecture (2016)” (Woodworth and Wallace, 2017, p. 1273). 18 City-regions and urban clusters were both established either to build “stronger coalitions for regional competitiveness or to solve the over-concentration of growth in large central cities” (Wu, 2016 a, p. 1134). It is not easy to pinpoint the differences between city-region and urban cluster. One way is to consider it as a sort of “scalar matryoshka”: “In short, the Jing-Jin-Ji, the YRD [Yantgtze River Delta] and the PRD [Pearl River Delta] themselves are not a single city-region but rather a cluster of city-regions situated adjacent to each other” (ibid.). 19 The economic competitiveness of city-regions is not promoted only by top-down actions. Since the early eighties there has been an increase in the number of regional economic associations focusing on the “construction” of economic spaces by strengthening horizontal relations between local authorities in order to overcome the extremely powerful “invisible walls” of administrative borders. For a debate about the relations and conflicts between top-down interventions and decentralised actions in the city-regions of the Yangzte River Delta, see Li and Wu, 2018 . 20 New towns were used in promotional and marketing strategies to validate “the suburbs as a nice place to live and work. (…) Local governments are now enthusiastic about building new towns to achieve a high-quality living environment” (Wu and Shen, 2015, pp. 310–311). As emphasised by the authors, the ultimate

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goal of these strategies is basically to increase the price of land. The characteristics of the masterplans and the “visual power of representation” in the promotion of the new towns of the Global South are discussed by Datta and Shaban, 2016; the exhibition halls – i.e., the space used to promote and sell the new towns – are presented by Repellino in this book. 21 Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou and Zhuhai-Zhongshan-Jiangmen are the other two metropolitan regions earmarked in the Outline Plan for the Reform and Development of the Pearl River Delta (2008–2020). 22 Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Guangzhou’s GDP compared to the total GDP of the Pearl River Delta dropped from 37 % to 32 %; during the same period, the percentage of Shenzhen’s GDP compared to the total GDP of the city-region increased from 20 % to 23 % (Xu and Yeh, 2005). 23 When referring to the Pearl River Delta, Tomba (2017 ) asks: “where that megacity actually is, what its emergence means beyond a renaming and a remapping of economic activities on the territory” (p. 204). The abstract nature of the cityregion of the Pearl River Delta reflects the abstract nature of the city-region “model” where the focus is on the economic and functional relations between “nodes”, about which we know very little (or nothing) as regards their physical (material) characteristics (Harrison and Hoyler, 2015; Shields, 2015). 24 The name Jing-Jin-Ji is “a composite of the ‘Jing’ 京 in Beijing 北京, the ‘Jin’ 津 in Tianjin 天津 and ‘Ji’ 冀, an historical name for Hebei” (Cartier, 2016, p. 182). The main statistical indicators about the BeijingTianjin-Hebei Region in 2015 are provided by the National Bureau of Statistics of China. 25 According to Kan (2016), the “poverty belt around Beijing first came up in a 2005 academic report commissioned by the Asian Development Bank” (p. 7 ), while the institutional acknowledgement of the “capital’s poverty belt” was first cited in the 2006–2007 Blue Book of Regional Development in China (Cartier, 2016, pp. 192–193). The “capital’s poverty belt” is made up of thirty-nine counties and county-level administrative districts of Hebei Province, some of which are located along the outer border of Beijing. 26 Although the declared objective of the Zhengbian Strategic Plan is to promote competitiveness by turning an agricultural economy into an industrial and urban economy, “there is no proof that an ambitious urban expansion plan contributes to its attractiveness to investors” (Wu, 2015 a, p. 98). The “Central Plains Economic Region” is nevertheless taken as a “national model” for the coordinated industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation of agriculture, as the “engine” of national economic growth, as well as a modern transport hub and the centre of Chinese civilisation and innovation (Wang et al., 2014).

Tongzhou: building the new town by replacing parts of the old city.

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About the Authors Alessandro Armando, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Department of Architecture and Design ( DAD ), Politecnico di Torino.

Liu Jian, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Design, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing.

Mauro Berta, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Department of Architecture and Design ( DAD ), Politecnico di Torino.

Anna Pagani, PhD Candidate in the programme “Architecture and Sciences of the City”, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Michele Bonino, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Department of Architecture and Design ( DAD ), Politecnico di Torino, Rector’s Delegate for Relations with China.

Samuele Pellecchia, photographer and Director of Prospekt Photographers, Milano.

Francesco Carota, PhD Candidate in the programme “Architecture. History and Project”, Politecnico di Torino. Filippo De Pieri, Associate Professor of History of Architecture, Department of Architecture and Design ( DAD ), Politecnico di Torino. Valeria Federighi, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Department of Architecture and Design ( DAD ), Politecnico di Torino. Filippo Fiandanese, PhD Candidate in the programme “Architecture. History and Project”, Politecnico di Torino. Francesca Frassoldati, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Department of Architecture and Design ( DAD ) and FULL Future Urban Legacy Lab, Politecnico di Torino. Francesca Governa, Full Professor of Economic and Political Geography, Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST ) and FULL Future Urban Legacy Lab, Politecnico di Torino. Florence Graezer Bideau, Senior Scientist, College of Humanities, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

246

Leonardo Ramondetti, PhD Candidate in the programme “Urban and Regional Development”, Politecnico di Torino. Maria Paola Repellino, PhD in Architecture and Building Design, Politecnico di Torino. Currently Research Fellow at the Politecnico di Torino, Executive Director of China Room. Bianca Maria Rinaldi, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST ), Politecnico di Torino. Astrid Safina, PhD Candidate in the programme “Urban and Regional Development”, Politecnico di Torino. Angelo Sampieri, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Design, Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST ), Politecnico di Torino. Davide Vero, PhD Candidate in the programme “Architecture. History and Project”, Politecnico di Torino. Xu Gaofeng, PhD Candidate, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University.

Index of Places A

Chizhou (Anhui Province) 175

Airport City (Xixian New Area, Shaanxi Province) 83

Chongli (Hebei Province) 98, 103

Alamar (Havana, Cuba) 76

Chongqing 17, 27, 29, 68, 81, 86, 134, 175

Almere (Netherlands) 76

Chongqing’s Two-Rivers New Districts (Chongqing) 27

Anhui Province 80, 122, 175, 224

Chuansha County (Shanghai) 69 D

Anting (Shanghai) (also Anting New Town) 65, 70, 75

Dali New Town (Yunnan Province) 100, 103

B

Dezhou (Shandong Province) (also Dezhou National New Energy Demonstration City) 85, 86, 88, 89

Ba River 83

Dianzhong New Area (Yunnan Province) 68

Baicheng (Jilin Province) 175

Dinghu District (Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province) (also Dinghu New District) 107, 109, 114, 160, 161

Baisha District (Zhengzhou, Henan Province) 135 Baoding (Hebei Province) 129, 224

Dinghu Mountain (Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province) (also Dinghu Mountain Scenic Area) 114, 137, 146, 187

Beihai (Guangxi Province) 209

Dongguan (Guangdong Province) 114, 155, 228

Beijing 6, 7, 12, 17, 18, 23 – 26, 29, 34, 61 – 63, 66, 67, 85, 86, 89, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 105, 121 – 124, 126 – 129, 134, 135, 138, 139, 156, 161, 162, 166, 168, 170, 173 – 175, 178, 179, 205, 206, 214, 216, 219, 220, 223 – 228

Dongjin New District (Xiangyang, Hubei Province) 86, 88

Baiyangdian Wetlands (Baoding, Hebei Province) 175

Binhai (port of, Tianjin) 224 Binhai New Area (Tianjin) (also Binhai New District) 17, 27, 68, 69, 81, 102, 103

Dragon Lake (Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, Henan Province) 135, 165, 172, 173 E Erhai Sea (Yunnan Province) 100, 101 Évry (Île de France, France) 164

Bujicun Village (Guangdong Province) 113

Euralille (Lille, France) 125

C

F

Campos de Santana (Curitiba, Brazil) 76

Fendong New City (Xixian New Area, Shaanxi Province) 83

Canal Park (Tongzhou New Town, Beijing) 128 Cangzhou (Hebei Province) 129 Central Plains (also Zhongyuan, Central Plains Urban Agglomeration, Central Plains Economic Region) 25, 117, 178, 179, 205, 224, 228 Cergy-Pontoise (Île de France, France) 76 Chandigarh (India) 76 Chang’an Avenue (Beijing) 123, 128, 220 Changchun (Jilin Province) 68

Fenxi New City (Xixian New Area, Shaanxi Province) 83 Forest Park (Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, Henan Province) 172, 173 Foshan (Guangdong Province) 25, 95, 99, 109, 114, 142, 157, 160, 161, 165, 178, 222, 223 Fujian Province 121, 175 Fujisawa New Town (Kanagawa, Japan) 207 Fuzhou New Area (Fujian Province) 68

Changde (Hunan Province) 175

G

Changli River 113

Ganjiang New Area (Jiangxi Province) 68

Changsha (Hunan Province) 80

Gansu Province 17, 29, 81, 97, 98, 122

Chaoyang (Beijing) 123, 161

Gaoqiao (Shanghai) 75

Chengde (Hebei Province) 129

Grand Canal 95, 100, 123, 126, 128, 162, 173, 178, 206

Chengdong (Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province) 109

Grand Canal Forest Park (Tongzhou New Town, Beijing) 99, 100

Chengdu (Sichuan Province) 22, 107

Index of Places

Anshun (Guizhou Province) 27, 175

247

Guangdong Province 23, 80, 99, 105, 109, 113, 114, 121, 136, 147, 156, 157, 179, 223

Jilin Province 122, 175

Guangzhou (Guangdong Province) 25, 68, 89, 95, 99, 107, 109, 114, 122, 142, 146, 148, 155, 157, 160, 161, 222, 223, 228

Jinan West New Town (Shandong Province) 99

Guangzhou-Foshan-Zhaoqing metropolitan area (Guangdong Province) 25, 95, 109, 114, 142, 157, 160

Jinghe New City (Xixian New Area, Shaanxi Province) 83

Guanxi Autonomous Region 122

Jing River 83 Jing-Jin-Ji Global City-Region (also Jing-Jin-Ji urban cluster, Jing-Jin-Ji mega-region, Jing-Jin-Ji region) 80, 85, 89, 95, 126, 129, 135, 178, 179, 205, 223, 224, 227, 228

Guian New Area (Guizhou Province) (also Guian New District and Guiyang-Anshun New District) 27, 68, 175

Jinpu New Area (Dalian, Liaoning Province) 68

Guiyang (Guizhou Province) 27, 175

Jiyuan (Henan Province) 117

Guizhou Province 17, 68, 80, 122, 175 H Hangzhou (Zhejiang Province) 23, 123, 128 Harbin (Heilongjiang Province) (also Harbin New Area) 23, 68, 101, 169 Heavenly City (Zhaoqing New Area, Guangdong Province) 146 Hebei Province 80, 84 – 86, 105, 126, 128, 129, 135, 175, 223, 224, 228 Hebi (Henan Province) 175 Heilongjiang Province 101, 122 Henan Province 23, 25, 31, 80, 84, 105, 117, 122, 156, 175, 214, 219, 224, 226, 227 Hertfordshire (United Kingdom) 73 Hishimo New Town (Nagoya, Japan) 207 Hong Kong (also Hong Kong Special Administrative Zone) 68, 107, 114 Huangpu District (Shanghai) 69 Hubei Province 80, 122, 175 Huizhou (Guangdong Province) 114, 228 Hunan Province 68, 80, 122, 175 Hutuo River 85 I Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region 17, 29, 80, 122, 214 J Jasmine Mansion (Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, Henan Province) 146 Jialu River 135 Jiangbei New Area (Nanjing, Jiangsu Province) 68

K Kaifeng (Henan Province) 25, 34, 117, 120 – 122, 178, 187, 195, 205, 215, 221, 224, 225 Kangbashi (Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region) (also Ordos Kangbashi) 29, 214 Kolkata (India) 217 L La Défense (Paris, France) 25, 164 Langfang (Hebei Province) 129 Lanzhou (Gansu Province) (also Lanzhou New Area, Lanzhou New District) 21, 22, 27, 29, 81, 82, 89, 97, 98, 103 Lausanne (Switzerland) 6, 7 Le Mirail district (Toulouse, France) 164, 165 Letchworth (United Kingdom) 72 Liangjiang New Area (Chongqing) 68, 81 Liaoning Province 29, 80, 121 London (United Kingdom) 121, 122 Long Zhi Lake (Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, Henan Province) 117 Longhai (railway) 122 Longhu Area (Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, Henan Province) 122, 165 Lotus Park Township (Cape Town, South Africa) 76 Lotus Village (Zhaoqing New Area, Guangdong Province) 113 Luo River 84 Luohe (Henan Province) 117 Luoyang (Henan Province) (also Luoyang New Area, Luoyang New District) 31, 84, 87, 89, 117, 122

Jiangmen (Guangdong Province) 114, 228

M

Jiangsu Province 80, 175 Jiangxi Province 68, 80, 175

Macao (also Macao Special Administrative Zones) 68, 107, 114

Jiaozuo (Henan Province) 117

Manchuria 73

Jiaxing (Zhejiang Province) 175

248

Jinan (Shandong Province) 99, 175

Milan (Italy) 7 Milton Keynes (United Kingdom) 76, 206 N

Qunli New Town (Harbin, Heilongjiang Province) 23, 101, 103, 169 Qunli Stormwater Park (Qunli New Town, Heilongjiang Province) (also Qunli Stormwater Wetlands Park) 101, 169, 175

Nakuru (Kenya) 76

R

Nanjing (Jiangsu Province) 68

Randstad (Netherlands) 25

Nanning (Guangxi Province) 175

River East International (Tongzhou New Town, Beijing) 150

Nansha New District (Guangdong Province) (also Nansha New Area) 27, 68 Nanshi District (Shanghai) 69 Ningxia Autonomous Region 122 Nowa Huta (Kraków, Poland) 76

Runcheng Time (Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, Henan Province) 146 S Shaanxi Province 68, 80, 175

O

Shandong Province 86, 99, 121, 175, 224

Ocean Orient (Tongzhou New Town, Beijing) 146

Shangdi Hi-Tech industrial zone (Beijing) 227

One Meter Sunshine (Zhaoqing New Area, Guangdong Province) 146

Shanghai 12, 17, 19, 21, 27, 29, 61, 64, 65, 67 – 70, 74, 75, 81, 84, 89, 94, 101, 103, 121, 129, 134, 148, 214, 219

P Paris (France) 102, 128, 133, 164 Pearl River 107, 114

Shanghai County 69 Shantou (Guangdong Province) 12 Shanzi Province 224 Shenfu New Town (Liaoning Province) 29

Pearl River Delta (also Pearl River Delta city-region, Pearl River Delta global city-region, Pearl River Delta economic zone) 17, 23 – 26, 89, 99, 105, 107, 109, 113, 114, 136, 142, 169, 178, 179, 205, 214, 220 – 223, 226 – 228

Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou metropolitan area (Guangdong Province) 114, 228

Pengdongzhou Village (Zhaoqing New Area, Guangdong Province) 113

Shunyi New Town (Beijing) 63, 126, 129, 220

Shenzhen (Guangdong Province) 12, 17, 76, 103, 109, 114, 129, 135, 147, 157, 160, 223, 228

Shijiazhuang (Hebei Province) 84, 85, 88, 129, 224

Pingdingshan (Henan Province) 117

Sichuan Province 68, 122, 175

Pingxiang (Jiangxi Province) 175

Singapore 98, 103, 122

Poly I Cubic (Guangzhou, Guangdong Province) 148, 155

Sino-Singapore Eco-city (Tianjin) 98, 103

Poly Garden (Zhaoqing New Area, Guangdong Province) 137, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, 154, 155

Solar Valley (Dezhou, Shandong Province) 86, 88

Pudong (Shanghai) (also Pudong New Area, Pudong New District) 17, 27, 67 – 70, 74, 81, 103

Songzhuang Arts and Agriculture City (Beijing) 74

Pujiang (Shanghai) (also Pujiang New Town) 70, 75, 101, 103 Q Qianan (Hebei Province) 175 Qiantang River 128 Qingdao West Coast New Area (Qingdao, Shandong Province) 68

Songjiang (Shanghai) 70, 75 Star Alliance Bay (Zhengdong, Zhengzhou, Henan Province) 146, 150 State Road 321 107 Suining (Sichuan Province) 175 T Tangshan (Hebei Province) 129, 179, 224 Tema (Ghana) 76

Qinghai Province 122

Tiananmen Square (Beijing) 128, 227

Qingyuan (Guangdong Province) 114

Tianducheng New Town (Shanghai) 23, 102

Qinhuangdao (Hebei Province) 129, 224

Tianfu New Area (Chengdu, Sichuan Province) 22, 68

Quanmen Street (Dongcheng District, Beijing) 162

Tianjin 17, 18, 27, 29, 68, 69, 73, 81, 85, 98, 102, 103, 105, 121, 126, 129, 135, 179, 223, 224, 228

Index of Places

Megahall MOMA (Tongzhou New Town, Beijing) 146, 149

249

Tianxiang City (Henan Province) 121 Tianzhu Park (Shunyi New Town, Beijing) 129 Tibet Autonomous Region 122 Tonghui River 128, 129, 166, 174, 178 Tongzhou (Beijing) (also Tongzhou District, Tongzhou New Town, Tongzhou New District) 4, 6, 8, 23 – 26, 31, 33, 34 , 63, 95, 96, 99, 100, 103, 105, 123, 124, 126 – 129, 134, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146, 149, 150, 156, 161 – 164, 166, 169, 170, 173, 174, 187, 195, 205, 206, 208, 210, 214, 216, 217, 220, 225, 226 Torino/Turin (Italy) 6, 7

Yangtze River Delta (Shanghai) (also Yangtze River Delta Region, Yangtze River Delta city-region, Yangtze River economic belt) 65, 68, 89, 223, 227 Yanyang Lake (Zhaoqing New Area, Guangdong Province) 113 Yellow River 99, 172, 179 Yi River 84 Yizhuang New City (Beijing) (also Yizhuang New Town, Yizhuang Hi-Tech industrial zone, Yizhuang Economic Development Zone) 63, 66, 67, 126, 129, 216, 220, 227 Yunnan Province 68, 100, 122

U Urumqi (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) 135

Z Zhangjiakou (Hebei Province) 98, 129

V Vanke Cloud City (Guangzhou, Guangdong Province) 148, 155 W Wan Wei’s Home (Zhaoqing New Area, Guangdong Province) 146 Wei River 83 Welwyn (United Kingdom) 72

Zhengbian (Henan Province) (also Zhengbian New District) 25, 105, 117, 120 – 122, 135, 205, 207 – 211, 215, 221, 225, 228

Wuhan (Hubei Province) 175

Zhengding New District (Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province) (also Zhengding New Area) 84, 85, 88

X

Zhengdong (Zhengzhou, Henan Province) (also Zhengdong New District, Zhengdong New Town) 4, 23 – 26, 31, 33, 34, 95 – 97, 105, 115 – 118, 120 – 122, 135, 136, 140, 142 – 144, 146, 150, 151, 156, 163 – 165, 169, 172, 173, 175, 205, 207 – 210, 214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 224 – 227

Xi Jiang River 25, 113, 114, 178, 187, 207 Xiamen (Fujian Province) 12, 175 Xi’an (Shaanxi Province) 27, 79, 82 – 84, 87, 135, 175 Xi’an-Xianyang New District (Xi’an and Xianyang, Shaanxi Province) 27 Xiangjiang New Area (Changsha, Hunan Province) 68 Xianyang (Shaanxi Province) 27, 83, 175 Xiaoqing wetlands park (Jinan West New Town, Shandong Province) 99 Xinhua Canal Bay (Tongzhou New Town, Beijing) 146 Xinjiang Autonomous Region 81, 122

Zhengzhou (Henan Province) (also Zhengzhou Economic Development District) 6, 7, 23 – 26, 31, 34, 84, 97, 105, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 136, 140, 142, 144, 151, 156, 163, 165, 178, 179, 187, 205, 208, 214, 219, 221, 224 – 226 Zhenjiang (Jiangsu Province) 175 Zhenjiang Province 121

Xintiandi District (Shanghai) 84

Zhongguancun Hi-Tech industrial zone (Beijing) (also Zhongguancun Science Park) 67, 129, 224, 227

Xiongan New Area (Baoding, Hebei Province) 175

Zhongmou County (Henan Province) 221, 225

Xixian New Area (Shaanxi Province) (also Xixian New District) 68, 82, 83, 175 Xuchang (Henan Province) 117

Zhongshan (Guangdong Province) 114, 228 Zhoushan Islands New Area (Zhejiang, Hebei Province) (also Zhoushan Islands New District) 27, 68

Xuzhou (Jiangsu Province) 82, 89

Zhuhai (Guangdong Province) 12, 114, 228

Y

Zhuhai-Zhongshan-Jiangmen metropolitan area (Guangdong Province) 114, 228

Yamagata Hawaii Dreamland resort (Japan) 207

Zhujiajiao (Shanghai) 70

Yangpu District (Shanghai) 69

250

Zhaoqing (Guangdong Province) (also Zhaoqing Hi-Tech Area, Zhaoqing New Area Zhaoqing New Town) 4, 6, 7, 23 – 26, 31, 33, 34, 95, 96, 99, 103, 105, 107 – 110, 112 – 114, 132, 135 – 137, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 155 – 158, 160 – 162, 164, 165, 169, 172, 178, 187, 195, 205, 206, 208 – 210, 214, 216, 217, 220 – 223, 225 – 227

Illustration Credits Cover photograph by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017 pages 8–9 Photograph by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017

Tongzhou. Suburbanisation and Decentralisation, pages 123–129 Fig. 1 Photograph by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017

Walking Through, pages 33–57 Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 Photographs by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017

Fig. 2 Masterplan of Tongzhou New District (2004–2020), redrawn by Filippo Fiandanese Exhibition Halls, pages 132–142

A Policy Discourse on New Town Development in Contemporary China, pages 60–70 Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4 Tables drawn by Jian Liu and Gaofeng Xu New Urbanisation and “Go West” Policies, pages 78–89 Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Maps drawn by Matteo Migliaccio, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and Google Earth Architecture and New Towns, pages 97–103 Figs. 1, 2 Photographs by Michele Bonino, 2016

Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4 Photographs by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017 High-Rise Apartments, pages 143–155 Fig. 1 Photograph by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017 Figs. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Plans redrawn by Francesco Carota, based on plans drawn from promotional brochures and fieldwork data Figs. 7, 8 Photographs by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017 Undergrounds, pages 156–165 Figs. 1, 2 Photographs by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017

Fig. 3 Photograph by Michele Bonino, 2015

Urban Parks, pages 166–175

Fig. 4 Photograph by Michele Bonino, 2013

Figs. 1, 2, 3 Photographs by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017

Fig. 5 Photograph by Michele Bonino, 2014 Mapping New Towns, pages 177–201 Zhaoqing New Area. The Saturation of the Pearl River Delta, pages 107–114 Fig. 1 Masterplan of Zhaoqing City (2015 –2030), redrawn by Astrid Safina Fig. 2 Photograph by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017 Fig. 3 Masterplan of Zhaoqing New Area (2012–2030), redrawn by Astrid Safina

Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Maps drawn by Matteo Migliaccio and Maria Paola Repellino, based on plans drawn from OpenStreetMap, Google Earth, and fieldwork data. pages 230–231 Photograph by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017

Fig. 4 Photograph by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017 Zhengdong. Empowering the Inland Metropolis, pages 115–122 Fig. 1 Masterplan of Zhengdong New District (2001–2009), redrawn by Leonardo Ramondetti Fig. 2 Photograph by Samuele Pellecchia, 2017

Illustration Credits

Fig. 3 Masterplan of Zhengbian New District (2009 –2020), redrawn by Leonardo Ramondetti

251

Acknowledgements

The project involved a number of research partners to whom we would like to express our gratitude. It was realised within the framework of “La Ricerca dei Talenti” initiative, and it was supported by Politecnico di Torino and Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Torino through the research grant given to Michele Bonino in December 2015 (http://www.researchers.polito.it/en/success_stories/la_ricerca_dei_talenti_projects).

The research has been further developed within the EU project TRANS-URBAN-EU-CHINA (Transition towards urban sustainability through socially integrative cities http://transurbaneuchina.eu/), led by Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER ) and 14 international partners, Politecnico di Torino and Tsinghua University among them. The project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 770141.

TRANS-URBAN EU-CHINA

Research & Innovation on Urban Transition

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