China's Emerging Cities

The Making of New Urbanism

Fulong Wu

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415416177
• eBook ISBN: 9781134117703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

With urbanism becoming the key driver of socio-economic change in China, this book provides much needed up-to-date material on Chinese urban development.

Demonstrating how it transcends the centrally-planned model of economic growth, and assessing the extent to which it has gone beyond the common wisdom of Chinese 'gradualism', the book covers a wide range of important topics, including:

• local land development
• the local state
• private-public partnership
• foreign investment
• urbanization
• ageing
• home ownership.

Providing a clear appraisal of recent trends in Chinese urbanism, this book puts forward important new conceptual resources to fill the gap between the outdated model of the 'Third World' city and the globalizing cities of the West.

Part I
Cities as emerging institution

1 Beyond gradualism
China’s urban revolution and emerging cities

Fulong Wu

Urban revolution

Chinese cities are the country’s engine of economic growth. The level of urbanization increased from 18 percent in 1978 to over 43 percent in 2005 (State Statistical Bureau 2006). Driving rapid urban growth is the inflow of foreign capital into coastal China. Since gaining World Trade Organization (WTO) membership in 2001, China has been speeding up its pace of becoming a world factory. But where is the world factory physically located? Many factories for global commodity production in China are located in the cities, or more precisely within the metropolitan region. Global economic production is becoming part of urban economies, concentrated in the cities of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta but also widespread all over the country. Accompanying economic growth is the emergence of cities on the world stage of super-affairs or megaevents: Beijing will be hosting the Olympic Games in 2008; Shanghai the World Expo 2010; Guangzhou the Asian Games in 2010; and Shenzhen the 2011 Summer World University Games. With the development of international airports, deepwater ports and information port and logistics centers, Chinese cities are rebuilding themselves towards becoming “global cities” (Wu 2006).

China’s urban landscapes are being forcefully transformed: in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou but also in many other large cities such as Chongqing, Dalian, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Nanjing and Xi’an, skyscrapers mushroom in central areas; fast elevated multilane roads extend to suburbs where gated communities, development zones, and high-tech parks are scattered. Infrastructure is being built at an unbelievable pace.

Large-scale urban redevelopment schemes have converted old neighborhoods into modern office blocks. For example, in Shanghai, the government initiated a redevelopment program to demolish and rebuild 3.65 million square meters of old lane housing, which was achieved in 2000 (see He and Wu, Chapter 10 of this book; Tian and Wong, Chapter 11 of this book). The government then swiftly launched the second phase of the redevelopment program, involving the redevelopment of 20 million square meters of old housing. With the boom in real estate development, suddenly Chinese cities began to see the formation of a multilayer structure: old prerevolutionary lane housing remains in residual poverty neighborhoods; workers’ welfare housing, built in the prereform or early reform era, is deteriorating into low-quality residential areas; and new luxury condominiums have upgraded some parts of the city into gentrified residences. In the suburbs, gated high-standard commodity housing estates sometimes even flaunt ostentatious and magnificent gates, demarcating emerging “consumer clubs” in response to the retreat of the state from the provision of public goods (Wu 2005).

Chinese cities are now perhaps seeing the “newest” form of urban development reported in advanced Western market economies: sports-led property redevelopment near Nanjing Olympic Sport Center, leisure-led redevelopment to pursue the nostalgia for colonial or prerevolutionary republic era in Shanghai’s Xintiandi and Nanjing’s 1912, arts-led regeneration near the Great Tang Dynasty Garden in Xi’an, and artists’ enclaves in Beijing’s Factory 798. These landscapes can take a variety of forms: some transplant classical Western styles that are alien to China; some repackage Chinese architectural motifs of imperial palaces into playful fun parks, while others like Beijing’s Factory 798 reuse derelict industrial buildings and adapt them to postmodern cultural production and consumption. Chinese cities are also becoming experimental sites for global signature architects and their firms, ranging from Paul Andreu to Rem Koolhaas.

While Chinese cities are modernizing, or even postmodernizing themselves, classical components of the Third World City have reemerged. Some quasislum areas or deteriorated neighborhoods accommodate millions of “floating population” or migrant workers. Former rural villages encroached on by urban expansion are becoming “villages in the city” (chengzhongcun), spontaneously built by farmers into very high density areas. Farmers rent out their houses, often now with multiple floors, to migrants from other places. But these buildings are so close to each other, because each owner of a land plot wants to maximize the use of the land, that the streets between them barely allow fire engines and ambulances to enter. The infrastructure and public facilities of these neighborhoods are completely missing. However, these villages provide cheap housing for migrants, and are becoming virtually migrant enclaves.

It is now even possible to depict a general model of the new Chinese city. While Chinese cities vary greatly according to their geographical locations and histories of development, some generic elements are present almost everywhere, including

• Central Business Districts (CBDs) or financial streets such as Shanghai’s Bund and Lujiazui Financial and Trade Zone, or Beijing’s CBD in Chaoyang district and Xidan financial street;
• Bar street and night-time entertainment places such as Shishahai and Sanlitun in Beijing, Hengshan road and Xintiandi in Shanghai, Hunan road and 1912 in Nanjing, Kundu in Kunming, and the Great Tang Dynasty Garden in Xi’an;
• Boulevards, pedestrian streets, and magnificent city squares such as the Century Avenue in Shanghai and Jiefangbei in Chongqing;
• High-tech parks and economic development zones such as Beijing’s Haidian university and science park and Shanghai’s Zhangjiang high-tech park;
• Gated communities in Western styles such as the Orange County, Yosemite, and McAllen in Beijing, Fontainebleau in Shanghai, and Creative Britain in Kunming;
• “Villages in the city,” widely seen in almost every Chinese city, with varying qualities of built environment.

What are the factors that contribute to China’s urban revolution? The remainder of this chapter will look into this radical nature of postreform urban development, in contrast to the common wisdom of Chinese gradualism.

The catalyst factor of globalization

Since the adoption of an open-door policy, China has seen phenomenal growth in foreign direct investment (FDI). China is the second largest country in terms of absorbed FDI (Nolan 2004), and in 2005 FDI amounted to 60.33 billion US dollars, growing from 3.39 billion US dollars in 1989 (State Statistical Bureau 2006). Since China joined the WTO in 2001, the pace of integration into the global economy has quickened. Globalization is becoming a major driving force for China’s economic growth (see Yang, Chapter 5 of this book).

However, China’s growth is not totally determined by the agenda of globalization. The influence of globalization on the locality is mediated by the state at various levels. In contrast to India, where the demographic political setup allows more bottom-up development, China’s urban development is still very top-down, in the sense that the state plays a much more important role. Many ambitious development projects, including the building of global cities, are initiated out of the strategic considerations of the national state. For example, the development of Shanghai as a global city is part of an overall strategy to revitalize the Yangtze River region (Wu 2000). Thus, the central government has provided much support, both institutionally and financially (in terms of changing the tax regime), to the city. While the development of Shanghai reveals the role of the central state, the development of China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (Pereira 2003) shows another example of the importance of the local state. Reading China as an authoritarian state, the Singapore government negotiated the project mainly with the central government in Beijing. Because the Suzhou municipality was placed in a peripheral position in the Park development, it decided to set up its own development zone – the Suzhou New District, an industrial zone controlled by the local government. The two parks are in competition, with the latter having the advantages of low-cost land development. The example shows that foreign investment cannot act on its own without the support of the local state, even with nominal approval from the central state. Foreign capital has to be embedded into local politics. This global–local nexus means that globalization is not simply a “homogenization” process through which the global overcomes the local.

This perspective of locally initiated globalization is particularly important to the understanding of the spread of Western architectural styles in China. Drawing from the examples in Globalization and the Chinese City (Wu 2006), this section will decode the factor of globalization. Western building styles are often selectively adopted and mixed (e.g. “continental European style”), and are becoming very popular in China. Gated residential enclaves, built in the style of American “gated communities,” are spreading out in the suburbs of Chinese cities. Some are so “exotic” that they do not really belong to any single American, French or Dutch style, but rather display a mélange of Western architectural motifs. They bear fantasy Western place names such as Orange County and Venice Garden, but in fact they are imagined forms of the West.

In the design of landmark buildings, Western architects and their firms are invited to apply various sorts of new concepts. The Western style also deeply penetrates “ordinary” residential landscapes. The Orange County (Beijing) is such an example. Located 16 kilometers into the northern suburbs of Beijing, the Orange County is one of Beijing’s luxury gated communities along the belt of villa compounds near the Wenyu River. What is unusual is that the project boasts that it adopts “100 percent authentic North American design” (Wu 2004). According to the promotional materials, the design uses a new visionary concept that helps to maintain an atmosphere of “community.” This sense of community is also, it is claimed, derived from “mimicking a French town on the River Seine,” and therefore it fully “presents exotic characteristics of the foreign country” (from promotional web page). The construction materials, including doors, windows and ventilation systems, are in fact imported from overseas. Some houses in the Orange County are built in a townhouse style, which is a kind of product innovation. In the prereform period the dominant form of housing was multistorey matchbox-style walk-ups. In the 1980s (the early stage of reform), high-rise and high-density commodity housing estates began to emerge. They are built in the form of residential districts (micro-regions), a concept originating from the Soviet residential plan (French and Hamilton 1979). While the large modern housing estates developed in the 1980s are better than the workers’ villages built in the 1950s, market reform has raised the aspirations of the middle class that has benefited from marketization.

Driven by the desire for lower density, more green space and private car travel, those “who want to own a plot of land under the feet and a piece of sky overhead” began to seek the villa type of living, which would bring them “land, sky, garden, and garage,” a lifestyle which has not previously been seen in China. But the form of the villa demands more land, which is scarce in densely populated Chinese cities. The government in Beijing also tightened control over villa projects after the villa market collapsed in the Asian Financial Crisis. The townhouse, as an “economic villa,” fills the gap between luxury villas and ordinary high-rise commodity housing, and is becoming popular with the upwardly mobile middle class. These townhouses mostly follow Western styles, as do the luxury villas.

In addition to the clustering of luxury villas, the villa compounds that are targeted at foreign tenants (mostly expatriates) are built close to each other, forming “foreign gated communities.” This spatial concentration, it appears, reflects the rising demand for high-quality expatriate housing due to globalization. However, looking into the formation of concentrated foreigners’ villa areas, it is revealed that such a separation of foreign and local housing is due to the historical requirement for the special approval of “foreign housing” or “housing for foreign sales.” Domestic and foreign properties are separate submarkets. The latter is a kind of market that is unsubsidized. But the customers of foreign gated communities are not limited to expatriates. Now, since the category of foreign housing sales was abolished and merged into local sales (i.e. there is no difference between foreign and domestic sales), the gated form is becoming popular, promoted by the developer as well as the government to meet the increasing demand for better and safer residential space. In fact, while the gate has existed in China for many dynasties, it has now been rediscovered as an instrument for the partitioning of derelict socialist landscapes produced by “economizing the cost of urban development” and a postsocialist imagined good life (Wu 2005).

More recently, under the notion of “new urbanism” and “transit-oriented development” (TOD), developers emphasize the small-town atmosphere and the value of “community” to boast their product innovation. Again, they selectively package the elements of neo-traditionalist design, originally advocated by Duany and Plater-Zyberk (1993), such as a walkable community, compact urban form, neighborhood, or small town social relations, into a theme-park-like residence. For example, the McAllen Courtyard Villa claims that the project was named by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. These kinds of Chinese versions of “new urbanism” designs, however, intentionally forget about the advocacy of their originals for a “compact” urban form and higher reliance on public transit. The American version of new urbanism, as a kind of “smart growth,” at least has an environmental agenda in the context of American suburban sprawl. But the Chinese traditional city form is more compact. The adoption of American new urbanism in the Chinese context is leading to urban expansion and the loss of more agricultural land (see Giroir, Chapter 12 of this book, for golf communities, which occupy excessive land).

How to explain this spread of Western residential forms? Do they reflect the hegemony of “globalization” or the imperialism of Western culture along with economic globalization? Did Chinese cities jump over the linear stages of modernization into “postmodern urbanism” (Dear and Flusty 1998), given that the basic elements of the latter (e.g. de-contextualized building styles, gated communities, thematically preserved heritages, and playful nightscapes) are all present in Chinese cities? These questions will lead to a more fundamental question, that is, what is the role of globalization in China’s urban development?

Does this reflect globalization? Not really. This is at least different from so-called McDonaldization, as it is not Western styles that overwhelm and diminish Chinese styles. This is more a sort of “imagined globalization,” using global motifs to sell off “local” products. Some tenants in Western-style communities might be translocal migrants, but the landlords are almost all the Chinese new rich. Globalization provides the possibility (such as the transplanting of different building styles), but how to turn this possibility into reality (e.g. the construction of the Orange County, Beijing) depends greatly on local conditions and politics. The local conditions for the development of exotic Western-style gated communities ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part I: Cities As Emerging Institution
• Part II: Transitioning Economic and Social Spheres
• Part III: Rebuilding Residential Space
• Part IV: Emerging Leisure, Retailing, and Consumption Practices