Understand the urbanism of 21st century China from its origins.
Author: María José Masnou. Professor at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona, and coordinator of the working group on ‘Urban, territorial development and sustainability’ of Cátedra China and urban consultant.
Keywords: China, urbanism, cities, urban planning.
A brief introduction to the origins and stages of urban planning in China from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century, will not allow us to understand more clearly what role urbanism has played in the Reform period, and how it has intervened in the intense processes growth and urban transformation.
Urban planning as a discipline had its origin in Europe, in the will to rectify, reform and regulate the spatial, functional, social and health disruptions that caused the development of the ‘Industrial Revolution’ in cities. The desire for urban reform, systematic and technical resolution of these problems and situation began in the mid-nineteenth century, integrating various technical knowledge and disciplines. Also coinciding in this period is the demolition of numerous historical walls, already obsolete, which prevent the expansion and modernization of cities. It is a period of exemplary growth and transformation cases, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, ...
All of this required integrated planning that contemplated new and complex scenarios, and proposed the regulatory frameworks and plans necessary for their development. Examples of reference for its innovation and its different urban contributions were the ‘Ensanche Plan’ by I. Cerdá in Barcelona (1859) or the ‘Haussmann Plan’ for Paris (1857), among the best known.
However, a process of disruption and spatial, economic, urban and social transformation similar to that linked to the Industrial Revolution in Europe had no parallel in 19th century Imperial China.
We can affirm that the urban discipline in China was introduced indirectly through the administration and management of the port cities of the international concessions obtained after the treaties of the two 'Opium Wars' in the 19th century, the first of them after the' Treaty of Nanking 'in 1842, in cities such as Shanghai, Fuzhou, Xiamen (Amoy), Ningbo or Guangzhou (Canton), but its influence did not transfer to the cities of the Imperial administration.
The different sectors of the international concessions in Shanghai.
The layout of the Chinese city in the Imperial administration was the reflection of a political-administrative order, that of the Imperial State that was spatially projected in a hierarchical and functional arrangement. An urban spatial structure that maintained its immobility until the end of the 19th century and did not question its urban DNA with policies of modernization and functional adaptation until the establishment of the Republic in 1911 (Masnou, 2012). For the first time, cities had municipal governments that allowed them to be managed independently as autonomous entities, separated from their rural hinterland (Esherick, 2000) and with autonomy to influence urban design. In this period the first demolitions of some foundational walls that surround the cities headquarters of the Imperial administration took place.
The academic training of Chinese elites abroad, such as Japan and Western-oriented, in Great Britain, the United States and France in the first decades of the twentieth century, allows the training of the first technical architects and urban planners. And also of the first urban plans, some of ‘Beaux Arts’ orientation such as the Plan for Nanjing of 1921.
In this environment, initiatives related to the reorganization, modernization and sanitation of cities take place in the hands of technicians and enlightened officials, who seek transformation through the autonomy of the newly created municipal administrations and their capacity for urban planning, as was the case of Canton (Tsien, 1999) ─ with Sun Fo ─, Hangzhou (Wang, 1999) ─ with Zhu Fucheng ─, Chengdu (Stapleton, 1999) ─ with Yang Sen─ as relevant cases.
The return of graduates and intellectual activists trained abroad helps to form the first departments of architecture and urban planning. This is the case of the pioneering architect Liang Sicheng, who, upon returning from his academic training at the University of Pennsylvania, joined the University of the Northeast in Shenyang in 1928 and later created after the end of the Japanese invasion and World War II. the Faculty of Architecture at Tsinghua University in 1946.
However, the Republican period of great national complexity due to the Japanese invasion, the Second World War and the internal civil war prevent the stability and continuity necessary to consolidate this modernization work and the institutions necessary for it.
The Socialist period (1948-1976), saw the city as a resource at the service of the economic planning of the country and the location of industrial production. The location of large industrial complexes and associated facilities in autonomous functional and spatial units in cities, the ‘work units’ are an urban typology that characterizes this period.
The inheritance of the years of ideological affinities and technical cooperation with the Soviet Union leave their mark on this centralized and technocratic state planning, as well as with the formal language of institutional architecture, whose monumentality makes the scale of political power visible.
TianAnmen Square
At the same time, much of the cultural and historical legacy of the architectural heritage suffers destruction and demolition for reasons of spatial and functional substitution or for ideological reasons, as during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1966-76). During this period, cities suffer a period of urban hibernation, and of great infrastructural neglect. Urban planning does not include the existence of the objectives and values contributed by the urban discipline as a configuration of an urban project according to the criteria of Western urbanism.
The Reform period that began in 1979 and the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping began a slow path towards the recovery of the value of the city, its economic role and the correction of the important accumulated urban deficits, not only during the previous period. The deficits are enormous, general and transport infrastructures, public, cultural and economic facilities, and a very important residential deficit.
The urban discipline and its framework appear as an extremely necessary instrument to order this urban transition from a planned economy to a socialist market economy.
Some researchers (Wu, 2015) describe the business nature of planning during the transition to a market economy, as a system that facilitates economic growth supported by land development.
This process will culminate with the enactment in 1990 of the ‘City Planning Act’, which establishes the foundations of the current system, is the legislation that formalizes the urban planning system in China. It specifies the roles and functions of the different institutions.
The creation of the first 'Special Economic Zones' (SEZ) in the 80's of the 20th century represent a turning point in the challenge of configuring a new urban framework and adequate land management system that supports the transformation and the growth of mainland Chinese cities. The ‘Land Use Rights’ (LUR) system will provide the efficient management system in force in Hong Kong.
And Shenzhen will be a pioneering urban laboratory, sharing the border with Hong Kong, the gateway to the global economy.
From the beginning of the 21st century, the development of the urban discipline in China, in a race against the clock, will be built through the accelerated demand for land to be urbanized, and often the urban framework will always arrive behind the praxis, the constructed reality.
We can affirm that, since the beginning of the Reform period, spatial planning has become an instrument for the transition and opening towards a market economy (Douay, 2018).
Thus, the character of urbanism in China must be understood within the framework of the country's planning, and subordinate to the development and economic construction of this nation.
This text is part of the introduction to an extensive article that analyzes the framework of urbanism in China in the Reform period, and that allows us to understand the complexity of its operation, its title is:
‘The framework of urbanism in the China of the XXI century. A discipline at the service of the construction of a nation ', published in the journal' Sinología Hispánica, China Studies Review '11.2 (2020), pp. 75-104
