جهت یابی مجدد طرح های شهرستان: برنامه ریزی استراتژیک و رقابت طراحی در چین

Rather than being abandoned along with the demise of the centrally planned economy, city planning as a profession is flourishing in China. New hybrid plans such as strategic development plans (concept plans) have been invented, and the planning procedure has become more flexible. Design competition and planning consultancy are widespread. This paper examines the development of new strategic development plans and design competition. It is argued that city planning has been re-orientated from a technical rationale, i.e. allocating state development projects to the city, to the imperative derived from market-oriented development, i.e. consolidating competitiveness during inter-city competition. The contradiction between market and planning is that while the status of city planning has been raised and its approach is becoming more strategic, the actual functionality of city planning has become more instrumental.

Transition towards a more market-oriented economy in China has reduced the role of the socialist state in direct resource allocation. After more than two decades of economic reform, many directives of the centrally planned economy have been abandoned and replaced by the market. However, city planning has survived market-oriented reform and become the ‘phoenix rising from the ashes’. Since the late 1990s strategic development plans, planning consultation and design competition have proliferated. Indeed, as suggested by a senior planning official in the Ministry of Construction (Zhou, 2002a), city planning in China is now entering the so-called ‘third spring’.1 With increasing demand for city planning, urban planning and design academies and institutes are overwhelmed by the task of making plans. This phenomenon cannot be simply attributed to greater pragmatism advocated under economic reform and fast-growing economies. This paper attempts to examine the recent proliferation of plan-making activities so as to see how city planning has undergone re-orientation. The research is based on extensive interviews with local planning officials and material collected in fieldwork in major Chinese cities. In the second section, the relationship between planning and the market is reviewed with reference to the experience of advanced market economies. In the third section, economic reform and the changing planning system are discussed to provide an overall picture of the re-orientation of the city plan. In the fourth section, the making of the two strategic development plans of Guangzhou and Nanjing is examined. In the fifth section, changing planning practice regarding planning consultation and design competition is discussed. Finally, in conclusion, an assessment is offered regarding the extent to which city planning has now become a more plural, global, and strategic process. While the features identified here are not necessarily applicable to all Chinese cities, especially those in the inner and central regions, the general trend of re-orientation of the city plan is apparent.

This paper analyses recent changes in the profession of city planning during China’s transition towards a more market-oriented economy. I argue that, while the traditional approach of the master plan arising from the process of resource allocation in the centrally planned economy has been weakened, planning as a profession has adapted to the needs of the new phase of urban development and has flourished. Specifically, city plans have become re-orientated towards more strategic and flexible ones. First, the functionality of city planning has shifted from materializing economic planning defined by the socialist planning economy to enhancing economic competitiveness in inter-city competition. Second, the approach of planning goes beyond the two-tier system of the urban master plan and the detailed construction plan and witnesses the proliferation of hybrid plans including the concept plan or strategic development plan. Third, the process of planning involves design competition and planning consultation. Fourth, the output of planning adopts more strategic and policy recommendations. In short, the purpose of city planning has gone beyond supporting socialist economic plans to allocate resources according to top-down development goals, and become more proactive for market-oriented development. This is partially because city plans, presented often as maps, are very suitable for visualizing future growth. Mayors and political leaders are keen to use this vehicle to present their vision or the achievement in office. Similar to the influence of ‘branding the city’ in the market economy (Kipfer and Keil, 2002), city planning in China has been re-oriented from a rationalistic and technical work guided by the framework of national economic planning to a more proactive and instrumental device in local economic development. City planning in the period of economic reform witnesses a contradictory tendency: the development of the market economy has weakened city planning and made some of the conventional approaches of physical planning irrelevant; on the other hand, it is the new market-oriented development that creates a new imperative for economic competition and boosts the status of city planning as a proactive device in entrepreneurial governance. In sum, city planning in China has been driven away from its normative root – to create a new classless and communitarian environment (Enyedi, 1996, Fisher, 1962 and French and Hamilton, 1979) – to new economic instrumentalism which is more compatible with market-oriented urban governance. However, the above re-orientation of the city plan does not mean the creation of a brand new city plan. The adoption of new planning practices is selective and confined mostly to China’s more globally oriented cities. In many small and medium-sized cities and the cities of the inner and central regions, the conventional approach of urban physical planning is still widely practiced. While the new planning practice is becoming more inclusive and strategic, detailed investigations reveal the feature of path-dependency. First, while planning is now more open than it was, involving external consultation and even international design teams, the nature of economic instrumentalism keeps it at a distance from substantial public participation. The involvement of the public is in fact regarded as less efficient or ineffective in achieving economic targets and structural competitiveness – a term now deeply associated with neo-liberal urban policy (Jessop, 1998 and Kipfer and Keil, 2002). As seen from the concept plan, the strategic proposal is not formulated through public participation and does not involve wider public debate. Rather, the economic strategy and its spatial development are often the brainchild of well-known consultants or design professionals. In the style, format, and discourse of strategic planning, many shortcomings of traditional planning approaches remain. Some planners did not investigate in detail the problems of city development, but rather “invented unrealistic ‘new concept’ … some were keen to repackage these new concepts and to produce incomprehensible consultancy reports which limited the implementation” (Li, 2003, p. 32). Ironically, while the new strategic development plan is to remedy the inadequacy of research in conventional physical plans, it lacks serious research. These fashionable strategic studies are problematic because they introduce new concepts without rigorous research. Second, while international planning consultation and design contests are trendy in many large cities, especially when prestigious projects are involved, the making of the plan is in fact still locally oriented. On the surface, city plans are no longer prepared only by local city planning departments and can be purchased from domestic planning institutes in Beijing and Shanghai and even from architectural design firms throughout the world. However, external consultation is often symbolic – as commented by one director of a planning bureau: “sometimes it is more important to spend money to buy a plan than to produce a plan result itself” (interview, May 2002). Often, international expertise is too general in design principles and not fitted to the local situation. While detailed urban design may be subject to the influence of Western design concepts, strategic developments are so deeply influenced by local institutional setups that Western strategic plans, such as the structure plan in the UK and the concept plan in Singapore, are too difficult to be copied. Recommendations from international consultancies are often de-contextualized. To produce the final plan, a local institute is often asked to reconcile different scenarios proposed by different consultant teams by selectively picking up the realistic components that are more suitable for the local situation. There is also a sharp discrepancy between the plan produced and its actual implementation. Third, while the strategic development plan is more strategically oriented, its functionality is in fact more instrumental and more confined by short-term incentives. More often than not, plan making is given a very tight deadline, as short as two or three months. The initial purpose often originates from the adjustment of administrative boundaries, change in the leadership of municipal government, and new opportunities in large regional infrastructure projects. The plan gives too much emphasis to place promotion, and the making of the plan is often subject to the pressure to boost the status of the city rather than to make a comprehensive arrangement of conflicting interests. In the new market environment, planning bureaus face an enormous pressure to adapt their working mode from reactive to proactive. Strategic plans serve this purpose. But on the other hand, the lack of a solid social foundation continues to place a limit on its strategic role. The plan often serves as a flexible way to present the vision of local political leaders. Whether or not the concept proposed in the plan is used to formulate a growth strategy is often dependent upon the decisions of key political players. In sum, the making of city plan in China has been selectively re-orientated, in response to the changing environment brought about by progressive market-oriented reforms. While far from being totally abandoned along with the end of the planned economy or remoulded by the influx of international consultancy expertise, new planning practices continue to demonstrate institutional constraints originating in the political economy of market transition.