Scaling-up Strategy as an Appropriate Approach for Sustainable New Town Development? Lessons from Wujin, Changzhou, China

Abstract

China has achieved rapid urbanization and unprecedented economic booming over the past three decades. Numerous cities and towns dreamed of cloning the miracles of Shenzhen and Pudong, Shanghai, in terms of their international development. However, inappropriate development strategies have meant that the majority of fast expanding urban suburbs or newly developed towns suffer a high ratio of vacant dwellings in real estate markets and a massive loss of farmland. The frequent exposure of these empty cities to mass media or the public has urged urban governments to impose fiscal austerity. These unexpected and negative consequences of urban development have explicit conflicts with sustainability. This paper aims to provide a political economy view of these unsustainable outcomes of new development. To achieve this, the processes and agendas of new city or town planning in Wujin District, Changzhou City, are analyzed and evaluated from the OPEN ACCESS Sustainability 2015, 7 5683 perspective of scale theory. Extensive interviews conducted with local politicians at different levels, planners, real estate agents and local residents facilitate the interpretation of these processes and agendas. It is argued that the legends of Shenzhen and Pudong, Shanghai originate from a modified neoliberal capitalism intervention at the right time and place, with which other peer cities are not comparable. It is concluded that the scaling-up strategy is not appropriate for the local new town development of Wujin, which has led to unsustainable outcomes-empty cities and towns-and created important lessons for the sustainable development of Chinese cities.

A temporally cyclic growth model of urban spatial morphology in China: Evidence from Kunming Metropolis

“…For instance, the public infrastructure investment dropped to 4.71 billion Yuan RMB, only amounted to 33.34% of that in the previous stage (1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007) (KMG, 1999;KBSM, 2014). At this stage, local government retreated back from the front desk, however, it not only allured real estate industries to replace them, but also ordered the sub-agencies of local government to move in, then forced high density infill urban growth to boom involuntarily, which cause the phenomena of "ghost city" more seriously (Chen et al, 2015). Consequently, the IID curve has exceeded the EID since 2011 ( Figure 5).…”

Unsuccessful Urban Governance of Brownfield Land Redevelopment: A Lesson from the Toxic Soil Event in Changzhou, China

“…The process of urbanization in China is essentially a land development dominated urbanization process [22,46]. During the process, the local governments, as the de facto owner of land, make use of abundant low cost and undeveloped land to enter into an alliance with enterprises and property developers for promoting industrialization and urbanization [47].…”

Spatial production and spatial dialectic: Evidence from the New Urban Districts in China

“…China's urbanization has typical "endogenous" characteristic and is strictly influenced by administrative forces (Cartier, 2016). On the whole, the theoretical interpretation of spatial organization such as NUD is relatively lacking based on the combination of spatial production and administrative division Chen et al, 2015;Fang et al, 2016). Under the people-oriented concept of new-type urbanization, we need to reorganize and rethink the NUD and its transformation with power and capital in space.…”