Mapping China: Urbanisation - 9 The City Planners, Designers and Decision-Makers: Urban Planning Mechanism

Since the reforms of the 1980s, the decision-making process in China’s urban planning system has been drastically decentralised. In general, the municipal government is responsible for the production of city master plans.

Among the most important instruments enabling the government to control the physical layout of their cities are the Regulatory Plan and the Constructive Plan. A Regulatory Plan made by a qualified planning institution is considered a by-law, once endorsed by the local government. The most important elements of the plan include a development timeframe, development goals, a layout for urban transportation and land use, as well as density, building coverage, greenery spaces, height control, etc. for each of the urban blocks within the designated boundaries of the plan.

Developers can propose Constructive Plans, which are subject to the limits and bars set by the officially recognised Regulatory Plan. These plans regulate the space orientation, transport circulation and other detailed physical characters of the designated areas. The Constructive Plan has to be approved by the municipal government before any physical development can take place. Otherwise that will be considered a violation of the law.

Although Regulatory Plans restrict development activities in each street block, exceptional cases are allowed through ad hoc communication channels with the government. One such example is the Xin Tian Di redevelopment scheme, a successful commercial project featuring the preservation of historical architectural components, with which the developer from Hong Kong (Shui On) negotiated for a higher density allowance in the neighbouring blocks, which were then turned into high-rise luxury apartments and hotels.

While urban planning decision-making mostly takes place at the local levels, the state government is able to get hold of the reins by leveraging land as critical state capital and facilitating it at the centre of development.

First of all, according to national regulations, the revenue generated through the transaction of land ownership (a de facto user-right for limited durations) is divided into state and local sections, and the state section is much bigger than its municipal counterpart. Secondly, in order to manage the local development, state-owned corporations are set up to represent the will of the district government. Functioning at a local level, the biggest shareholder of these corporations is always the State-Owned Asset Supervision and Administration Committee, a representative of the State Council. This arrangement guarantees that all the cash flows are under surveillance of the state government.

For example, around 2000 a new town was planned in Songjiang, one of the townships in suburban Shanghai. While the decision to build the new town was made by the Shanghai Municipal Government, at the encouragement of the State Government the local implementation of the plan was facilitated through the Songjiang Planning Bureau and Songjiang New Town Development Co. Ltd. The latter, a state-owned company, was the key player in the making of the new town. It made sure the development pushed forward effectively, building transportation facilities and allocating lands to universities and private developers. But this top-down strategy of urban planning has its deficiencies. The residential development was targeted mainly for upper middle class people moving out of the city centre, who didn’t really show up in the first decade of the development. And the miscalculation was not rectified on time because of the rigid top-down decision-making routine.