Welcome to the second themed issue of Urban Design and Planning on China.
As stated in my previous editorial (Gu, 2014), over the past 30 years, China's urban planners have studied the theories and methods of urban and rural planning from western market-economy countries. They have also focused on delivering ‘problem-oriented planning’ and ‘goal-oriented developmental planning’ under China's reform and opening-up policy.
However, urban development in China has been largely dependent on informal institutional arrangements, such as land finance. Uncontrolled development arising from local governments seeking revenue from selling land and increasingly speculative private-sector developments have become major problems.
Without doubt the biggest change in China's urban spaces over the past three decades has been in the residential sector. In the socialist city of the 1980s, each work unit organised and built factories and housing, with planning policies such as ‘the factory in front of the residential areas’ and ‘the balance between jobs and housing’. Regardless of each work unit's size and resources, the accommodation provided to each family was broadly the same.
In the early days of China's reform, the country followed a principle known as, ‘giving priority to efficiency, giving consideration to fairness’, and also to allow ‘some people to get rich first, some areas to get rich first’. As a result, urban family income began to show a much greater range, with some earning much more than others.
In the 1990s China also reformed the urban housing system, effectively ending the socialist control by work units. This resulted in rapid urban development and redevelopment. Combined with the growing movement of poorer rural people into increasingly affluent cities, this resulted in a marked increase in urban social differentiation, social segregation and social polarisation.
The paper by Feng (2014) paper ‘Urban residential area transitions in China’ investigates the trends and characteristics of urban residential area transitions and analyses the problems from the perspective of city planning. Field surveys were carried out in the five largest metropolitan areas of Kaifen, Beijing, Nanjing, Chengdu and Chongqing. The study indicates that the basic urban residential unit in China went through a physical and social succession, from work unit (danwei) compound to commodity housing estates (xiaoqu), then to city complexes during the last three decades. The paper considers that the overall urban form appeared as a mosaic-like pattern, representing a Chinese-style space stratification and segregation.
Jiang and Hino then examines the housing development process in Beijing. Urban expansion in the city from 1992 to 2013 was found to be mainly due to housing development in the suburban area. A questionnaire was carried out to examine social characteristics of migrants in these areas. A companion paper by Zhou et al. (2014) discusses care for elderly in urban China, with a case study of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province.
The paper by Zhang and Zhou (2014) attempts to build a new framework by applying the idea of ‘paradigms’ to urbanisation and urban planning. The paper shows that some of China's planning practices have now transcended those in the west and are in the process of producing new paradigms, helping the country realise better urbanisation and urban planning.
In the final paper by Miao et al. (2014) reliability is calculated using a computer code based on reliability theory. The results show that the reliability index for logarithmic normal distribution is higher than normal distribution. It is concluded that the clustering center method has higher reliability in predicting pile bearing capacity than the Eslami and Fellenius method, Almeida method and Powell method.
I hope this second themed issue will provide readers with a further understanding of the process of transformation, existing problems and future prospects for urban residential areas in China.
