Crossing the river by feeling the stones : Approaches to Sustainable Urban Development in China

Open Access

Abstract

China already has the highest numbe of,and largest cities in its history. According to recent statistics, Chinese cities were home to 52.6% of China's total population at the end of 2012. If the current trend holds, it is predicted that by 2025 the Chinese urban population will be over 1 billion including eight megacities, each with a population of over 10 million. Urbanisation is part of a central strategy of the Chinese Government to aid development and gradually raise welfare standards. Meanwhile, environmental problems in China are getting more severe which now threatens the balance of sustainable development. To address the environmental challenges caused by and in cities and to balance its economic growth with social and environmental aspects, China has made itself a vast living laboratory for sustainable urban development approaches. Many city concepts such as green city, garden city, and eco-city and low-carbon city have been promoted and put into practicein the past two decades at different levels and scales. The reasons why so many concepts have been used in China are: the vague definition of sustainable development; different governmental departments have been engaged in promoting different concepts each with a different focus; the concept itself evolved over time. One common feature of these concepts is that none of them is well defined. However, there is a clear trend that the concepts are becoming more comprehensive regarding their coverage of more aspects of sustainability. Case analysis of the more popular concepts eco-city, low-carbon city, low-carbon eco-city, eco-civilization, and other experiences show, that the lack of definition of the concepts proves important barriers in practice. It's not possible to clearly define these concepts because they are more or less value based, but it is desirable to develop more scientifically based frameworks within which urban planning can be carried out. Another barrier is that urban planning in China is implemented with a confused backdrop of a state ...