Urban China

Urban China
Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2014-07-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1464802068

In the last 30 years, China’s record economic growth lifted half a billion people out of poverty, with rapid urbanization providing abundant labor, cheap land, and good infrastructure. While China has avoided some of the common ills of urbanization, strains are showing as inefficient land development leads to urban sprawl and ghost towns, pollution threatens people’s health, and farmland and water resources are becoming scarce. With China’s urban population projected to rise to about one billion – or close to 70 percent of the country’s population – by 2030, China’s leaders are seeking a more coordinated urbanization process. Urban China is a joint research report by a team from the World Bank and the Development Research Center of China’s State Council which was established to address the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in China and to help China forge a new model of urbanization. The report takes as its point of departure the conviction that China's urbanization can become more efficient, inclusive, and sustainable. However, it stresses that achieving this vision will require strong support from both government and the markets for policy reforms in a number of area. The report proposes six main areas for reform: first, amending land management institutions to foster more efficient land use, denser cities, modernized agriculture, and more equitable wealth distribution; second, adjusting the hukou household registration system to increase labor mobility and provide urban migrant workers equal access to a common standard of public services; third, placing urban finances on a more sustainable footing while fostering financial discipline among local governments; fourth, improving urban planning to enhance connectivity and encourage scale and agglomeration economies; fifth, reducing environmental pressures through more efficient resource management; and sixth, improving governance at the local level.

Thirty Years of Reform and Social Changes in China

Thirty Years of Reform and Social Changes in China
Author: Qiang Li
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 521
Release: 2010-08-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004187162

Thirty Years of Reform and Social Changes in China is translated from the original Chinese to provide a look into how scholars in China have been assessing their country's recent societal and political history. This volume and the others in the SSRC series, provide western scholars with an accessible English language look at the state of current scholarship in China on the interplay of the country's political and economic reforms with the society and daily life of its people.

Chinese Urban Transformation

Chinese Urban Transformation
Author: Chen Yuanzhi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000705765

Now an established global force, China has experienced a sustained period of staggering economic growth since policy reform in the 1970s. Chinese urbanisation is the most significant example of economic, environmental and social change both within China and globally. In recent years, central government has made a concerted effort to encourage city governments to realign their priorities and achieve a balance between economic efficiency, social justice and environmental protection. Chinese Urban Transformation: A Tale of Six Cities is a fascinating exploration of the dramatic development Chinese cities have undergone. Tracing this transformation through a comprehensive analysis of social and economic change in six cities, it unravels the complex relationship between policy, outlook and role that urban development plays in China’s view of itself, including the tensions resulting from rapid social and economic change.

The Transition of China's Urban Development

The Transition of China's Urban Development
Author: Jieming Zhu
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 191
Release: 1999-08-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0313371377

From 1949 to today, China has experienced dramatic changes in its economy and urban development. This book examines these changes and looks at one city, Shenzhen, in detail. The performance and behavior of a fledgling property market in the transitional economy are analyzed in the backdrop of real estate commodification and marketization. Students and researchers in urban geography, urban planning, economics, business, and real estate will find this monograph lucid and original. Two distinctive periods divide the last fifty years of development in China. The period 1949 to 1978 was dominated by central planning. After 1978, however, economic reforms brought a new property market to many of China's cities. The economic surge of this period has transformed these cities and helped create new metropolises. The special economic zone of Shenzhen grew from what was, until 1980, a landscape predominantly made up of rice paddy fields and traditional villages. By 1995, the population of the city grew to more than two and a half million. Two modes of land provision are identified as the main contributors to Shenzhen's urban development process, which is also echoed in other Chinese cities. Incremental urban land reforms are elaborated within a broad framework of institutional change, while marketization has brought many changes to Chinese society. Continued urban reform toward a market economy seems now irreversible.

Urbanization in China

Urbanization in China
Author: Yan Song
Publisher:
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2007
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Unprecedented urbanization is taking place in China and will continue over the next decades. China's level of urbanization rose from 18 percent in 1978 to 30 percent in 1995 and to 39 percent in 2002. It is expected that China will quadruple its total GDP and reach 55 percent of urbanization by 2020. Urbanization in China is a comprehensive process involving transformations in many areas, including the management of spatial expansion via modern urban planning, the administration of land use changes via land policy reforms, the process of rural-to-urban migration, and the development of public finance systems. All of these changes are part of China's transition from a centrally planned economy to a socialist market economy.

The Chinese City

The Chinese City
Author: Weiping Wu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2013
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0415575753

This text is anchored in the spatial sciences to offer a comprehensive survey of the evolving urban landscape in China. It is divided into four parts with 13 chapters that can be read together or as stand alone material.

China’s New Urbanization

China’s New Urbanization
Author: Chuanglin Fang
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2016-02-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3662494485

This book answers the call for New Urbanization, and proposes a “5+9+6” national spatial layout plan for the urbanization of the 770 major cities in China. This macro pattern is based on a few major metropolises at the center, and other cities supporting and benefitting from these metropolises to form a pyramid-like urban hierarchical system. The book also presents a comprehensive regionalization plan for China’s New Urbanization and strategic approaches to improving the quality of this New Urbanization. Currently, China is aggressively promoting a so-called New Urbanization, which has been regarded as one of the primary ways to build a moderately prosperous society, to address critical issues related to agriculture, rural regions and farmers, to expand domestic demand and promote industrial innovation, and to realize the China Dream. From a systematic perspective and using recently released urban data, the authors analyze the current status of New Urbanization in China and also investigate the various potential problems and obstacles to its concrete implementation. Based on the analyses and investigations, the authors propose strategic directions, paths and basic principles for China’s New Urbanization. In addition, they clearly identify the three different modes of New Urbanization, namely, the general mode, differentiated mode, and gradual mode. Today, many scholars argue that China’s urban regions are experiencing a highly unsustainable mode of development. Chinese cities are heavily burdened by the so-called “urban diseases,” which are characterized e.g. by congested traffic, polluted water and air, and a lack of open and green spaces. Traditional urbanization, which primarily focuses on economic development, must be fundamentally reformed. New Urbanization, which focuses on integrated economic development, social integration and space/environmental sustainability, or simply put, on the quality of urbanization, has been called for to provide a potential “cure” for these urban diseases. Due to the vastness of China’s population and its rapidly growing economic, political and cultural relationships with the rest of the world, the book demonstrates that the success of this New Urbanization is critical not only to the future of urban China, but also the future of urbanization worldwide. The book offers a valuable reference work for all researchers, graduate student and policy makers interested in China’s urban development.

The Great Urban Transformation

The Great Urban Transformation
Author: You-tien Hsing
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2010
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199568049

As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined. The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market.