Prof. Fulong Wu, Dr. Fangzhu Zhang, and Mr. Zheng Wang secured a Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI)-commissioned project named ‘Planning for Growth: International Evidence from China’ from 2014 to 2015. The research examined evidence from China to show the significant economic, social and environmental value that a robust planning system could deliver. This project generated a report mainly for planners and other related policy makers, several public media outputs and a series of research outputs such as books and journal articles.
The main findings of the project, which were also a summary of the report are as follows.
1. The Chinese state stimulated the market through land development. A key means of providing market stimulus was through direct state actions. Chinese municipal governments in this regard were prime examples of ‘urban entrepreneurs’ who were actively involved in the development of urban projects.
2. The planning institutes played a key role in regulating markets. Planning in China had become an important mechanism for shaping the market according to the needs of the state and the general public.
3. Furthermore, the Chinese state used planning to shape the markets. Planning also fostered the overall competitiveness of the region by encouraging industrial development and the allocation of new land for developing new industrial sectors.
4. The Chinese state actively built the capacity of planning. Among many other aspects, building the capacity of planning could be understood as improving the mindset of public planners and ensuring that planning professionals were well connected to a broad social network of other market actors. In the Chinese context, planning was widely considered as a tool that could facilitate growth and thus enjoyed great popularity amongst political leaders. This firm confidence that planning could be a leading force in fostering economic growth was largely due to the proactive interpretation of the role of planning and also stemmed from political support of planning at the highest level.
5. The Chinese state created economic value through planning. The impact of planning in China was wide reaching and could not simply be understood as higher GDP growth. More importantly, whilst planning was sometimes associated with economic costs, planning also represented development and the creation of economic value. Value in this sense had multiple dimensions. The cases of Wuxi Taihu new town and Songjiang both illustrated how planning and land development could be effectively used to create new housing catering to various population groups as well as offering employment opportunities in these new satellite towns. In this sense, planning had effectively turned the demand for housing into an impetus for development and economic growth.
For more details, please see the summary here.
Please see the full report here.
The findings were also circulated in public media outlets, for example, a blog on The Planner.
Academic output included the widely-cited book ‘Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China’, and several journal articles such as:
Wu, F. (2018). Planning centrality, market instruments: Governing Chinese urban transformation under state entrepreneurialism. Urban studies.