Urban Sustainability and the Urban Forms of China's Leading Mega Cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou

Abstract

Rapid urbanisation and economic development in China since the 1980s have taken place while sustainable development has increasingly dominated the global planning trends. The three leading cities in China—Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou—have invariably adopted sustainability principles in their urban form planning strategies. However, their actual urban development has not yet realised these sustainability tenets. This article argues that such sustainability performance has resulted from the marketisation reforms in the urban sector. As compaction was not the governments' conscious effort to improve sustainability, the sustainability benefits and disbenefits of these three cities associated with their urban forms differed from those postulated in the compact city model. Urban policies were found to be more influential on some sustainability benefits/disbenefits than urban forms. The better successes of Shanghai and Guangzhou in developing new urban conglomerations over Beijing speaks for the need to consider the economic structure of the host city in devising multi-nodal urban forms.

1980 年代，可持续发展渐成全球城市规划大趋势，而中国则开始了快速的城市化和经济发展。中国的三大城市——北京、上海和广州——在城市形态规划战略中都纳入了可持续发展的原则。但这三座城市在实际发展过程中并未实现可持续发展的目标。本文作者认为这是城市市场化改革的后果。政府在改善可持续性时没有考虑小巧紧凑的方案，因而这三座城市在可持续性方面的得失，以及与其城市形态相关的优劣，不同于小巧模式的城市。研究发现城市政策比城市形态更多地左右城市在可持续性方面的优劣。上海和广州在发展新型城市群方面优于北京，说明在设计多节点城市形态时应充分考虑主要城市的经济结构。

Keywords:

• Urban sustainability
• compact urban form
• Beijing
• Shanghai
• Guangzhou

Acknowledgements

The work described in this article was funded by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. HKU742307H). The graphics in this article were prepared by Silvia L. S. Cheng, research assistant to this project.

Notes

1. Quoted from government statistics shown in Tables 1 and 2. Though not specified in the original sources, the urbanisation rates in Beijing and Guangzhou should refer to permanent population, whereas that of Shanghai should refer to registered population only.