Towards Sustainable Cities in China

The most significant worldwide social change that has occurred in the last 200 years has been the large-scale agglomeration of the world’s population in urban areas. During 2008, the proportion of the world’s population who lived in urban areas reached 50% for the first time in history, symbolizing the beginning of the era of an urban-dominated society

Since the 1980s, the Chinese government or related sectors and management institutions have discussed and explored many aspects of urban construction, including the “civilized city” which emphasized social culture, “environmental protection model city,” “garden city,” “ecological garden city,” and “eco-city” which focused on protecting the urban ecological environment, “hygienic city” and “healthy city” which stressed caring for residents’ health, as well as the “livable city” focusing on residents’ living comfort. Various urban models have their own implementation focuses and the establishment goals continue to evolve and innovate along with the national urbanization process to ensure, promote, and adapt to the healthy and rapid development of China’s urbanization.

Apart from qualitative description, the most important method we used to analyze and assess the development level toward a sustainable city was quantitative analysis (Sustainable Development Strategy Study Group 2003). The quantitative analysis seeks and sets up a set of measures that can quantify the development level toward a sustainable city and answer the questions that people are generally concerned about. For example: What is the level and trend of sustainable city construction of this specific city? How can the city’s ranking be defined compared with the sustainable city construction level of other cities? What are the weak points and key issues in the sustainable city construction processes of this specific city? What are the prioritized areas and paths to enhance or improve the sustainable city construction level of this specific city? (Kuik and Verbruggen 1991; Opschoor 1992). We measured or assessed the sustainable city construction level precisely to answer questions.

Taking into account, the availability of required data, the basic comparability between cities, city size and level of urbanization, and other factors, the book selected 26 provincial or autonomous region capital cities (due to lack of data, Lhasa City and Taipei City were not included), four municipalities and five cities with independent planning, resulting in a total of 35 cities for the analysis and assessment of sustainable city in China in 2008.

For the sake of convenience and integration, the candidate cities were verbally analyzed in accordance with the ranking results of the comprehensive assessment with the awards bonus included, i.e., in the order of the Bonus Scenario shown in Table. The ranking order described in this chapter refers to the place of each city among the 35 candidate cities.

After nearly 30 years practice, China has made great progress in the field of sustainable city, especially achieving some breakthroughs in theoretical and practical issues. The Chinese economy is experiencing rapid development along with the three-step macrostrategy, and the urbanization process keeps on accelerating, making the task of sustainable construction and development faced by China extremely urgent. It is, therefore, vital for us to put forward and develop the macromanagement system and control measures for China’s sustainable city development according to the national conditions so that China’s sustainable city construction and development will be further promoted and assured. Sustainable city construction and development involves so many factors, and this book only carries out discussions and explorations on some comprehensive and fundamental factors.