Metropolitanization through making ‘new metropolitan plans’ in China

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Metropolitanization through making ‘new metropolitan plans’ in China

Wang, Weikai; Wu, fulong; Zhang, Fangzhu; (2024) Metropolitanization through making ‘new metropolitan plans’ in China. Habitat International , 143 , Article 102987. 10.1016/j.habitatint.2023.102987. Green open access

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Abstract

Although mega-city regions have attracted wide attention in China, recent ‘metropolitanization’ at the multi-city scale is poorly understood. To tackle the void, this paper examines the emergent ‘metropolitan plans’ (dushiquan guihua) since 2019 and identifies a paradigm shift in metropolitanization from ‘territorial urbanization’ to ‘multi-city regionalism’ in China. We find that 1) as a fuzzy and dynamic concept, the metropolitan region has been mainly employed as a policy object for state rationalities and has been upscaled from a city region scale to a multi-city scale; 2) regarding planning practices, the new metropolitan plans function as an overall collaborative framework to support priority tasks for city regionalism in a shorter term rather than formulating long-term spatial strategies; 3) as space of governance, the recent state-orchestrated metropolitan region reflects the newest round of state rescaling process to cope with domestic uneven development and urban issues through ‘urban unification’, and its materialization heavily relies on concrete cross-boundary projects delivery and coordination through soft governance. These findings not only provide conceptual clarity and relational understandings of the metropolitanization process but also exemplify the distinctiveness of the Chinese metropolitanization approach in terms of scalar logic, planning style, and associated governance mechanisms. This paper furthers the understanding of the divergence and diversity of metropolitan planning and governance practices in different political-economic circumstances.

Type:	Article
Title:	Metropolitanization through making ‘new metropolitan plans’ in China
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI:	10.1016/j.habitatint.2023.102987
Publisher version:	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2023.102987
Language:	English
Additional information:	© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords:	Metropolitan region, Metropolitan planning, Urban governance, City regionalism, China
UCL classification:	UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Planning
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10183205