Singapore, a Model for (Sustainable?) Urban Development in China: An Overview of 20 Years of Sino-Singaporean Cooperation

ABSTRACT: In order to face the challenge of sustainable urban development on its own territory, China has chosen Singapore as its model and privileged partner. By analysing more than 20 years of cooperation, the aim of this article is to study what sort of vision and model for development China is pursuing, how the “Singaporean model” is imported and incorporated by Chinese stakeholders, and in what ways it is transforming the specificities in planning, building, and organising the country’s cities. Our analysis covers two Sino-Singaporean urban operations that are currently leading the way in China: the Suzhou Industrial Park and the Tianjin eco-city. The incorporation of the Singaporean model into these two operations shows that the latter offers an effective way of linking economic development with urban production, and of enabling the building of orderly cities with good environmental standards. However, these advances have only been made possible by the capacity to take political and financial initiatives that are still exceptional in the country as a whole, and until now do not appear to be easily extendable to other Chinese cities. Moreover, the Sino-Singaporean view of urban development based on productivity and concentrating on supply, infrastructure, and technology encounters major limitations in terms of environmental sobriety and the cities’ social integration. KEYWORDS: urban planning, eco-city, sustainable urban development, environment, models, infrastructure, technology, institutions, China, Singapore.

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Chinese Urban Planning: Environmentalising a hyper-functionalist machine?

ABSTRACT:How should the considerable discrepancy between the concepts of sustainable urban development proclaimed by the Chinese authorities and the reality on the ground be understood? This article examines the urban planning procedures that currently hold sway in China. The building of new cities is based upon a generic method of hyper-productivist and functionalist planning, reflected as a pyramid structure that extends over the whole country and is embodied by urban zoning on a vast scale. This procedure, which has been in force for nearly 30 years, is not at present one that is called into question by Chinese decision-makers, and does not take environmental principles seriously into account. Conversely, all of the reasoning upon which urban development is based remains very far removed from environmental considerations. China is continuing down the road of accelerated development behind the wheel of a growing hyper-functionalist urban machine. KEYWORDS: urban planning, environment, sustainable development, urban planning model, functionalist urban planning, utilities networks, institutional system, SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park).

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