Tomorrow's eco-city in China : eco-city development though a culture of collaborative communication

The delivery of Chinese eco-cities has met certain challenges in plan-making and the subsequent implementation of planning documents. Meanwhile, communicative and collaborative planning has been advocated as a method that can assist in decision-making and facilitating urban development in China. In...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wang, X.
Other Authors: Mell, Ian ; Kidd, Sue ; Bing, Chen
Published: University of Liverpool 2018
Subjects:
577
Online Access:https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.755690
Description
Summary:The delivery of Chinese eco-cities has met certain challenges in plan-making and the subsequent implementation of planning documents. Meanwhile, communicative and collaborative planning has been advocated as a method that can assist in decision-making and facilitating urban development in China. In the development of the ‘eco-city’, communicative and collaborative planning has met certain barriers to implementation, and has thus played a limited role in the planning system. This research aims at examining whether a communicative turn has occurred in the delivery of eco-cities with regard to sustainable development in China, discusses how communicative and collaborative planning could help to improve the development of Chinese eco-cities, and examines the methods that can achieve this. To provide an update on the difficulties of communication and collaboration in planning work, the development programmes of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city and the Shanghai Dongtan Eco-city are reviewed and compared. The Tianjin Eco-city was approved by central government as one of several pilot areas for developing eco-cities; the Dongtan Eco-city was suspended and failed to achieve its original vision. Data and evidence was collected from the planning documents in both Tianjin and Dongtan, and combined with data collected from interviews with 12 key persons who directly engaged in the delivery of the eco-city programme in China. Along with emerging technologies, local authorities are facing new challenges and opportunities in adopting communicative and collaborative planning. The study concludes that an extensive implementation of communicative and collaborative planning, through both traditional and emerging technologies, is required to reconcile the diverse interests of stakeholders and address the multi-disciplinary issues in the sustainable development of the Chinese eco-city. The major outcome of this study, as the final part of the thesis demonstrates, is a series of recommendations to mitigate issues during the delivery of Chinese eco-cities. According to these recommendations, a practical framework is developed to adopt a communicative rationality in the current Chinese planning system to facilitate the planning process of an eco-city programme in the field of plan-making, implementation, and monitoring. The study also contributes to stakeholder engagement through advancing a modified and innovative approach to dealing with the barriers to communicative activities and consensus building in the development of the eco-city programme in China.