Abstract
In the past forty years, more than 3,800 new towns emerged and accommodated over 150 million urban inhabitants in China, which drew much attention since they were reported as “ghost cities” by media in the late 2000s. This literature review examines existing research and synthesizes current discussions through a meta-analysis. It concludes that existing literature, led by environmental scientists and designers, exhibits two polarized debates around the new towns’ uniqueness and the future of ghost cities. Gaps exist in national-scale surveys, criticism of planning methodology, and theories that can explain the current disputes.
Keywords
Introduction
China's new town phenomenon has transformed millions of people's living environments over the past few decades, raising interest from hundreds of scholars and practitioners. Since the Reform and Opening-up in 1978, China's rate of urbanization has skyrocketed from 20% to 60%, meaning that the urban population has increased dramatically from 170 million to 850 million. In the past few decades, the central government and local municipalities have initiated thousands of new town projects to absorb rural migrants and promote economic development. Today, more than 3,800 new towns occupy nearly 30,000 km2 land and provide shelters for about 150 million people (Wang, Liu, and Wang 2021). However, neither the public nor the researchers paid much attention until the media coined the term “ghost cities” (Chan 2009; Chen 2013; Powell 2010), an ironic expression of the new town projects with few residents. Research from various fields has sprung up in recent years and spurred the debates around China's new towns.
Evaluating the new town literature is of significant value to guide future policy-making and planning practices, especially during China's urban transition era today from high-speed to high-quality development. First, the new town phenomenon is an excellent topic to examine China's modernization policies because of the various stakeholders and disciplines involved. Local political leaders, economists, planners, and designers experimented on the sheer scale of greenfield development with innovative mechanisms through real-world practices. Second, the socio-economic context in which China's new town phenomenon originated has recently begun to change, calling attention to the question of whether the early ideas are still useful today. As the economy is slowing down, China is proactively shifting from conventional development-driven urbanization to new-type urbanization by focusing on inhabitants’ living environment instead of land expansion. Such an urban policy suggests that the previous nationwide land-driven new town projects might shrink to the first-tier and second-tier big cities to address people's concerns with congestion and overpopulation. Synthesizing the past ideas will provide scholars with sound foundations in the new context. Practitioners, including political leaders and planners, also need to understand how academia interprets the new towns’ past and what scholars recommend for the future. Third, although academic discussions around the topic have proliferated in the past ten years, no comprehensive literature review of China's new towns exists.
This review aims to answer the research questions of (1) Who studies China's new towns? and (2) How do scholars comment on these projects? Thus, the first objective is to delineate which disciplines are involved in the discourse of Chinese new towns. As the discussion has been heating up, more and more praise and criticisms from multiple perspectives have emerged in the past several decades. However, it is still unclear who is leading the conversation and which fields are playing crucial roles in determining the new towns’ future development directions. Examining the existing literature will raise scholarly attention to the neglected disciplines and will balance the dialog to help promote the contributions of differing fields. The second objective is to distill the consensus and debates of the existing literature on China's new town phenomenon. Since they were first reported on as “ghost cities” by the media around 2010, China's new towns have attracted numerous publications from various audiences, including scholars, practitioners, and the public. Therefore, extracting the agreements and conflicts will simplify the complicated topic for further studies.
This literature review encompasses hundreds of journal articles, dozens of monographs, and several official documents and reports published after 2000 in English and Chinese. Acknowledging the broad themes discussed, it focuses on the disciplines directly related to planning, such as spatial planning, urban design, ecology, and transportation. It also touches upon research in other fields such as political science, economy, and sociology when they provide pragmatic insights for planners. This extraction of information will guide future planning practice and research by highlighting the crucial consensus and debates as well as the weaknesses of existing literature.
The paper has five sections. Following the introduction, the second section briefly synthesizes the scholarly understanding of China's new town history. The third section explains the terminology, methods, and data used in this literature review. The fourth section unfolds the key findings: it outlines the intellectuals studying the topic and their agreements and disagreements. This review argues that researchers’ assessments of China's new town phenomenon, led by environmental scientists and designers, revolves around two debates: (1) Do Chinese new towns exhibit exceptional traits related to the country's rapid urbanization, or are they ubiquitous globally? (2) Are Chinese new towns ghost cities, or will they become promising urban centers in the upcoming future? Furthermore, the review concludes by calling for further research around China's new town phenomenon, focusing on national scale assessments, criticisms of planning methodology, and theoretical updates to accommodate the debates in the contemporary context.
History and Facts
China's new town phenomenon “epitomizes the national socio-economic development” and aligns with “the trajectory of the country's urbanization” (Gu 2015a, 61). From 1978 to 2019, China's gross domestic product (GDP) increased from US$ 149.5 billion to 14.4 trillion, while the rate of urbanization increased from 20% to 60%. As part of this growth, the new town trend, instituted by the central government and local municipalities, spread widely across the country along with the unprecedented economic escalation and urban congregation, representing China's decades-long effort toward modernization spatially, and “reflecting the transformation of regional culture and national identity” (Lin 2012, 225). Furthermore, while some tend to view China's contemporary urbanization as a consistent experiment and achievement, it has, in fact, advanced under a variety of agendas over forty years’ practice. Thousands of spatially and temporally diverse new town projects demonstrate how the central government and local municipalities envisioned urbanization in various regions, under various cultures, and over various periods. Nobody could forecast China's cities and villages in 1978, since the urbanization and new town phenomenon evolved through a tortuous trajectory to adapt to the nation's shifting socio-economic context over the past four decades.
China's new town history aligns with national development strategies. While new town projects exist from 1949 to the present, existing literature “focuses mostly on the recent past” (Wang 2020). Scholars categorize China's new town growth into three phases: the 1980s initiated by marketization, the 1990s promoted by metropolitanization, and the 2000s driven by globalization (Duan and Yin 2011, 180; Gu 2015a, 65; Wu, Yang, and Zhang 2011, 21; Yang and Liu 2017, 27). As early as the 1980s, national industrial investment incubated the first generation of new towns (Duan and Yin 2011, 180). In 1984, the central government designated fourteen Economic and Technological Development Zones in the coastal cities, such as Dalian, Qinhuangdao, Tianjin, and Qingdao. These projects evolved into industrial cities by attracting investment, creating jobs, and absorbing migrants. Later, in the 1990s, the extensive influence of the Reform and Opening-up brewed the second generation of new towns in the metropolitan areas (Gu 2015a, 71). The national land policy reform stimulated urban entrepreneurialism and triggered many local municipalities to initiate development zones for economic growth. The new towns gradually joined the expanding old cities spatially, forming the metropolitan areas and megaregions. The Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Shandong Peninsula, and other developed regions became the hot spot areas for new towns in this era, such as the Pudong New Area in Shanghai. In the 2000s and the early 2010s, globalization amplified the new town trend more dramatically than in the late twentieth century. Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, its role as “the World's Factory” has attracted international interests and stimulated migration from inland to the southeast coast. International investments and global events prompted the creation of various new towns such as industrial parks and Olympic villages beside the growing real estate-driven projects. For example, the Suzhou and Tianjin governments cooperated with Singapore and built the China–Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park and Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city in 1994 and 2007, respectively. Beijing took advantage of the infrastructure and amenities built for the 2008 Olympic Games and initiated three new town projects in Shunyi, Tongzhou, and Yizhuang right after its closure.
Scholars and research institutions are fully aware of the sheer scale of the phenomenon. Today, China has more than 3,800 new towns (19 National New Areas (NNAs) and 552 National Development Zones designated by the central government, 1,991 Provincial Development Zones approved by the provincial administrations, and 1,284 new towns initiated by local municipalities). On average, each county manages 1.5 new towns. In total, these projects occupy 28,952 km2 of land, equating to 14% of China's built environment (Wang, Liu and Wang 2021). Research indicates that the growth in the twenty-first century is larger than ever. By the end of 2011, 1,557 new towns had emerged after 2000, while only 43 and 533 were built in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively (Liu, Liu, and Sheng 2013, 79). Spatially, new towns are distributed across the country consistent with population density and economic vitality. Research shows that only 26% of new towns were located in the central and western regions, but 74% were in the more developed eastern region (Ji et al. 2015, 85). Around 1,680 new towns cluster in China's seven megaregions (Wang, Liu and Wang 2021), more than 300 of which are in Jing-Jin-Ji (Feng 2016).
Terminology, Methods, and Data
Terminology
While the new town projects have many Chinese names, this review keeps the English term “new town” because of its wide-ranging scope and global acceptance in the planning field since Ebenezer Howard proposed the idea of the Garden City at the end of the nineteenth century. In this literature review, the term “new town” includes many Chinese alterations, whose subtle differences are not emphasized in the media, public, and administration as seriously as in the new town scholarly literature. The three most common variations are (1) “new area” (新区), (2) “development zone” (开发区), and (3) “functional new town” (功能性新城). Most close to Howard's conventional new towns, new areas primarily refer to greenfield developments proximate to existing cities with both housing and work. Some visionary high-level governmental bodies often designate these comprehensive projects, including the 19 NNAs directly initiated by the central government. Another group of projects, usually approved by the central or provincial government, favors “development zones”, which often relates to the Reform and Opening-up context from the 1980s. The National Development and Reform Commission verified a list of all development zones in 2018 and divided the 552 National Development Zones into five categories, including Economic and Technological Development Zone, High-tech Industrial Development Zone, Areas under Special Customs, Border/Cross-border Economic Cooperation Zones, and Others, such as Resorts and Investment Zones (National Development and Reform Commission 2018). Lastly, functional new towns often refer to local projects, proposed by city or county level municipalities without high-level government intervention, such as “industrial parks” (工业园), “university cities” (大学城), “Olympic villages” (奥运新城), “aviation towns” (空港新城), and “ecological cities” (生态新城), which often closely reflect their functions and identities.
The jumbled naming system, unsurprisingly, has confused scholars interested in new town studies. Jian Liu and Gaofeng Xu's analysis broadly refers to new towns as “the urban expansion” driven by various policies, including urban-planning-policy-driven “new cities” and “new towns,” economic-development-policy-driven “development zones,” and comprehensive-reform-policy-driven “new areas” (Liu and Xu 2019, 60). Increasingly, planners have adopted the term “new town and new district” (新城新区) (Gu, Yu, and Li 2008, 636; Wu, Yang and Zhang 2011, 194; Zhang 2009). Although there is no consistent definition yet, existing literature tends to identify new towns with a policy-driven greenfield urban development approach. Shilin Liu defines a new town and new district as “a new urban center with independent political administrations in rural areas” (Liu, Liu and Sheng 2013, 77). Chaolin Gu regards China's new town and new district as “planned urban spaces to promote economic development” (Gu 2015b, 31). The China Academy of Urban Planning & Design simplifies the meaning of new town and new district as the “government-initiated autonomous space proximate to urban cores” (Wang, Liu and Wang 2021).
Acknowledging the various opinions on what should be counted as a new town in China's urban context, this review purposefully maximizes the research scope and covers all the projects named in any Chinese nomenclature variations. In conventional western definitions, new towns typically are (1) spatially new and (2) a mix of residential and productive areas. These classic principles, derived from Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities, became the foundation of contemporary new town research. However, this review argues that these obsolete doctrines limit scholars from fully interpreting China's urban practices today. First, as Wu, Yang, and Zhang claim, China's new towns have exhibited new mechanisms more than new spaces (Wu, Yang and Zhang 2011, 20). Since China has been a mature civilization of millennia, local inhabitants have cultivated much land for agricultural production before modern urbanization, which naturally restrained greenfield development. Second, the argument for excluding development zones and industrial parks from new towns neglects that their names merely reflect the initial economic strategies. Many of China's development zones and industrial parks grew quickly and, as people gradually settled down, these monofunctional projects eventually turned into cities of residents and industries. For example, two projects designated in 1994, Beijing Development Zone (Yizhuang) and Suzhou Industrial Park, both become mixed-use new towns and accommodate 176,000 and 821,000 people, respectively. Therefore, this review adopts a broad new town definition, aiming at contributing to China's urbanization studies rather than only tracing the descendants of Garden Cities. Howard's new town idea has spread and evolved over more than a century and has been localized by planners in various regions. Opening the window for a broader new town definition can enrich how scholars interpret the nineteenth-century idea's contemporary influences.
Methods
This review applies a meta-analysis to comprehend the topics and opinions of the existing literature. The dataset includes reports, monographs, book chapters, journal articles, and essay collections in both English and Chinese. The review first investigates the dataset's landscape, focusing on the sources’ academic fields, geographic locations, and research methods. It then examines the authors’ thoughts on the new town phenomenon by synthesizing consensuses and debates.
The dataset of this review covers recent books and peer-reviewed articles in both English and Chinese between 2000 and 2020. The English papers primarily come from the Web of Science database, with a few supplementary pieces from ProQuest. CNKI, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, provides all the peer-reviewed articles in Chinese. The search of English literature is limited to the papers whose title includes “China” or “Chinese” and “new town” or its synonyms such as “new city,” “new area,” and “new district.” The search in CNKI identifies Chinese papers with the keywords of “新城” or “新区.” Lastly, some crucial pieces, including papers, books, and book chapters, were added through backward and forward searching. Two additional criteria for the CNKI search reduce the size of the dataset and filter substandard publications. The first criterion rejects papers cited no more than twice to mitigate CNKI's over-collection issue, and the second criterion excludes publications on the new town outside of China. Additionally, both English and Chinese searches exclude the papers from disciplines with few connections to the planning field.
This review first examines the fundamentals of the new town literature by categorizing them by discipline, scale, and the geographic locations of the studied projects. First, the list of disciplines includes design, economy, environmental science, geography, history and theory, viewpoint, political science, sociology, and transportation. The categories of design and viewpoint are worthy of clarification for readers not familiar with China's urbanization. The “design” discipline includes the subfields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and spatial planning. As Chinese cities expanded rapidly in the past forty years, designers widely published their practices and became the most influential advocates on the topic of urban growth. “Viewpoint” refers to nonresearch perspective pieces published in academia. Although general viewpoints are waning in popularity in academic journals, this review acknowledges their importance in the existing literature. Then, the exploratory analysis groups the dataset based on the study's scale. An article falls into one of the four scales: individual, comparative, regional, and national studies. Lastly, the review also identifies the researched cities to examine whether scholars are more interested in some regions than others.
The study then explores the existing literature to find consensus and debate among scholars. A duality currently exists in the literature analyzing China's new town projects. On the one hand, the scholars share some consensuses on these projects’ planning and mechanical flaws over the past forty years. On the other hand, the authors have expressed differing attitudes to the future direction of the new towns. This literature review synthesizes the broad discussion by grouping scholars’ comments on the past and future of China's new town phenomenon.
Data
This literature review covers 226 peer-reviewed articles and 19 other pieces, which include reports, monographs, book chapters, and essay collections (Table 1). As expected, scholars published more journal articles in Chinese even though the keyword search excludes many uncited papers. The selected journal articles include 92 in English and 134 in Chinese. The Web of Science title search between 2000 and 2020 generates 81 qualified English journal articles. The additional 11 essays are added after a supplementary search in ProQuest and backward and forward searching. The Chinese-language papers are narrowed down from the 391 first-round results. This review excludes 193 essays cited no more than twice, 20 studies introducing international new towns, and 44 pieces with little relationship to the planning field. Of note, the number of papers in English has grown consistently since the late 2000s, while Chinese scholars’ interests peaked around 2010. The majority of the authors are Chinese scholars, suggesting an absence of international perspectives.
Summary of the Existing Literature by Year.
Findings
Disciplines
A clear disciplinary trend is emerging from the existing journal articles, leaning toward design and environmental science (Table 2). Since 2000, environmental scientists have published 44 journal articles, making up nearly 20% of the existing literature. Designers contributed 43 pieces from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and spatial planning. Most of the designers publish in Chinese journals, whereas environmental scientists prefer English publications. A smaller percentage of contributions are active in other disciplines, including economy, history/theory, political science, sociology, and transportation, while 15% of the authors share their general thoughts through nonresearch-based viewpoint papers.
Summary of the Journal Articles by Discipline.
Environmental science
In recent years, many environmental scientists show a vital interest in China's new town projects, focusing on water quality and ecosystem services. Environmental scientists’ greatest concern is with water quality issues: some new towns were located at vulnerable sites with low water quality, and other projects drastically polluted water resources during their construction (Lu et al. 2018; Luo et al. 2017, 2018; Pan, Bao, and Xu 2020; Wang and Ji 2007; Xie et al. 2011; Zhang et al. 2014). Other water issues include, but are not limited to, coastline change (Chen et al. 2017), groundwater overdraft (Gan, Bai, and Gong 2012, 1882; Zhu et al. 2019), and flooding (Su et al. 2014).
Ecologists identify the degradation of ecosystem services as the second most frequented topic in many new towns across the country, with great impacts in Binhai in Tianjin, Jiangbei in Jiangsu, Lingang in Shanghai, and Zhoushan in Zhejiang (Long et al. 2014, 536; Qiu et al. 2017, 17; Tang, Wang, and Wu 2019; Wang, Chen, and Wang 2019, 6; Yang et al. 2012). These case studies, adopting the ecosystem services theory and evaluation method, measure the new towns’ land cover changes before and after their designations. The results show that built areas increased rapidly while other land cover types with a high value of ecosystem services, especially wetlands, dropped simultaneously. Since the new towns paid little attention to mitigating the environmental impact, their sum values of ecosystem services often decreased and threatened local habitats. Air quality (Han et al. 2018; Wang et al. 2013; Yang et al. 2012) and climate-related issues (Qian and Cao 2018; Sun et al. 2014; Sun et al. 2014; Wang et al. 2020) also raise scholarly interest. In sum, the existing literature expresses anxiety about the limited environmental capacity and severe ecological degradation in Chinese new towns. These concerns raised criticism of new towns’ planning processes, which lack ecological awareness and effective natural protection strategies.
Design
Existing literature, particularly that written by design practitioners, pays significant attention to new towns’ physical space, with topics ranging from large-scale spatial strategy, urban design, and open space to small-scale building forms. Some planners believe in the imperatives of optimizing spatial structure to guide growth on the regional scale (Rao and Chen 2015; Wang et al. 2012; Yang, Wu, and Jin 2017). Several urban designers advocate for cultural identity and historic preservation in these projects (You 2017), and a small group of landscape architects publishes their experience with practical projects, both parks and greenways, reflecting the ecological efforts of the new town projects (Corner 2020; Hu, Zhao, and Chen 2010; Xu et al. 2016; Yin 2010). The new town projects built in tabula rasa also give architects many opportunities to showcase their skills and visions (Gerfen 2015). Bonino also criticizes architectural projects’ secondary role in these new towns and that urban space and observes that buildings are often isolated (Bonino 2019, 97).
Others (economy, sociology, geography, and political science)
Scholars also extend the discussion into the fields of economy, sociology, and political science. These discussions are usually interdisciplinary, treating the new towns as a medium through which individuals and government bodies interact. Political scientists’ interests in policies are often closely related to economic and industrial development, which social scientists interpreted as the key to attract migrants to new towns. Specifically, economists are interested in the model of city–industry integration (Chen 2017) and the issue of local governments’ debt (Chang and Lu 2017). Sociologists’ research emerges in the early 2000s, focusing on population policies, especially in the first-tier cities such as Beijing (Tan 2008; Tang and Yang 2012) and Shanghai (Li and Chen 2006; Wang and Yang 2015). Recently, sociologists investigated into more nuanced issues surrounding the new town inhabitants by evaluating urban diversity (Cho and Kim 2017) and advocating for social equity (Z. Liu et al. 2020). Geographic studies evaluating the new towns’ vacancy emerged in the late 2010s after many journalists reported these projects as “ghost cities” (Jin et al. 2017; Shi et al. 2020; Williams et al. 2019).
China's new towns also arouse the interests of a group of political scientists, who see the new town initiatives as a political strategy of state rescaling (Chen et al. 2015; Li and Chiu 2018; 2020, 2,564). From 2014 to 2017, the central government approved thirteen state-level NNAs, taking the number to nineteen in total. Acknowledging the central government's rescaling effort, many political scientists examine whether the NNAs achieved their initial goals through case studies. In Chongqing Liangjiang New Area, Li argues that “the division of responsibilities barely synchronizes administrative restructuring with economic development” (Li 2015, 80). Chao and Lin find that establishing an NNA “increased the spatial inequality of the municipality” (Chao and Lin 2020, 1). Another research paper claims that the NNAs “merely rest upon new practices of rural land commodification and development” (Yang et al. 2019, 114). Wang, Chao, and Li attribute the challenges to “unifying their territorial development logic” (Wang, Chao, and Li 2019, 1).
Debates
Moreover, two debates around China's new town phenomenon arise from existing literature: (1) Is the phenomenon ubiquitous or exceptional? and (2) Are these projects ghost cities or promising towns?
Ubiquity versus exceptionality
The first discourse extends from the contention around China's economic rise: some see the growth as an outcome of neoliberalization since the late 1970s, while others attribute it to China's historical–local context (Ren 2013, 1). Similarly, one group of new town researchers follows the theory in The Production of Space (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith 1991) and put China together with the global new town trend around the turn of the century. On the contrary, other scholars differentiate China's new towns from other countries’ projects for their specific mechanisms and motivations.
A group of theorists interprets China's new town phenomenon as a ubiquitous capitalization outcome within the Marxist theoretical framework. In his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey uses Dongguan New Town as an example to support the idea that “cities have also become venues for frenzied real-estate development and property speculation” (Harvey 2007, 133). His interpretation explains China's new town history, especially in the late twentieth century when the central government allowed local political leaders to stimulate development through land finance (tudi caizheng). In Harvey's theoretical framework, Dongguan New Town is not a city that could emerge only in China, but a possible case that could exist in other western countries. His neoliberal interpretation of urban expansion and new towns, that the transformations “do not occur by accident” (Harvey 2007, 1), inspires a group of theorists in China. Wu, Yang, and Zhang trace the history of China's new towns after 1979 with Harvey's conceptual framework and claim capital as the “core driver” (Wu, Yang and Zhang 2011, 37) of the phenomenon, acknowledging the difference in historical and geographical context between East and West. Chen also puts the new towns “in the process of capital accumulation” as “a major (temporal-spatial) fix for the surplus capital” (Chen 2013, 18). Bao and her colleagues link the spatial production of new towns in Nanjing with political transformation and attribute the disordered growth to the shift of power (Bao et al. 2015, 63). This cohort sees the emergence of the new town phenomenon as a natural consequence of China's capital accumulation.
Others studying contemporary global new towns also find many similarities between China and other regions, especially Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Brommelstroet and Stolk define this surge as the third, and the most recent, wave of the new town movement (te Brömmelstroet and Stolk 2009, 9). Marcinkoski names “speculative urbanization” (Marcinkoski 2015, 11) as the cause of recent new town projects in the United States, Ireland, Dubai, and China. Wakeman argues that China's new towns are “evocative examples” (Wakeman 2016, 304), extending the utopian thoughts of the past generations of western precedents. Research from the International New Town Institute also observes a physical extension from the western precedents through an architectural and design lens: the twenty-first-century new towns in Asia, including China, are “falling back on many of the same principles that guided the Western New Towns fifty years ago” (Provoost and Vanstiphout 2011, 12).
However, other planners believe that China's new towns exhibit prominent Chinese characteristics, entirely different from the twentieth-century western new town movement. Some western authors agree that “western urban theory is unsuited to narrate (and understand) Chinese cities” (Governa and Sampieri 2020, 369) and “any western model is unsuitable here” (Hartog 2010, 410). Rather than focusing on the new towns’ economic mechanisms like Harvey, these statements emphasize China's distinctive planning system and its political context compared to other countries. Scholars highlight the unique role of politics in China's new town projects to engage much more intensely (Zhang 2009, 187), compared to Japan and America, where private developers drove the new town expansion. Multiple levels of politicians are involved in China's “state-led efforts” (Wang 2020) and “local government-led projects” (Jiang et al. 2017, 452). Some scholars further explain the political system and analyze the pros and cons. Typically, “the new town's governing body was provided with new territorial power on top of the preexisting, ordinary administration division” (Wang, Chao and Li 2020). Yin, Liu, and Wang propose the theory of “local government-directed capital switching” (Yin, Liu, and Wang 2018, 103) to interpret the unique financial model. Lin highlights that these projects are “characterized by top-down process of planning and development” and suggests the lack of attention to the bottom-up public engagement, which is echoed by Zhou and Hann (Lin 2018, 100; Zhou and de Hann 2010, 258).
Another difference between China's new towns and the western precedents is motivation. From the viewpoint of urban growth, some scholars believe that China's new towns are “built to create new expansion, not to limit it,” (Bonino et al. 2019, 15) or, in Miller's word, “built ahead to anticipate growth” (Miller 2012, 135). Zhou regards “China's desire for economic development” as the core driver of the new town phenomenon (Zhou 2021, 55). This argument is sound comparing the rate of urbanization between today's China and the nineteenth-century western countries. The proportion of the urban population in China recently reached 60%, closed to England's percentage in the 1890s. Many researchers further distinguish the new town phenomenon for its unique political purpose, “an important state spatial strategy/project of the Chinese state to facilitate accumulation, maintain hegemony, and sustain state legitimacy in distinct historical contexts” (Wang 2020). Hsing argues that the new towns are “both territorial and accumulation projects… exploited to boost the leading city's control over the rural hinterland” (Hsing 2010, 214).
“Ghost cities” versus “promising towns”
China's new towns also raise a heated debate among scholars since the late 2000s’ rise in the popularity of the term “ghost cities.” Some claim the projects a failure, while others hold neutral to positive opinions. In the late 2000s, the media invented the term “ghost city” (Woodworth and Wallace 2017) for the new towns in China with few people but many vacant houses in China, such as Kangbashi District in Ordos, a city in the Inner Mongolia Province. According to media, the “ghost cities… lacked inhabitants” (Jiang et al. 2017, 445) and had a “high ratio of vacant dwellings” (Chen et al. 2015, 5,698) after construction. With advanced quantitative research, geographers and data scientists first confirm the existence of the alleged ghost cities, followed by a surge of criticism to the political mechanism and the speculative motivation. Opposite voices defend the new town's low occupancy rates as being exemplary projects merely waiting for inhabitants to move in after they recognize the benefits granted by the new model of urban lifestyle.
With multiple data sources and methods, including night-time light satellite images, open-access API (Application Programming Interface), and social media data, scholars study the vacant cities and neighborhoods and confirm the existence of ghost cities. First, surveys exhibit some impressive numbers. Researchers identify that “the average ghost city rate was 35.1% in China in 2013” (Ge et al. 2018, 1). At the community scale, Shi and his colleagues precisely detect 1,048 “ghost neighborhoods” occupying 354 km2 of land (Shi et al. 2020, 8). Another study in 2017 analyzes some sample projects’ vitality with spatial data, such as points of interest and location-based service records, and shows that residential projects in the ghost cities are as low as 8.8% active as compared to those in old cities (Jin et al. 2017, 98). Second, existing literature also shows the spatial pattern of these projects. Zheng and his colleagues prove that ghost cities tend to exist in regions close to the national border (Zheng et al. 2017, 41), as well as new towns in small counties rather than the big cities (Zheng et al. 2017, 112). Research shows that low occupancy rates are more evident in small towns (Lu et al. 2018, 16) as they are considered to be less attractive than the larger cities (Jiang et al. 2017, 452). Williams and her colleagues identify that developments of few amenities mostly cluster in satellite cities rather than city cores, meaning that newly constructed neighborhoods distant from existing urban land attract fewer residents than those in old cities (S. Williams et al. 2019, 280).
Acknowledging the new towns’ vacancy, scholars challenge the key actors of the local and central government. Most of the voices interrogate the ambitious economic intentions and the speculative purpose of the ghost cities. Some scholars criticize the institutional “urban entrepreneurialism” in the new town projects, which drives the adoption of “a growth-at-all-costs approach” in some cities relying on land-leasing revenue (Mai and Zhang 2013; Song, Stead, and de Jong 2020, 5178). Zhou criticizes policy-makers for their “unrealistic, copycat, and aggressive” work when planning, building, and managing new towns (Zhou 2021, 312). Woodworth is pessimistic because the speculative drive of “broad and unstable popular support” might lead to “a proliferation of landscapes of premature decay and ruin” (Woodworth 2018, 14). Doubts also exist from other disciplines, such as urban design and political science. Sorace's theory of phantom urbanization also criticizes the intentions of local governments, claiming that “constructing the aesthetic form of the urban is even more important to local state actors than economic, demographic or environmental repercussions” (Sorace and Hurst 2016, 1). Tan argues that China's new towns “failed to meet their goals” to “reduce regional disparities” (Tan 2010, 47). Feng points out the ignorance of the mismatch between the growth of land development and population in these projects, supported by the fact that urban land development expanded 83% while population only grew 45% in the 2000s (Feng 2015, 11).
However, another group of scholars holds a neutral to positive position on the future of the ghost cities, assuming them as merely places that “people have not moved into yet” (Miller 2012, 124). Liu defends the new town projects that the critics lack historical understanding and evident data (Liu 2014, 75). Some researchers are optimistic after visiting the ghost cities on site. Journalist Shepard conducted a field study to observe Chinese new towns and concludes that “China's ghost cities are a temporary phenomenon” (Shepard 2015, 200). From a sociological viewpoint, Yin, Qian, and Zhu challenge the media's lopsided critiques, which erased “the lived experiences of the residents,” and suggest an ongoing process of social place-making in the “cities-in-waiting” (Yin, Qian, and Zhu 2017, 11). There is also quantitative research challenging the media. For example, by studying the projects’ spatial patterns, Lu's team finds a trend that the ghost towns’ night-time light increased over time before reaching the peak found in large cities, while the light in small cities usually decreased (Lu et al. 2018, 15). Nonetheless, evidence proving the ghost cities’ growing occupancy is still insufficient, which calls for further solid spatial research to support the nonghost-cities group.
A cohort of architects and urban designers focus on physical appearance and environmental manifesto and observe positive attempts through the new town phenomenon. Rather than seeing Shanghai's One City Nine Towns as copies of Western ideas, Wakeman regards them as “a form of metamorphosis and co-optation to local needs, ideals, and fantasies” (Wakeman 2016, 305). Acknowledging this irony of Shanghai, suffering imperialism but mimicking western cities, Campanella interprets the nine new towns as “an act [that] could only be undertaken by a society supremely confident in itself” (Campanella 2012, 88). Designers also reveal vital interests in new towns branded as “eco-cities.” Austin regards China's eco-cities as “experimental urban centers” (Williams 2017, 190) to explore future sustainable lifestyles in cities. Lin argues that transforming the current land policies and urban strategies would help the eco-cities to “move toward a sustainable society” (Lin 2014, 564).
Conclusion and Discussion
Through examining existing literature, this review not only identifies fields involved in and absent from the discussion of China's new towns but also synthesizes scholars’ debates about the uniqueness of the projects and the future of the ghost cities. The research investigates hundreds of publications, in both English and Chinese, in the databases of Web of Science, ProQuest, and CNKI to answer the questions of (1) Who studies the topic? and (2) How do scholars interpret the phenomenon? After a brief synthesis of China's new town history, the paper concludes that environmental scientists and designers lead the existing literature centered on the two polarized debates: Are they unique? Are they ghost cities? Furthermore, these findings reveal the gaps in the existing research and suggest a new agenda for future Chinese new town studies.
First, acknowledging the diversity of disciplines engaged in China's new town discourse, this review observes a gap in the lack of sufficient national-scale surveys (Table 3). More than 65% of the research only studies one or two cases, lacking connections between individual projects. Case studies dominate the existing literature in both English and Chinese publications. The scholars studying at the national scale are mostly theorists, meaning that quantitative analyses fall short when delineating the big picture. The authors also show geographic bias in new town research: nearly half of the essays focus on the Yangtze River Delta megaregion (Table 4). Shanghai attracts attention from 33 scholars, much more than any other city. Another hotspot is the Jing-Jin-Ji megaregion, including Beijing, Tianjin, and Xiong’an, the most eye-catching new town initiated in 2017. Nonetheless, scholars pay little attention to the other regions, especially the new towns proximate to small cities.
Summary of the Journal Articles by Scale.
Summary of the Geographic Locations of the Studied new Towns.
While the central government showed some interest in synthesizing information about the new town practices recently, academic efforts and willingness to study this phenomenon on the national scale is limited. In early 2018, the National Development and Reform Commission and five other ministries released a list of development zones, which covered the designation dates, approved areas, and primary industries of 552 National Development Zones and 1,991 Provincial Development Zones (National Development and Reform Commission 2018). The newly assembled Ministry of Natural Resources collected the geospatial data of 531 National Development Zones and analyzed these new towns’ land-use efficiency (Ministry of Natural Resources 2018, 2020). These descriptive government documents enabled the new town researchers to move from discrete studies, such as Feng's annual reports (Feng 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018), to broader studies such as the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design's recent work (Wang, Liu and Wang 2021), which included many detailed national-scale quantitative analyses. Nevertheless, while these efforts gave the public a glance at the new town phenomenon, national-scale and in-depth analyses based on the recently collected information are still inadequate. Policy-makers need national-scale research to fully decipher the phenomenon's big picture much more than they did decades ago when mayors sought duplicatable models and case studies. Interpreting the new towns as a phenomenon, rather than as thousands of individual projects, will draw politicians’ attention at a higher level to improve these urban settlements.
Second, practitioners need criticisms of planning methodology, which is crucial but insufficient in the existing literature. First, while engaged widely in the discussion, designers merely showcase their professional projects through publications rather than examining planning methods and the planners’ role. In many nondesign papers, authors attribute various issues to the initial planning and design phase. For example, designers are often criticized for their lack of ecological concerns (Wang, Chen and Wang 2019, 17) and proactive voices because they simply “draw a blueprint to satisfy government ‘developer’ and public expectations” (Xue, Wang, and Tsai 2013, 231). The current showcasing trend veils the willingness to criticize the design approaches. Second, new town planners exhibit few methodological inventions different from designing existing cities. Greenfield planning arguably requires the most skill from the professionals because of the limited genius loci. Designing new towns and old cities with the same approach will expose unique urban issues such as low occupancy and ecological fragmentation.
Third, scholars need to invent new theoretical frameworks to accommodate current debates. The key lies in the interpretation of the Chinese context. This review argues that the two debates, ubiquitous versus unique and ghost versus promising, derive from the attempt to position China's new towns within the western conceptual framework. However, this effort neglects the fact that universal theories in social science cannot fully explain every phenomenon in distinctive contexts. Two crucial contextual differences are worth scholars’ attention when analyzing Chinese new towns in the future.
The first difference refers to the context in which the British new town movement emerged in the 1890s versus how China's new town phenomenon sprouted in the 1980s. The most determining dissimilarity is the share of the urban population. According to Our World In Data, 61.90% of residents in England and Wales lived in urban areas in 1890, while China had only 17.90% urban population in 1978 (Ritchie and Roser 2018). In other words, the western new town precedents prospered from Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities at the end of the nineteenth century when visionaries looked for paths toward post-industrialization settlement. However, China has been treating new towns as drivers to accelerate industrialization. Therefore, although China's new towns sprouted almost a century later than those in the West, they were, in fact, initiated in a context similar to England in 1800, a period with merely 20.30% urban population. This spatial and temporal lag results in the classic Western planning theories’ incompetence in explaining China's forty-year new town phenomenon.
The second difference refers to China's recent domestic contextual change, publicized as new normal (新常态), from an incremental era (增量时代) to a stock era (存量时代), and from high-speed development (高速发展) to high-quality development (高质量发展). All these Chinese manifestos pinpoint the inevitable trend that China's rapid urbanization will end after forty years’ growth. Planners have to adapt to the new context where the economy grows more gently, cities propose more renovation projects, and residents need an urban environment of higher quality. For the new town practitioners, on the one hand, while new projects will likely decrease quickly, improving the existing new towns could become a prevalent job. On the other hand, the up-and-coming new towns will require planners to invent new ideas and theoretical frameworks since they could likely be initiated with brand-new agendas. For example, the up-to-date Xiong’an New Area reveals a fresh ambition different from existing new towns. On April 1, 2017, the Central Committee and the State Council announced the plan to build Xiong’an New Area to relocate redundant industries from Beijing, China's overcrowded capital city 100 km away. The central government describes this new town initiative as “a national project of millennial significance” (Xinhua Net 2017). After four years of early-stage preparation, this project exhibits many characteristics different from past new towns. Xiong’an set no goals for population and GDP growth, strictly limited speculative real estate investment, and constructed merely a few buildings and infrastructure projects. Instead, it focused on ecological restoration on Baiyangdian Lake, built housing projects to relocate local residents, and invested in smart city technologies. These differences suggest that the past theoretical and practical experiences are outdated in the ongoing contextual change kicked off by Xiong’an. Without creating new theoretical frameworks based on these two contextual differences, scholars will not fully understand why China's new towns have as many differences as similarities with those in other countries.
After recognizing the three gaps in national-scale surveys, planning methodology, and theoretical framework, how can scholars advance studies on Chinese new towns? This paper recommends researchers to shift focus from the individual projects to the big picture, from planning products to planning processes, from following old paradigms to inventing new paradigms. The first step is to establish a Chinese new town database and test if the problems observed in some cases are prevalent. Researchers could use the National Development and Reform Commission's 2018 list as a foundation and add other accessible and sophisticated data. Conversations with practitioners, including politicians, spatial planners, architects, and landscape architects, will also be critical for new town scholars to understand further how new towns grew out of tabula rasa. After understanding the big picture and planning mechanism, researchers could then localize the global new town theories in China and even create new theoretical frameworks that can prevent the current debates from polarizing and lead the academic research back to practical advice.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
