Sustainable Urban Development Issues in Chinese Transitional Cities: Hong Kong and Shenzhen

Abstract

Post-colonial capitalist Hong Kong and rapidly developing Shenzhen in China's socialist market economy have both adopted a pro-growth strategy to cope with challenges imposed by a globalizing economy. This development philosophy has exerted tremendous pressure on both cities, pushing them further away from the path of sustainable urban development. Despite the policy rhetoric of pursuing sustainable development, both city governments have refrained from identifying and analysing sustainable urban development issues. While the top-down elitedominated polities in Hong Kong and Shenzhen are working hard to attain world city status, both cities lack a sustainable development strategy. Without a critical rethink of the growth-rst mentality, sustainability principles such as an ethical utilization of natural resources and aspirations for intra-and inter-generational equity are not put on the policy agenda. Despite recent efforts to clean up the environment, it is uncertain how these two growing cities will proceed as the global economy itself is starting to capitalize on sustainability efforts to further capital accumulation.

Environmental impacts of urban growth from an integrated dynamic perspective: A case study of Shenzhen, South China

“…7c). These observations have significant implications for a city that already strives to maintain adequate levels of water supplied to its residents and industries (Ng, 2002). Furthermore, the water shortage scenario suggests sufficient incentives for taking action now to guarantee that the city will be affected as little as possible from such shortages.…”

The Governance of Urban Upgrading in Southern China

“…Like probably no other city in mainland China, Shenzhen tried to establish internationally recognized planning standards and opened itself up to the world (Ng 2005). The city is trying to increase its competitiveness by improving its port facilities and its soft location factors and in this waytokeep the competitiveadvantages that havem ade it one of the most affluent cities in China.…”

Balancing Economic Development and the Preservation of Agricultural Land: An Evaluation of Shanghai's Municipal Land Use Plan

“…Thus far, the literature has concentrated on four key areas: (i) urban-rural land markets, real estate development, property tenure and its impacts on urban development (Li, 1997(Li, , 1999Cartier, 2001;Guo, 2001;Ho, 2001); (ii) surveys of broad legal and political institutional change in response to China's rapid economic development (Zweig, 2000); (iii) the challenges and impact of globalisation on Asian cities with some attention given to Shanghai (Mitchell, 1995;Olds, 1997); and (iv) critiques of contemporary legislation regarding urban planning (Yeh & Wu, 1999). Recent research is beginning to uncover how planning ideas and sustainability objectives are being expressed in the plans for China's city-regions (Yan, 1997;Xu & Ng, 1998;Ng, 2002). However, research provides little analysis of the planning response at the city-region scale to China's loss of agricultural land (Skinner et al, 2001).…”

“…As such, the evaluation of plans can lead to important insights into the broader socio-economic and political conditions existing at the time of a plan's creation and adoption. The evaluation of land use plans has been undertaken by various researchers (Dalton & Burby, 1994;Kaiser & Godschalk, 1995;Baer, 1997;Berke & Conroy, 2000;Xu, 2001;Ng, 2002). For example, urban and regional plans have been reviewed, analysed and critiqued with respect to urban growth issues (Sutton & Fahmi, 2001), national capital planning objectives (Gordon, 2002) and environmentally sustainable planning principles (Border, 1997;Bradley, 1999;Berke & Conroy, 2000;Ng, 2002).…”