This book unravels China’s new megaregional structure, new megaregional planning and development, new megaregional governance, and new regional planning system. It draws upon a diversity of megaregional cases: city clusters of the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region, Yangtze River delta region, and Greater Bay Area; and metropolitan circles of Chengdu, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Zhengzhou.
Megaregions are the new form of Chinese-style urbanisation. China’s new discourse of ‘high-quality development’ and ‘new-type urbanisation’ is reshaping its megaregional strategy. Imbalance and fragmentation characterise the diversity of megaregions - developed or developing, coastal or inland. The central goal of megaregional planning and governance is to achieve integrated, balanced development of them. Hu challenges the official notion of ‘top-level design’ that dominates the planning, governance, and development of China’s megaregions. Instead, he argues for the importance of engaging nongovernmental stakeholders, rebalancing the government-market relationality, encouraging bottom-up initiatives, and enabling grassroots ingenuity.
The volume offers the first and most comprehensive study of megaregional China in the new contexts of both national development and urban development. It will be of interest to anyone looking into urban and regional development, and Chinese studies.
1 Megaregions and urban China 2 Planning megaregions 3 Developing metropolitan circles: Issues and challenges 4 The dragon’s head in spatial imaginary: Integrating Shanghai and the Yangtze River delta region 5 ‘One country, two cities’: Relational planning of Shenzhen and Hong Kong in the Greater Bay Area
Biography
Richard Hu is an award-winning urban planner. His work and interests - both intellectual and professional - integrate built environment, economy, and technology to address contemporary urban transformation and sustainable development, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. He is the author of Smart Design (2021) and The Shenzhen Phenomenon (2020).
