Fulong Wu

Simulation of Land Development through the Integration of Cellular Automata and Multicriteria Evaluation

Cellular automata (CA) simulation has become a popular method of exploring the behaviour of all kinds of self-organising systems. The city may clearly be viewed as such a system but one with a particularly complex set of transition rules. Many natural processes such as the spread of fire or vegetation can be modelled by a simple set of local rules. Insofar as the development of a piece of land depends on the neighbourhood situation as well as on the characteristics of a site, urban evolution can be treated in much the same way, with transition rules translating the evaluation of the location into a land conversion outcome. If this modelling paradigm is to be used to gain insight into real-world urban development processes, there is a need to discover ways of capturing the richness of land conversion behaviour in the simplifying mechanisms of CA. Our paper contributes to this research agenda by integrating multicriteria evaluation (MCE) into a CA simulation in order to define nondeterministic, multidimensional, and multilevel transition rules. An analytical hierarchy process is used to implement MCE-derived transition rules. The integrated MCE – CA model may be used in a gaming mode to explore how urban form evolves under different development regimes caricatured by the set of multicriteria weights. We use it to test loosely hypotheses about the nature of the regimes that have governed the expansion of a fast-growing southern Chinese city.

The Global and Local Dimensions of Place-making: Remaking Shanghai as a World City

Shanghai, the largest socialist industrial city in China, is now experiencing dramatic restructuring under global and local forces. This paper provides a preliminary account of remaking this city into a world city. The case study suggests the tremendous and pervasive impact of globalisation on the city in transitional economies, although it is still not comparable with a truly global city. The growth of inward investment, particularly its penetration into real estate development, has exerted direct impacts on the urban structure. It is argued that, however, that this global influence can only be realised through the coincidence of indigenous changes in the political economy system. Specifically, the willingness of the central government to give more autonomy to local governments, the new policy to set up a window for Chinas open policy, the incentive for making money from selling the space, the injection of public money into infrastructure and fierce promotional development strategies, all contributed to the process of urban restructuring. The effect of combined global and local changes has led to an extremely optimistic growth atmosphere and a building boom since the mid 1990s. Shanghai highlights the local as well as the global dimensions of urban change in the post-socialist economies.

Property-led redevelopment in post-reform China: A case study of Xintiandi redevelopment project in Shanghai

ABSTRACT: Urban redevelopment in China has experienced great transformation. Government-backed redevelopment has been replaced by privately funded and property-led redevelopment. This article discerns the impetus of ongoing property-led redevelopment. A case study of the Xintiandi project in Shanghai reveals how property-led redevelopment actually works. Pro-growth coalitions between local government and developers are formed. Despite its role as capital provider, the private sector is still regulated by the government due to its negligible influence on local governance. The government controls the direction and pace of urban redevelopment through policy intervention, financial leverages, and governance of land leasing. Property-led redevelopment is driven by diverse motivations of different levels of the government, e.g. transforming urban land use functions, showing off the entrepreneurial capability of local government, and maximizing negotiated land benefits. Driven by profit seeking, some thriving urban neighborhoods are displaced by high-value property development, and suffer from uneven redevelopment.

Rediscovering the 'Gate' under market transition: From work-unit compounds to commodity housing enclaves

This paper applies two major explanations in gated community studies, namely the club realm of consumption and the discourse of fear, to examine the changing forms of urban ‘gated communities’, i.e. the transition from work-unit compounds to gated commodity housing enclaves, in urban China. While the gate has existed in China for a long time as a physical form, it has now been rediscovered as an instrument for the partitioning of derelict socialist landscapes produced by ‘economising urbanisation’ and a post-socialist imagined ‘good life’. The study highlights that the function of gating is dependent upon social and economic contexts: under socialism, gating reinforces political control and collective consumption organised by the state; in the post-reform era, the gate demarcates emerging consumer clubs in response to the retreat of the state from the provision of public goods. While the discourse of fear seems less applicable to the Chinese city, urban fragmentation is paving the way to a new urban experience of insecurity, which has begun to appear in the discourse of ‘community building’ in urban China.

Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space

A sea of change has occurred in China since the 1978 economic reforms. Bringing together the work of leading scholars specializing in urban China, this book examines what has happened to the Chinese city undergoing multiple transformations during the reform era, with an emphasis on new processes of urban formation and the consequent reconstituted urban spaces. With arguments against the convergence thesis that sees cities everywhere becoming more Western in form and suggestions that the Chinese city is best seen as a multiplex city, Restructuring the Chinese City is an indispensable text for Chinese specialists, urban scholars and advanced students in urban geography, urban planning and China studies.

Changing Spatial Distribution and Determinants of Land Development in Chinese Cities in the Transition from a Centrally Planned Economy to a Socialist Market Economy: A Case Study of Guangzhou

The spatial distribution and locational characteristics of land development have changed dramatically in Chinese cities since the land reform of 1987 which allowed the paid transfer of land-use rights—i.e. land leasing. This has led to the rapid transformation of the urban spatial structure of Chinese cities. There is an urgent need to study the general trend of such changes and their policy implications. However, due to the lack of data, such investigations lag far behind the rapid land development in Chinese cities. This paper attempts to examine the new spatial pattern of land development in Chinese cities and its determinants by studying land development in Guangzhou before (1979-87) and after (1987-92) the land reform by analysing data obtained from aerial photographs with the aid of GIS techniques. The determinants of land development are analysed using a logistic regression model. It is found that there has been significant acceleration of urban redevelopment and urban sprawl in Guangzhou since the adoption of the new land-leasing system in 1987. The changing spatial distributions and determinants of land development suggest the emergence of new locational behaviours of land development in Chinese cities in the transition from a centrally planned economy to a socialist market economy.

Planning the Competitive City-Region The Emergence of Strategic Development Plan in China

This article analyzes the emergence of the so-called urban strategic development plan in China during inter-city competition and new entrepreneurial governance. Driven by market-oriented development and globalization, the local government attempts to overcome the constraints of conventional statutory planning to promote a visionary city plan. Through case studies of Guangzhou and Hangzhou, we argue that the strategic plan is more or less a mission statement of the local political leaders and thus has a narrow social foundation. The emergence of the strategic plan reflects the overall shift of city planning towards being an important instrument for enhancing economic competitiveness.

China's recent urban development in the process of land and housing marketisation and economic globalisation

The postreform landscape is characterised by the formation of a more market-oriented system and the ‘open-door’ policy. Economic globalisation and marketisation, especially in the arena of urban land and housing, are becoming the key variables determining the postreform urban development in China. Since China opened its door in 1978, foreign investment has continued to flow into the cities and played a vital role in urban development. In the first round of economic reform (1978–1992) urban policies were formulated under the internal constraints of a socialist system. Since 1992 onwards, however, substantial marketisation in land and housing and the inflow of foreign capital into real estate have begun to qualitatively change the scene of urban development. Now China is moving closer to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) membership. The ‘synergetic’ effect of global and local forces will continue to transform urban China. This paper therefore aims to offer an initial examination of these two variables and then to explore of the implications for urban planning and real estate growth.

Urban spatial structure in a transitional economy: The case of guangzhou, China

Abstract The urban spatial structure of Chinese cities has been changing since the post-Mao economic reform in 1978. More dramatic changes have occurred since the housing reform in 1982 and land reform in 1987. This article examines the transformation of urban spatial structure in China in the context of a transitional economy and its underlying dynamics. The land use changes in Guangzhou are used for a case study. The major findings are rapid decentralization through leapfrog developments in peripheral areas and the re-emergence of business and service areas in the city centre. The authors present a model of a new urban spatial structure and discuss its implications for urban planning.

An experiment on the generic polycentricity of urban growth in a cellular automatic city

Post-Fordist urban growth is characterised by ever-increasing dispersal and polycentricity. The transformation of urban spatial structure has profound implications for sustainable development. There is now a substantial literature both on confirming the existence of polycentricity through equilibrium and evolutionary theories and on empirical identification of subcentres. However, more research is needed to explore the generically polycentric urban growth. A microscopic simulation approach is thus applied to study how stable subcentres, measured in terms of population density, can be established. In this study, an experiment carried out in an artificial cellular city is reported. One innovative feature of this simulation is that the state of the cellular automaton comprises a quantity variable (population density) as well as a binary state variable (selected or not selected). The two are interlinked through the evolution of the city. The experiment suggests that the combined forces of accumulative population density and local interactions can lead to the formation of stable subcentres. In such a regime, subcentres are first established through stochastic ‘errors’, for example, clusters of local developments. Thereafter the clusters continue to capture development opportunities through reinforced local interactions. With the evolution, however, disutilities, such as congestion, are accumulated from the concentration of local development. The growth of disutilities changes the relative attractiveness between formed (sub)centres and other areas. When significant disutilities are accumulated, another stochastic change may overturn the dominance of (sub)centres and drive developments to other locations. The subcentre formation is validated under the general discussion of ‘goodness of fit’ of possible urban automata, and population density surfaces are measured through various ‘signatures’.