Conceptual Sustainability Framework for Eco-City Development in the City Core of Xuzhou

Abstract

Urban planners in China often face major challenges when developing or revising their city master plan in accordance with sustainability principles. They are very much trapped between policies and guidelines issued by the government and a market economy controlled by developers. The government has issued some overall recommendations for establishing eco-cities in China built on resource efficiency principles, but they lack more hands-on guidelines to be used by urban planners. Several of the most well-known eco-city projects have also encountered difficulties in the implementation phase. One problem is that the frameworks have not been developed bottom-up in a local participation process but have mainly been imported from other projects, in several cases from international experiences. This creates a gap between planning and implementation. The traditional way of planning in China is done in a sectoral way. That is, different sectors, like transport, energy, water, waste, and environment, are planned separately. This is also reflected in the lack of cooperation between the different city departments and companies responsible for energy, water, and transport. The overall aim of this study was to develop and test a new simplified framework that can guide urban planners when developing the master plan for a city or a city area aiming at becoming an eco-city. The framework developed was applied in devising a more comprehensive and integrated plan for the city of Xuzhou based on cross-sectoral planning. Meeting the future challenges of a growing population and consumption of a third planning level, the 3R level, is proposed in this paper. This is in line with a growing skepticism towards the belief in ecological modernization. In order to avoid the problem of finding exact definitions for concepts, such as sustainability and eco-city as used in China, an approach with three levels of ambition for sustainability and sustainable development was adopted. Each level of ambition requires different planning approaches related to sectoral, cross sectoral, and 3R planning. The framework will next be refined and applied in other eco-city projects in China.