Garden Cities of To-Day.
The Chengdu Model as a paradigm for a 21st Century Garden City Development
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Garden city planning efforts as manifested in the Chengdu Region of China may be the most extensive contemporary application of the garden city planning idea put forward by Ebenezer Howard more than one hundred years ago. Howard’s original idea consisted of a new urban development paradigm by which urban growth would occur through the creation of self-sustaining communities combining urban qualities with those of rural areas. According to his model, the careful balance between nature and urbanity would create smaller, healthier and more livable communities. Another important aspect of Howard’s garden city was the idea that land ownership would be held in common, thus preventing real estate speculations and allowing housing to be affordable to the lower classes. The garden city would become the economic center of its larger region, and serve as the marketplace for many of the goods and produce grown in the agricultural land surrounding the urban centers.
Over the past few decades, the city of Chengdu has been engaged in planning efforts directed at the integration of nature and urbanity into a comprehensive and healthy whole. The city leadership has engaged in the preservation of natural and agricultural areas and tried to prevent the sprawl seen in other regions through a very enlightened policy that allowed many farmers to sell their development rights in exchange for the improvement of their living conditions and by consolidating a myriad of small agricultural hamlets into new rural villages offering services once unavailable to many farmers and their families. Meanwhile, the city has also promoted the creation of a greenbelt surrounding the city and green fingers penetrating the urban areas, thus offering Chengdu residents the opportunity to be in close contact with nature.
The “Garden Cities of To-Day” Project consists of a partnership between the University of Oregon, Renmin University’s program in Planning and Public Policy and the City of Chengdu. The project intends to engage in three fundamental types of activities – data collection, teaching, and service-learning – to help gather, evaluate, and disseminate knowledge, information, and practical strategies for the promotion a sustainable urban to rural development in the context of the contemporary city of Chengdu, commonly known as China’s “garden city.” By studying Chengdu, this project will attempt to study how the garden city idea has “traveled” from time and space, and how its current adoption by the Chengdu municipal planning model can help redefine it and project it towards the 21st century.
