Written by Jonathan Chatwin, CNN
Jonathan Chatwin is a writer, journalist and author of books including "Long Peace Street: A Walk in Modern China".
By 2035, the Chinese government expects more than 70% of the country's population - around one billion people - to live in cities.
Shanghai and Beijing have announced population limits and are implementing policies to reduce the number of new arrivals. These restrictions seem likely to be replicated in many of China's most populous cities.
But the rate of urbanization shows no sign of slowing down. So while existing small towns can absorb some of the millions who relocate, China is increasingly eager to develop entirely new urban areas to provide housing, jobs and infrastructure - while stimulating economic growth.
The most prominent is Xiongan, a new city under construction in three counties in Hebei Province, 100 kilometers southwest of Beijing. Announced with great fanfare in April 2017, it should welcome up to 2.5 million people. Large-scale construction started in 2019 and over the next decade an ambitious government plan will see many Beijing businesses, universities and hospitals relocated to this new city, easing pressure on the capital and encouraging economic development in high technology in a traditionally industrial region.
Across the country, the Chinese government is investing billions of yuan to establish new development zones and areas, many of which act as satellites to existing cities. South of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, the new Tianfu area has been developed over the past decade and is expected to open Unicorn Island, a 166-acre technology center designed by Zaha Hadid Architects soon. In Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, Xiangjiang's vast and equally ambitious new space is intended to attract the high-tech industry and is home to the country's first test area for autonomous public transport.
These projects all look to one city for inspiration: the sponsor of urban transformation and the "model" city of the country, Shenzhen. Now home to more than 13 million inhabitants, the southern metropolis is the proudest symbol of the Chinese government for the past 40 years of economic reform.
Rely on Shenzhen
On September 4, 1984, the sound of firecrackers echoed through the streets of Shenzhen as the city celebrated the completion of the International Trade Center, its - and, at the time, the tallest building in China.
Deng Xiaoping, then supreme chief of the country, had visited the site at the beginning of the year and had approved the project. He was particularly impressed by the speed of construction which, although it started slowly, partly due to a lack of appropriate equipment, finally hit a new floor every three days. The pace with which the upper floors of the tower were built became known as the "Shenzhen Speed", a part of ubiquitous mythology that obscures the origins of this so-called "instant city".
For visitors to Shenzhen in the 1980s, the 50-story skyscraper dominated the city skyline. Over time, however, neighboring buildings would reach and then pass the International Trade Center. As Juan Du, architect and author of the new book "The experience of Shenzhen", observed in an interview by e-mail: "This group of large buildings has become the image of the modernization and urbanization of China after the reform. "
Special economic zones
As China began to reform its economic system and open up to the world, a process initiated by Deng in the late 1970s, Shenzhen was established as one of the first four "special economic zones" or SEZs of China. All four were chosen for their favorable geographical position and their access to world markets, Shenzhen being located just opposite the international center of Hong Kong.
An often repeated myth is that Shenzhen was born from a fishing village. But in 1980, it was already a lively town. The surrounding areas that will become the SEZ covered almost 330 square kilometers and included a number of other pre-existing villages and towns. The official population of the SEZ at the time was 94,100, according to research by Du.
Although Shenzhen is now considered a success, its early creation and development was not without controversy. The city was, as Deng recognized, an experience, and thus departed from the rules that applied to the rest of China. Shenzhen was allowed to try relatively radical ideas, such as loosening commodity price controls and inviting foreign direct investment.
Shenzhen was such an exception that for much of its existence it was physically separated from the rest of the country by a barbed wire fence. This fortified perimeter was interspersed with seven manned checkpoints and was known as the "second line" (the first being the border with semi-autonomous Hong Kong to the south).
Until 2006, visitors from other parts of China needed their passport and a special permit to enter the SEZ.
During his visit in 1984, Deng said that the SEZs were "windows of technology, management, knowledge and foreign policy", designed to unleash China's potential in the rest of the world - and in the rest of the country. The city was to become a "national model for the modernization and urbanization of China," said Du.
Architecture and design have become crucial means of representing this model vision of modern China. The country's urban spaces have long emphasized the importance of symmetry, with streets traditionally drawn in a straight line going from east to west and from north to south. Following these principles, Shenzhen first extended along its first east-west avenue, while the city's main central business district was arranged along a prominent north-south axis, flanked by skyscrapers. emblematic skies and architectural projects.
Shenzhen, however, was not a blank slate on which a symmetrically ordered city could be drawn. The existing villages within the boundaries of the special economic zone have grown exponentially, as they were often the first destinations of the thousands of new arrivals seeking affordable housing.
Those who owned village properties would quickly expand their homes upward and outward to provide low-cost housing for newcomers. "Without the villages, the city would never have grown with the famous" speed of Shenzhen "," wrote Jonathan Bach in "Learning from Shenzhen", a collection of essays on the city. "The city could never have borne the cost of housing and supported so much labor."
However, over time, villages have been surrounded and overshadowed by new, more lucrative developments - or razed by developers looking for new growth opportunities.
As Du observed in "The Shenzhen Experience", many people in China share a stereotypical view of the surviving villages as "dirty, messy and inferior", although they played a vital role in the success of Shenzhen, and that their dynamism and dynamism are a key aspect of the culture of the city. There are still hundreds of these "urban villages", and one of the unresolved challenges of Shenzhen's development is how to manage and integrate them in a sensitive way - and the millions of people who live there - in a metropolis in constant growth as leaders like promoting a model and orderly city.
A new city center
Shenzhen has been so successful that it now faces an unimaginable problem for its original planners: a lack of space.
A source of new land was found by building on what was once the sea.
Thanks to major land reclamation, the waterfront at the southern end of the city was extended into the bay almost 20 years ago. A new downtown business district, called Shenzhen Bay Headquarters City, is being built on this site.
"We intend to make Shenzhen Bay a complementary city center to the existing chain of central business districts in Shenzhen," said Claude Godefroy of Henning Larsen Architects, one of three companies to win a competition for design the new neighborhood, in an email interview.
With the first phase of construction to be completed by 2022, the project includes a north-south axis and a skyscraper (the main tower of the project will reach a height of more than 1,640 feet, said the architects, placing it firmly among the 20 tallest buildings in the world.
But beyond the superlatives, its design aims to correct the mistakes of the past. Although Shenzhen was considered a model city, the power of hindsight revealed some of the shortcomings of the original plan.
In a city where "oversized impassable highways crisscross the city and isolate neighborhoods from each other," as Godefroy said, Shenzhen Bay will be pedestrian-friendly. A promenade along the water will be lined with bars and restaurants, correcting "a historic failure in urban planning in Shenzhen: its disconnection with the sea," he added. "Citizens complain that they sometimes forget that they live in a coastal city."
One of the objectives of the project is to attract skilled Chinese and international workers to the city. "All mega-cities are competing to attract the talents of tomorrow," said Godefroy, "and Shenzhen lags behind livability compared to Hong Kong."
The idea of Shenzhen competing with its neighbor Hong Kong, long a thriving global trading center, is not new. But a government plan released in the summer of 2019 directly declared its ambition for Shenzhen to itself become "a capital of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity with international influence".
The plan focuses on opening up the city internationally, developing its reputation as a technology center - it is already home to Chinese tech giants Huawei, Tencent and ZTE, among others - and improving its environmental references. It is about becoming a "pioneer demonstration area of socialism with Chinese characteristics" according to the State Council, the Chinese cabinet.
"The State Council document was not part of the Shenzhen Bay case, but every architect involved with Shenzhen knows this is the agenda," said Godefroy. Although he does not think that Shenzhen can become a real competitor in Hong Kong because "their economies have such a different objective", he said that the government's ambition for the new development was very clear - he wants to "do of this district spearheading a plan to make Shenzhen a model city for China and the world. "
A model for China
Chinese politicians have constantly tried to replicate the "Shenzhen effect" as they developed other urban areas across the country.
These new areas often display architectural motifs reminiscent of Shenzhen, sprawling along wide perpendicular avenues flanked by convention centers, shopping malls and flagship skyscrapers. And, like Shenzhen, they are usually built with economic revitalization in mind, with local governments often providing favorable conditions for developers and the companies that locate there.
Take the Pudong district of Shanghai, across the river, from the city's famous Bund, which was inspired by Shenzhen. In the early 1990s, Deng, who often wintered in Shanghai, began to encourage the next generation of Chinese leaders to allow Pudong - relatively rural compared to the city it passed through - to redevelop, claiming that it had made a mistake in without including Shanghai in the original group of special economic zones in 1979. According to Deng's biography of Ezra Vogel in 2011, the supreme chief argued that the city could, at least, benefit from a development later than Shenzhen drawing lessons from its predecessor.
Pudong has since become the headquarters of a famous skyline dotted with some of the tallest buildings in China and the center of the country's financial sector. The planning and development of the district were certainly more centralized and coordinated than those of Shenzhen, but despite the innovative plans proposed by international architectural firms, Pudong ended up rearranging the same ideas of urban development: to build quickly and ambitiously , maximize the property value and prioritize the commercial over the human.
Beyond Pudong, China has struggled to successfully export the remarkable example of Shenzhen. Even the three other SEZs established at the same time as Shenzhen - Shantou, Xiamen and Zhuhai - failed to develop in the same explosive manner. A myriad of different factors have influenced this - geography, size and scale, specific local policies and the nature of urban populations. As Du noted in his book, "Shenzhen ... is not a singular transferable model but a plurality, informed by local conditions and local communities."
Xiongan, Xi's model city
Beijing's new satellite city, Xiongan, is China's latest attempt to replicate the success of Shenzhen. President Xi Jinping has appointed the former mayor and leader of the Shenzhen party, Xu Qin, governor of Hebei Province, where the city is under construction. State media called Xiongan "Shenzhen of the North" while, according to its master plan, the project should become "a model city in the history of human development".
However, there are differences between the development of Xiongan and that of Shenzhen. Obviously, while all of the original special economic zones were coastal areas designed to attract foreign capital, Xiongan is 150 kilometers from the nearest coast.
It will mainly serve as a center for domestic rather than international industries - in particular, many of the country's massive state-owned enterprises currently based in Beijing.
The government also points out that Xiongan will be a green "smart city", built on a more human scale and with a lower population density than China's sprawling mega-cities. The city will be relatively low and free from the higher and higher skyscrapers that define most new urban developments. Initial work focused on improving environmental conditions in one of the most polluted regions in China, the large Baiyangdian lake - around which the city will be oriented - undergoing an intensive clean-up operation.
As in Shenzhen, Xiongan must also navigate the complexities of managing the region's existing population. When Xiongan was first announced, a real estate rush led the government to freeze property sales.
The government later curtailed speculation further by announcing that housing in Xiongan will be subject to strict state controls - a substantial change in Shenzhen policy, where real estate development was a key driver of economic growth.
Many existing residents have already been relocated and compensated. But with a population of around 1 million people in the region - and more than 500 villages to be redeveloped - allowing satisfactory results for rural residents with low incomes and often older people remains problematic.
However, a key similarity between the two cities is the way that Xiongan will be integrated into a larger conglomeration of urban centers. Just as Shenzhen now almost imperceptibly mixes with other cities in the Pearl River Delta, such as Guangzhou and Dongguan, so will Xiongan be connected via a high-speed train with Beijing and Tianjin to the east to form a megalopolis of 130 million inhabitants nicknamed "Jing-Jin-Ji" (a coat rack of the names of Beijing, Tianjin and "Ji", an old name of the province of Hebei).
Clearly, ambition is not lacking for Xiongan. It is a project that reflects the ambitions and concerns of the current leadership of China, Xi apparently hoping to emulate Deng's legacy in Shenzhen by publicly attaching his name to the project. "Secretary-General Xi Jinping planned, made decisions and promoted (Xiongan) in person, putting in meticulous efforts," says a 2018 planning document.
It remains to be seen to what extent Xiongan will copy - or deviate from - the model established by the model city of Shenzhen. But what is indisputable is that the example of Shenzhen, both positive and negative, remains extremely influential in Chinese urban planning, even four decades after the creation of the city.