30 Years of Urban Change in China’s 10 Core Cities

As a continuation of our award-winning book ‘China's City Cluster Development in the Race to Carbon Neutrality’, this book covers China's major urban changes over the last 30 years. Unlike the previous book, where we highlighted regional development issues, this book explicitly explores the city cases, particularly those that are considered core cities in China. Based on the micro-historical analysis of China's urbanization trend and urban development patterns, we see that cities in China have played a significant role in driving the country's sustainable development agenda. In a way, they have had both positive and negative impacts on achieving sustainable development. We look at these last three decades mainly because, during this period, China's urbanization became unprecedented, the central government made several pledges and signed many international agreements related to sustainable development, and China grew rapidly to become the second global economic power. Aligned with the overarching Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the more recent Carbon Neutrality Plan (CNP), Chinese core cities played a significant part in regional development, urban-rural relations, industrial clustering, the development of free trade zones and special economic zones, etc. All these recent developments are due to China's ongoing urbanization and urban development. ‘30 Years of Urban Change in China’s 10 Core Cities’ is a mapping study of China's core cities and their changes over three decades of rapid urbanization, urban growth, and economic development. We explicitly highlight each selected city’s development trends, sustainable development plans, and major strategies. In this Volume (out of our two ‘connected’ volumes), we summarise lessons learnt from all 10 case study examples, and we hope they can be utilized for other developing and rapidly urbanizing nations. We expect this book to be a valuable resource for local governments, authorities, urban planners, urbanists, practitioners, developers, and urban researchers. We trust China is no longer a developing country, and much of these recent progressions are owed to its structured urban development strategies, robust governmental structure, and progressive attitude to growth and development. Hence, this topic coverage at the point where China's urbanization is shifting to high-quality urbanization is essential and beneficial to multiple stakeholders.