The Green Edge

CHINA'S ENERGY LANDSCAPE

RE//CLUSTERING
As definitions of the city have exploded, there have been more and more ways by which people attempt to cluster the urban. In chapter one, we looked at clustering by means of population and compared that against measures used by urban actors throughout the world. However, as we look at the intersection of flows of humanity, time as a measure of accessibility becomes a central measure of urbanity.

In 2001, Chinese planning objectives called for the construction of 400 new cities. A decade later this was abandoned in favour of a call for anywhere between 100 and 300 ‘eco developments’ — depending on which proposal you adhere to. These too, as of yet, haven’t mate- rialized. Still, the quest for these mythical developments echoes through Chinese planning discourse. There is broadly the assumption that building new cities is both required to absorb the urbanising populace and China’s best bet for achieving ecocities. Yet, as discuss throughout this volume, the consumption of rural and open space in the pursuit of new urban space, ‘eco’ or not, is detrimental to environmental and urban sustainability.

The former vice-minister of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MoHURD), Dr. Qiu Baoxing realized the dangers of locating ever more eco developments outside of the bounds of existing urban fabric. Aiming to produce a rational system by which to locate further development, he drafted a mandate that would require all new projects to happen within 100km of existing city. In combination with his even more forward-looking ‘complex systems’ theory, this is truly a progressive (and pivotal) stab at urban and regional planning in a sensible manner. However, loosely defined by a 100 km proximity “from large cities” this attempt to streamline eco development within the existing urbanized area failed to address a vital catch: virtually all of urban China is already within 100km of an existing city. This parameter for locating new projects would need to be more constraint and more precise at targeting areas of real growth potential.

By containing growth within the existing infrastructural systems, urban de- velopment moves further towards maintaining vital resource flows within a compact network. In total, this one-hour-envelope of potential development already holds 500 of China’s existing towns and cities. With our essential mandate of ‘no new cities’ we posit that all of China’s supposedly requisite 100 to 300 eco-developments can occur precisely within the ‘Green Edge’ as defined by this network envelope. Instead of building 400 new cities — the planning objective investigated in The Chinese Dream* — or indeed 100 ecocities, the nearly 500 cities existing within the Green Edge may be upgraded to ecohubs. All of the growth that China will need to undertake can be done in the catchment area of the Green Edge. In turn, these ecohubs can be developed into functional ecocities with without expansion — suggestions for which we present in Nanchong*. Based on human time, the borders are created explicitly to serve the deployment of space-economy. The preservation of open land is vital to sus- tainable urbanization, and this tool equips us with a discursive tool by which to erect an imagined ideal endpoint. At the same time, the Green Edge is a clear boundary that provides planners throughout the country a hard rule by which to make decisions about the viable ecological and economic location of future eco projects.