ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the shaping of Shenzhen’s built environment through planning and ‘unplanning’, design, and development. Shenzhen was planned on blank paper. Its planning has been largely indigenous, undertaken by Chinese planners, and has been exploratory and adaptive, to fit the local settings and to incorporate the city’s rapid changes. However, the city’s design has still involved much international learning, and the architecture of its iconic high-rises has been mostly undertaken by international designers. These planning and design efforts represent a spatial production for an economic purpose: that is, to accommodate and support the economic activities and workers that the city has wanted to attract and retain. However, Shenzhen’s rapid development has created a dual city: a modern Shenzhen in the business centres and gated communities for the high-end elites and professionals; and a pre-modern Shenzhen in the urban villages – an informal urbanism legacy – for the low-end labourers and rural migrants. This duality of urban settlements in Shenzhen has been rooted in the institutional paradox of China’s land and planning systems, and has created a planned Shenzhen and an unplanned Shenzhen co-existing in the same city. This duality presents a different narrative to the mythification of Shenzhen as a planned city and a planning success.
