ABSTRACT
In recent decades China has become an incredibly rich laboratory for urban development and planning. While Chinese planners, whether educated at home, in the USA, the UK, Germany or at other planning schools in Europe, struggle to cope with the immense challenges of rapid urbanization in a complex socio-economic and politico-administrative context, crowds of Western planners, planning consultants and planning scholars rush into the country to share and transfer their theoretical, analytical, methodological, technical or managerial knowledge and competence with local planners in cities and city regions, with planning educators in universities or with bureaucrats in central government institutions. The speed of urban development and change, the strong political leadership, a top-down planning culture, the repercussions of a capitalist market economy under socialist command and control, the dominance of developers and the changing values of citizens and migrants all influence, guide and control their work (see Campanella 2008; Hu & Chen 2015; Wu 2015). John Friedmann (2005) was among the first Western scholars to address the challenges of urbanization in a more theoretical and comprehensive dimension. In this brief essay I reflect on the challenges a foreign planner faces when
working in a Chinese city. Since the 1970s I have frequently worked in other countries and in quite diverse planning cultures. Hence, I have been confronted with the challenges and limitations of transferring planning theory and practice from one planning culture to another. Moreover, from teaching master’s degree courses at Chinese universities since 2000, I have learnt much from communicating with Chinese planning educators and students. In his now classic book, Planning in the Public Domain (1987), John Friedmann reflected on the many difficulties in moving from knowledge to action. The paradigmatic subtitle From Knowledge to Action was what I had in mind when invited to advise the local urban planning institute in a Chinese city, one of the many multi-million second tier cities in the country. Hoping that I could learn more about urban planning in China by being involved in practical strategic development projects, I accepted this invitation. ‘Places matter’ has
always been my guiding principle, as I prefer to learn from places rather than from books, and from working in other planning cultures (Kunzmann 2016). In his well-known essay on emerging planning cultures, and based on Chinese research, John Friedmann briefly sketched the multiple challenges of planning where physical planning and land development as well as socio-economic and environmental planning in China are hardly ever co-ordinated (2005; 2011, pp.170-4).
