ABSTRACT
Chinese cities used to be compact in comparison with sprawling North American cities. The expansion of the built-up area in the period between 1949 and 1979 was slow, due to the dominance of state housing provision, and the constraint of public transport. Prior to economic reform, apart from scattered industrial sites based on key state industrial projects, suburban areas maintained a rural landscape. The function of the suburb was to provide vegetables and perishable food for the city. However, since economic reform, in particular land reform, Chinese cities have experienced rapid urban expansion. During periods of building boom, the urban built-up area has been dramatically enlarged. Two boom periods can be identified: the first from 1992, when Deng Xiaoping started his 'southern tour’, to 1995, when Zhu Rongji implemented macroeconomic adjustment; and the second from 2000, when the property market recovered from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, to 2004, when the central state began to tighten land policies. Both these periods ended with an overheated real-estate market and consequent macroeconomic adjustment. The most recent adjustment (2004) is still going on, and the effect on urban land development remains to be seen.
