China's master planning system in transition Case study on Beijing

Ever since China reformed and opened up to the world in 1978, there were immense changes taken place in structure and system framework of society, economy and space. The service industry has entered the fast development track and the economic structure is speedily adjusting. Millions of farmers left their land to look for new development. In this period, industrialization and urbanization kept pushing forward. Thus, the conflicts between rural and urban development deteriorated and social migration is increasing. The largest dualistic economy entity in the world is changing. During this period, resource consumption increases rapidly in volume and environmental pressure continues to increase. In fact, China’s urban planning system play an important role for its development and growth as well as resource and environmental problems. This paper will discuss the great changes of the China’s urban planning system and have a Beijing case study during that time. In general, Urban planning in China first 30 years used the former Soviet Union urban planning model according to the planned economy system. Urban planning is implementation in space of the state economic development plans. The second 30 years exploring national conditions of the socialist market economic system in urban planning. Traditional urban planning system is broken and the new planning system also can not copy urban planning system from the European market economy countries. In the 1990s, China's urban planners found that it is difficult for the traditional master planning to adapt to rapid economic system restructuring and urban development, learn from the U.S. Action Planning, UK Structure Planning, Australia's Strategy Planning), and Germany's Land-use Planning and Singapore's Concept Plan, the China’s urban planning system start to rebuilt. 2. China’s Master Planning Review