The Research about New Urbanism Community Theory in Chinese Application for Urban Sprawl

The New Urbanism, which emerged in 1990s, mainly aims to revive communities and eliminate the effects of urban sprawl from the angle of community planning and design. This theory receives great success and is widely accepted. However, in China, concept confusion and mechanical copy are not rare in the application of New Urbanism in community planning and research. With a profound understanding of the origins and connotations of New Urbanism, this thesis discusses the differences between China and the Western countries, which are the motive of urban sprawl, the compactness of community, the relation between the city center and the suburb, the community culture and the stage of the development of transportation. Then, regarding the issues that emerged from mechanically copying the design principles and blindly copying the local context in China, such as the loss of cultural roots and livability caused by deliberate imitation, it proposes five planning principles and implementation approaches of how to build New Urbanism community within China, including the justice of urban roads and commuter traffic, the sharing of community resource and the accessibility of public space, environmental and ecological sustainability, community and site-cultural sustainability.