From blueprint to action: The transformation of the planning paradigm for desakota in China

摘要

With a case study of Chaonan in Guangdong Province, this study examines China's desakota and-its planning paradigm. After three decades of high-speed growth, the marginal areas of Guangdong Province the lab of China's market-oriented reform and open door policy, are still fraught with desakotas, semi-urbanized areas of mixed landscape, economic and administrative systems. Chaonan faces a number of challenges, such as economic slow-down, poor infrastructure, environmental pollution, and so on. We found that China's desakota is driven by decades of rural industrialization, and this is now becoming a major challenge to master planning, the paradigm of which mainly comes from the rational theories of early western countries. As the traditional paradigm emphasizes the overall blueprint, there is a mismatch between planning orientation and spontaneous investment demand. Planning implementation thus is almost impossible. As such, we take the master plan of Chaonan as a case to integrate both blueprints and actions. To turn traditional blueprint-led planning into action-led planning, we highlight both recent and long-term actions, to make practical improvements to various facets, socioeconomic upgrading, socio-spatial transformation, and environmental sustainability. Above all, we argue that action-led planning is the key to the transformation of desakotas in China. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.