Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Jonathan Rigg, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In 2010, the Shenzhen Municipal Government signed a ‘Framework Agreement to Co-develop a National Low-carbon Ecological Demonstration City’, well before the 2012 18^th National People’s Congress when the policy of integrating low carbon, cycle economy and green development into economic, political, cultural and social developments and processes was established (SUPLRC, 2013, prologue). Shenzhen’s proactive turn to low carbon urbanism could be a prelude to her leading of a second ‘land revolution’ in the nation. About three decades ago in 1988, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone promulgated a Provisional Ordinance on Land Management, allowing for the first time in communist China the leasing of state-owned land, unleashing across the country a ‘land revolution’. Not only was this first ‘land revolution’ important in ‘liberating’ land ‘hoarded’ by state-owned units, it has also given many local authorities, with their then new found decentralized power to undertake urban development, much needed resources to develop urban infrastructure through land leasing.

The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone annexed its neigbhouring Bao’an County to form the Shenzhen Municipality in 1993. Ten years later, all the farmers within the Municipality were given urban dwellers status. Unlike the rest of the country where rural farmers are often reported to be exploited and displaced of their collectively-owned land by municipal governments in the course of development, Shenzhen planners’ challenge was to transform and ‘liberate’ much of the ‘theoretically nationalized’ but still ‘collectively-possessed’ land held by former farmers into effective and efficient uses, balancing the exchange and use values. If successful, Shenzhen may lead the nation again to a second land revolution, bearing significant implications for Chinese urbanism and beyond.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mee Kam Ng is Vice-Chairman of the Department of Geography and Resource Management, Director of the Urban Studies Programme, Associate Director of the Institute of Future Cities and the Hong Kong Institute of Asian Pacific Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute, a fellow of the Hong Kong Institute of Planners and academic advisor of the Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design. She has completed over 20 research projects and published widely on planning, governance and sustainability issues in Pacific Asia. Her publications have earned her six Hong Kong Institute of Planners’ Awards and the Association of European Schools of Planning Best Published Paper Award 2015. She has been consultant to the United Nations, the European Union and the Municipal Government of Shenzhen. She is an associate editor for the Current Research on Cities supplement section of the Elsevier Ltd journal “Cities” and the Royal Town Planning Institute’s academic journal, Planning Theory and Practice. She also serves as a member of the editorial board of Town Planning Review, DisP—The Planning Review and City, Culture and Society, and Business Strategy and the Environment.

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