Event and the City

Second Thoughts on New Town Planning vs. Self-Organization

Jing Zhou

VERSION 1.0
18-12-2008

New town strategy has been adopted in Beijing New Masterplan 2004-2020. The planning and design has been prepared prior to the Olympic Games. It was plotted by Beijing municipality that large-scale new town development would commence shortly after the Games, which is suppose to play the role of urban economic stimulus in the post-Olympic period. In fact, over a hundred new towns are being or about to be constructed in urban China. Needless to say that how well this strategy is nationally implemented will have great influences on social economical even political aspects. However, this top-down planning idea has long been criticized as ideal and utopian. The discrepancy between theory and practice manifests in most of the existing cases. Then the question is serious: how certain are we on the reliability of this model theoretically in Chinese context? In this paper, I try to look into this question from its exact contrary – self-organization theory.

Building suburban new town used to be a type of spontaneous and self-organized activity initiated by some pioneer social reformers, like R.Owen and F. Fourier in early 19th century, as well as urban theorist like E. Howard in early 20th century. In the beginning it was self-organization in nature, because it was indeed individual planning behavior of a privileged industrialist for the good of his own employers. However, such kind of individual attempts set up a prototype for an appealing urban model for followers. When it came to Garden City, it became in between public and private. Although still individual initiated and financed, it aimed to serve for the benefit of a random group of in-comers which would be indeed attracted to the new town by its distinguished quality. In other words, the newcomers organized themselves by making a personal choice based on free will. And we should notice that even if the two Garden City experiments were small in scale – 30,000-50,000 dwellers, they cost Howard tremendous difficulty.

We can imagine that seeing those paradigms, the city decision-makers at that time could have thought: if one individual could do so much, then a city with stronger financial and administrative power could naturally make the process easier, and could make more of them at once. Take London for example, it officially started governmental new town constructions from 1946. Until 1977, 28 new towns had been built. However, the nature of new town thus dramatically changed to top-down and arbitrary. Especially for the case of earlier generation of British new towns, industries were forced to move there and their employees were forced to move with their job; and so were the people subjected to city center renewal. We do not deny that within all these incomers, there must be a certain amount of people who really dreamed to escape from the congested and populated industrial city, and deteriorated city center. And if you asked those ‘forced’ people, probably they would also give positive response to their new bigger house with garden in a nicer environment, because man are easy to compromise and adapt to constrains. However, mostly they were not given the freedom to choose. And if it was not their personal best choice, it was highly possible that they would be regretted, depressed and wanted to change. It was evident in the experiences of British new towns.

Here it argues that the decentralization of industries and population should base on ‘supply-on-demand’ rule and ‘self-organization’ rule. It means that ‘step-by-step’ method is not only suitable for urban renewal project, but only applicable to large-scale development. No one can precisely predict how many new towns a metropolitan needs and how fast they can grow. Taking Shanghai new towns as example, the construction of a dozen of new towns started more or less in the same period in late 1990s. Each of them has been using suburban style new housings as a strategy to attract potential inhabitants, which results in many overstocked units because of the market saturation of the similar typology. This indicates that instead of preventing an undesirable market-driven development, a planning policy could actually misguide the market to the wrong direction. The similar problems of empty office space and little-used public facilities can be found in the case of French and British new towns, and the loss was on the public investors. But both are a waste of social resources.

No doubt that the over-supply of public services like public transport and public facilities is derived from a thoughtful consideration of giving full life style and convenience to early settlers. Some may think it is an unavoidable burden that municipality has to carry. However, it seems to be over-worrying. In different developing phase, a new town will have different attracting points for target group. In the case of Dutch new town Almere, in the early stage, most of newcomers considered better housing as the most important attractiveness of the new city. From 1970s till early 2000, before the new city center is built, Almere inhabitants survived their social life heavily depending on its parental city Amsterdam. When the city finally delivered a mixed-functional stylish new center, the situation has been quickly reversed. By now, 60% of its citizens do shopping and have their social activities within the city, and it even attracts people from surrounding cities. it means that the foundation of a new town needs to be firstly laid down, that is, a sufficient amount of clients-‘critical mass’ (Charles Landry). However, how large this threshold is depends on the context of different society. The public facilities and investment thus should come in a relatively right time, and also should follow the rule of ‘growing-in-time’. That means that a plan or design is flexible, editable, and open to change. And for the development of Chinese new towns, this issue deserves future study.

As stated, ‘step-by-step’ strategy and ‘flexible planning’ can be one of the solutions for the unpredictable urban demand in new town development. However, there are indeed some questions need to be quantitatively and practically answered. They includes the how far should be the distance the parental city and a new town; how many population should a new town contain?

For the first question, the key problem is to keep a controllable nature area to prevent urban merging. However is that a feasible idea? We can challenge it with ‘self-organization’ theory which is part of the character of a ‘complex system’. The Complex System theory applies in many disciplines, such as physics, biology, cognition, artificial intelligent science, sociology and has been a popular topic which has close relation with the theory of evolution and relativity. The qualitative definition can be that ‘complexity is situated in between order and disorder’; ‘tow or more distinct components that are connected in such a way that they are difficult to separate’(Francis Heylighen). Each component in such a system is interacting with others, adapting to an external environment and self-organization as a result of an internal dynamics. Translate into urban scheme, it suggests that each individual is a planner himself, and his decision is always a result of interaction with others; each urban development is a process of self-organization, and it is always trying to connect its internal structure to external environment. Simply speaking, everything is connected in a complex system. It is not hard to understand that a new urban area wants to connect with existing urban fabrics in order to take the available advantages. In this sense, separating a new town from an existing city is in a large degree against self-organization rules, because the interaction, continuation and dependency are deliberately cut out.

However, not all organic growth in the city is desirable; neither all self-organization activities are correct. There is often a tendency that it goes to the wrong direction; and there is the need for the ‘collective good’. We can cite a very inspiring story of ant as an illustration (Francis Heylighen).

‘When ants find food, they leave a trail of pheromones (‘smell molecules’) along their path back to the nest. Other ants searching for food are most likely to go in a direction where there are more pheromones. If successful, they too will add pheromones, making the trail stronger, and more likely to attract further ants. If no food is found, no pheromones are added and the trail gradually evaporates. In that way, a colony of ants will at first explore their environment randomly, but gradually develop a complex but efficient ‘roadmaps’.

One of the important characters of self-organization is this so-called ‘trail-and-error’ process recognizable from the ant story. The negative effect of it is that sometimes an error has to wait too long or has become too big to be corrected. Think of the case of the over-supplied housing in Shanghai new towns. An ant would not loose too much by several futile trails, but for a city it is painful to afford the unsuccessfully urban investments. Therefore it is very necessary to find shortcut and balance the ‘trail-and-error’ processes. No doubt that public planning intervention, originated to cope with ‘market failure’ in market economy, could play a strong role. Interesting enough, in contemporary urban China, although the top-down planning appears to be strong, still the market development is rather unbridled and chaotic. This is not the case in some countries where there is also a strong hand of planning, e.g. Germany and the Netherlands. It means urban planning in China does not yet function as an effective tool to coordinate market-driven self-organization by developers, even by diverse local authorities and bureaus. Notable examples in Beijing are the eaten up of the planned ‘green-belt’ and the erection of Financial Street at the western end of Chang’an Avenue as an unexpected competition and challenge to the planned Central Business District in the eastern end. It is just saying that the relation between planning control and market force is still in a severe trail-and-error process itself. The balance between planned and unplanned; fixed and flexible is still unexplored. Perhaps the top-down planning institutes which is the order giver and diverse bottom-up actors which are the order takers are too busy self-organizing, but lack of interaction and communication for the ‘collective good’. Instead of planning the uncertain and unpredictable complex system – the society, more attention should be given to supervising and monitoring diverse bottom-up actors with a tight grip of only the main strategies and principles, and be flexible and open about local dynamics.

As above argued, planning remains as an essential tool to tackle ‘market failure’. It is like medical care to a person’s health. The early stage prevention is long-time, subtle but crucial. When ‘a malfunction’ or ‘a disease’ does occur, in case of Beijing city, its traffic congestion, deterioration of urban environment, lack of available land and water resources etc. then a surgery – a strong public planning intervention needs to be performed in order to cut out the undesirable organic growth. For Beijing, the central ‘big pancake’ needs to be dissolved and counterweighted by new centralities in the Greater Beijing Metropolitan Region, even in the larger Jing-Jin-Ji trans-provincial region.

If the main principle that new town is indeed desirable and feasible, then the question of how far and how large it should be, and how the urban design is all become purely technical problems. For example, according to research, an average person can accept at most a 45-minute travel time from home to work and vise versa. If a new town is to be connected by subway and intercity lightrail, we can calculate the distance according the speed of specific transportation means. This model applies to a new town which is in the future inevitably dependent on the parental city for employment and other major functions. And for those new towns which has own self-sustained economic establishment, the distance can be further away. To speak with actual cases, the distances from Milton Keynes (the biggest London new town) to its neighboring cities that include Oxford, Cambrige, London, and Birmingham are ranging from about 60-100 kilometers. And from Almere (the largest Dutch new town) one can reach its neighboring cities which include Amsterdam, Amsfoort, Utrecht and Lelystad within a 50-kilometer radium range. Both of them enjoy a strategic location and acceptable accessibilities to other cities in the network. On the contrary, if located too close by, then it looses the meaning of ameliorating the nature and urban environment, because the green space is simply not big enough to affect. And it challenges very much the capability of urban management whether or not the risk of eventual urban contiguity can be prevented, which as aforementioned is a natural tendency in a complex system to try to connect and relate different components. And according to the previous analysis, the planning management is not ready for such serious challenge. We can see that Tongzhou and Yizhuang new town in Beijing locate just about 15-20 kilometers away from center to center. It means the in-between open space is even as little as about 5 kilometers. In fact, inside the ‘open space’ there already exist certain amount of villages and segments of urban sprawl. No wonder some Chinese scholars have pointed out that they two are not really suitable to become 800,000-1 million size new city, which even by Chinese standard can already be called large city. But still the paradox is that it might be big enough in size to compensate the 10 million central city area, but the improvement of environmental quality might be weak. If not much attractive comparative advantage, especially in the case of Tongzhou where there is no self-sustained local economy, a series of social and spatial problem is imaginable. For example, concentration of low-income social groups, heavy traffic jam during peak hours caused by commuting flows.

To conclude, in the first instance, making new town by top-down intervention is against self-organization theory, because it tries to cut out connection, and instead of multiple agents working in a more trail-and-error way, it requires order, discipline and accordance. However on the other hand, such planning action can be seen as a self-organization of the city itself. It happens when there are too deep troubles and irreversible errors in the city. Then the head public planning institute acts as the doctor of the city to place prescriptions and do operations. In this sense, although very difficult, such intervene is by all means necessary. Making a new town requires strong and consistent planning and management efforts. This is an urgent challenge for urban China. What suggested is to resume the interaction and communication between top-down and bottom-up actors. One the one hand, from top-down there sets up an external environment by making both strict-in-principle but flexible-in-local strategic plans, and playing a role of supervising the process and collective benefits; one the other hand, leave the opportunity open for individual self-organizations so as to integrate them into the overall plan and optimize also individual values. Only when these two self-organizing process: top-down planning and bottom-up locals understand each other and strive for similar goals, can a complex urban program succeed in the complex society.