Inside Chengdu: can China's megacity version of the garden city work?

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Inside Chengdu: can China's megacity version of the garden city work?
“The goal is that every 300 metres you see green,” says Chen Lan, an expert in urban design and planning at Sichuan University in the emerging Chinese megacity of Chengdu. “You open a window, you see green, you see a park …”To get more Chengdu City, you can visit shine news official website.

With its mild weather, teahouses, quiet leafy streets and internationally known food, Chengdu in south-west China has long been rated one of the country’s most liveable cities.

For much of the city’s 2,000-year history as an administrative and agricultural capital surrounded by good land, Chengdu thrived in relative isolation in China’s hinterlands. Over the last two decades, though, it has experienced a burst of rapid growth, fuelled by Beijing’s “Go West” policy encouraging development in interior cities.In 1998 the city was home to 4.2 million people, according to United Nations estimates. With migrants pouring in from other parts of the province, that figure is now 8.8 million, and the latest UN forecasts predict more than 10 million will live in the urban agglomeration by 2026. Official Chinese data, which tends to include rural areas too, puts the current population at 16 million.

To deal with that growth, Chengdu city planners have made environmental protection a focus. Some liken the programme to England’s garden city movement, which emerged in the 1890s to counteract urban crowding and pollution.Local people take tea in a temple garden in Chengdu. Photograph: Getty Images

But Chengdu’s urban renewal campaigns, like those of many Chinese cities, have resulted in mass demolitions and relocations – and critics say these projects are more about local officials inflating economic statics, impressing Beijing to climb up the party ladder, and creating a pretext for transferring public funds into private hands.Rather than just building parks in a city, the idea is also to build a city within a park, according to Chen. By 2050, Chengdu will be home to what local officials say will be the world’s largest network of paths for people to walk or bike. The Tianfu Greenway is planned to stretch 16,900km around the city, and will be linked to hundreds of parks, gardens and protected “ecological zones”, enveloping Chengdu in one massive garden. Some 1,585km had been completed by August last year.

Existing parks will be expanded. Highways, flyovers and bridges will be “greened” with flowers and plants. One of the new parks, the Longquan City Forest Park to the east of Chengdu, will be among the world’s largest, spanning an area of 1,275 sq km when it is completed in 2035.Officials are also trying to preserve the rural outskirts of Chengdu. By 2022, 1,000 farming villages, known as linpan, will be protected. Decades of urbanisation have emptied out these ancient agricultural settlements, which are unique to the region.

“Chengdu is one of the most advanced cities in China – it’s one of the ones that are making environmental protection, public space and quality of life as the agenda,” says Salvatore Fundaro of the urban planning and design branch of the UN Human Settlements Programme, who has been working on projects in Chengdu.The goal of these projects is to help Chengdu compete with major Chinese cities like Beijing or Shanghai while protecting it from the kind of urbanisation and development that has stripped some Chinese cities of their character. Chengdu, an early centre of Taoism, is known for preserving Chinese traditions in a way other urban centres have not.

Chengdu’s campaigns have gone through various iterations and names – “garden city”, “rural-city reunification” and now “park city” – but their various iterations have always been inextricably linked with politics.

Li Chuncheng, the former mayor and a top party official, first promoted the idea of Chengdu as a “World Modern Garden City” in the early 2000s. After he was arrested in 2012 over corruption, the term “garden city” fell out of favour.