Singapore Exports Its Government Expertise in Urban Planning - NYTimes.com

We often heard about Hong Kong and Singapore being examples for China’s urban development. In Tianjin the state of Singapore now literally exports its knowledge, to build up an eco city:

Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City is a $22 billion effort to turn an expanse of nonarable salt pan and deserted beaches into a 30-square-kilometer, or 11.5-square-mile, urban area southeast of Tianjin. For China, the project is intended to showcase resource-efficient technologies and serve as a model for other new cities in the country.

It seems the Singapore strategy is literally an export product; a model that other countries want to adopt. Wong Kai Yeng, group director of Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority International, says in the New York Times article about the subject:

“In the past 40 years, we’ve acquired a good reputation for our design and master plan for urban development. A lot of cities have come here asking us how we did it, and how we got where we are in this short span of time.”

Read the article: Singapore Exports Its Government Expertise in Urban Planning - NYTimes.com.

Crossing a street in Xi’an

All around the country, Chinese cities are expanding at great speeds. To speed up the process of urbanisation, city governments sell out enourmous pieces of land to developpers. The different plots are seperated by big, very big, roads. Not only are these very unpleasant to walk along, they are also difficult to cross, as our experiment in Xi’an’s new northern district shows. How livable will a city be when it consists only of these types of wide speedway-like avenues and no small alleys or even streets whatsover? Take a look at the video:

Proposal competition Drum Tower traditional district, Taiyuan

For the Drum Tower traditional district in Taiyuan the city government is planning a revitalization. A competition has been organized for the urban planning. In this movie you can see the proposal of one of the architects, Preston Scott Cohen, inc, who are also building a museum in the new city center. Bring your Mandarin phrasebook.

via TY Urban on Vimeo.