Urban-planning practice and the transformation of value in China

China’s urban-planning practice, which had deep roots in traditional culture, started three thousand years ago. In the last century, the establishment of a socialist regime in 1949 and the adoption of the 1978 reform introduced socialist values and Western modern thoughts. They redefined the meaning of city and the role of urban planning. This chapter explores the transformation of urban planning as a function of the change in the value system, based on the urban-planning practice in Yangzhou city in Jiangsu Province. In this chapter, we conceive values as the prevailing norms, beliefs, imperatives, guiding principles, logics and priorities of society that shift across place and time. Such values are acted on and can shape physical urban form. Yangzhou has a history of approximately 2,500 years. In imperial China, as a vacation place for the royal family, Yangzhou city was built on the basis of a quadrate ideal city model, as a model for the temporary imperial palace. In socialist China, urban planning was perceived as a tool to realise the socialist values of planned development and to “translate” the goal of economic planning into urban space. Yangzhou was characterised as a state-level cultural city, in order to develop a tourist industry. But after the 1978 reform, the definition of the meaning of “city” reflected more Western modern thoughts in contemporary China. The latest master plan in Yangzhou transformed the city into an ecological garden city. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the consequences of these value shifts.