Plans and projects for the Central Plains of China: New forms of extended urbanisation in Zhengzhou metropolitan region

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, China has seen unprecedented urban growth which has spread to every corner of the country. This process has been anything but linear. Driven by the urban entrepreneurialism of the major municipalities until the mid-2000s, the reins have since passed to the central and regional administrations which plan development in a more comprehensive and coordinated fashion. This paper discusses how this turning point in urban policies has redirected planning activities: from the centripetal development of the major cities through new towns to centrifugal urbanisation fostering regional integration via wide-area projects and small-scale interventions. This is evident in the inland regions, which have become the testing grounds for new policies, governmental practices, and forms of spatial development. Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, is a case in point: once the epitome of urban entrepreneurialism policies in action, this metropolitan region is now the target of national plans and local initiatives to drive the Central Plains agglomeration. In addition to changes in its governance, this shift has also transformed planning activities, and so too the spatial features of this emerging urbanity. By investigating the changes in policies and plans, this contribution sheds light on the salient features of this metropolitan development, revealing the features of the emerging extended urbanisation in China, as well as continuities and ruptures with previous urban trends.

Introduction

Since 1978 China has experienced enormous urban expansion: the population living in cities has soared from 18% to 65%, while the number of cities has increased from 190 to 687 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2021). This growth did not proceed in a linear manner. The first wave of urban development sparked ‘centripetal urban growth’ ¹ characterised by the construction of Economic and Technological Development Zones (ETDZs), new towns, and extended networks for mobility gravitating around the major urban centres (Bonino et al., 2019; Cervero and Day, 2008). New urbanisations became ever larger, giving rise to a novel form of suburbanisation made up of polycentric regions around a few major cities (Wu, 2022; Yeh and Chen, 2020). Regarded as a successful model by local cadres, this ‘growth machine’ was widely adopted to emerge in the national and global arena (Ren, 2011; Wu et al., 2022; Yang, 2021). The resulting territorial competition exacerbated disparities between areas of the country (Western and Coastal regions), as well as segments of population (urban and rural citizens) (Chien and Gordon, 2008; Kanbur and Zhang, 1999; Wu, 2006). To tackle these problems, the central authority has adopted a policy of coordinated development to stimulate depressed regions, and boost domestic consumption and internal demand (Garnaut et al., 2013; Zhang, 1999). Once again, these initiatives gravitate around urban development: by reorganising land management and promoting regional-based growth, the central government is now extending urbanisation to over 25% of the territory, that is, an area inhabited by 63% of the Chinese population, accounting for 80% of China’s GDP, and home to 64% of the nation’s cities (Fang and Yu, 2016). Even though this centrifugal expansion is guided by comprehensive planning activities coordinating the interventions at different scales, the new initiatives clash with the preceding transformations, in turn generating new forms of urbanisation that further complexify the Chinese urbanisation process.

While this shift in urban policies and planning activities is impacting most of the country, it is far more evident in the second- and third-tier cities of the inland. Differently from the Eastern mega-city regions, the Central and Western provinces have represented a new frontier in Chinese urban development since mid-1990s. Zhengzhou, in Henan, is emblematic. This territory was characterised by a minor, diffuse pattern of urbanisation, made up of small villages and minor infrastructural networks, with only a few large cities, which over the centuries have chiefly performed administrative functions (Kirkby, 1985). In the last three decades, the situation has rapidly changed as this place has become a laboratory for new policies, practices, and forms of spatial development. Zhengzhou was first subjected to a series of urban entrepreneurial policies. Driven by territorial competition, the municipality promoted the construction of four ETDZs in the mid-1990s, and Zhengdong New District in the early 2000s. These initiatives fostered a centripetal urbanisation to strengthen the role of Zhengzhou as the main hub of Central China (Wu, 2015). Even though these projects were set in motion, they have been superseded by more recent initiatives to promote a comprehensive urban development (Wang and Tomaney, 2019). These are extending urbanisation, integrating the major urban areas, and expanding the infrastructural networks to cover the entire territory homogeneously. As a result, Zhengzhou is now an emerging metropolitan region at the heart of the Central Plains agglomeration made up of 9 prefecture cities, 23 cities, and 413 townships. It produces 3.06% of China’s GDP and is home to 45.5 million inhabitants (3.39% of the nation’s population), of which 13.7 million (30%) are registered urban citizens (Henan Province Bureau of Statistics, 2021). In this area of 58,500 square kilometres, the current policies aim to urbanise another 5,000 square kilometres to provide space for new inhabitants, new economies, and new ways of living (Fang and Yu, 2016).

Drawing upon the development of Zhengzhou metropolitan region, this article investigates how the shift in urban policies has redirected planning activities. Prior to this change projects were codified and rigid, whereas now they are comprehensive and flexible to fit a coherent narrative. However, such flexibility brings about an extreme ‘state of uncertainty’ and a profound spatial fragmentation. These are evident in current developments, which are built to host a myriad of uses and to enrich each space with a variety of aesthetics and meanings. This urbanisation can still be regarded as ‘extended’, that is, a composite agglomeration, deeply intertwined with the global economy in every single part (Brenner and Schmid, 2014). However, projects and spaces are constantly subjected to modifications, so the relations they establish with one another and with the global systems of production are increasingly complex and dynamic. In providing a situated understanding, this paper sheds light on the ever-changing nature of contemporary extended urbanisation and the attempts to govern and plan it.

The paper is structured as follows. The next section analyses the shift from urban entrepreneurialism and the ensuing territorial competition to a more comprehensive urbanisation fostered by regional planning activities and the initiatives of lower administrative levels. The following section examines how these policies have been implemented through planning activities in Zhengzhou, Henan, and investigates the change to centrifugal urbanisation. This study is the result of extensive fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019 in which the author experienced the ongoing development in the urban, suburban and rural areas of the emerging metropolitan region, and interacted with the people inhabiting these places, Chinese academics investigating these topics, and practitioners involved in the design process. ² These first-hand data have been combined with secondary sources such as planning and policy documents, consultancy reports, and statistical information from official yearbooks. For a more detailed account of the empirical findings, the methodological approach and the limits and openings of the fieldwork conducted see Ramondetti (2022). Finally, the concluding part summarises the current trends, discusses the issues arising from the metropolitan region of Zhengzhou, and underlines the necessity for more in-depth research to reveal the materialisation of policies and plans.

Shifting urban policies: from territorial competition to regional agglomeration

The forms of extended urbanisation emerging in today’s China are different from the mega-city regions that characterised the first stage of urban development (Yeh and Chen, 2020). Soon after the economic reform, several measures were taken to encourage the growth of the major cities. These culminated in the urban entrepreneurialism policies, which provoked strong inter-regional competition based on the (self-)promotion of ETDZs and new towns (Wu, 2016b; Yeh, 2005). Despite the adoption by central government of a variety of measures to curtail land speculation, only in 2003 President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao launched the ‘scientific approach to development’: a new strategy featuring a greater coordination between the main stakeholders in the urbanisation process (Wu, 2015). This became the cornerstone of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth Five-Year Plans (FYPs) (2006–2021) which advocated for a rational development of large, medium, and small cities and townships. These policies fostered urban agglomerations: extended urbanisations established to spread evenly economic growth, infrastructures, and services at regional scale. This development is being pursued through two initiatives: the adoption of national and regional planning activities, and the enactment of policies to develop rural areas.

Territorial competition: fostering urban entrepreneurialism

Since the period of economic reform, China has been characterised by increasing economic and administrative devolution (Ma, 2005). Between 1982 and 1998 the central administration’s contribution to public expenditure fell from 53% to 30% (Chien and Gordon, 2008). This caused financial problems for local governments, which ran growing deficits. To address this, a series of reforms were passed which turned the land market into the main source of revenue for local government (Wu, 2015; Xu and Yeh, 2005). The land system was reformed via the Land Administration Law (1986, revised in 1998) and the City Planning Act (1990), meaning that local governments controlled both the ownership of and the development rights for urban spaces (Xu and Yeh, 2009). Furthermore, a dual-track land management system was established in 1988 that distinguished land ownership, which remained public, from land use rights, which could be leased to private enterprises (Ren, 2013). The resulting leasehold system allowed municipalities to distribute land rights through tender, public auction, and negotiation (Wu, 2003). In addition, a tax-sharing reform was enacted in 1992 allowing lower administrations to levy fees from land management and collect extra-budgetary revenues (Wong, 2000). The reliance on land sales intensified in the following decade, to the point that income from land sales increased from 9.3% of total revenues in 2000 to 74.1% in 2011 (Shepard, 2015). In other words, local governments need to ensure that cities kept expanding to make the fiscal system work. These administrative and financial conditions boosted urban entrepreneurialism, which became the main driver of a great landscape transformation centred on the major cities and their fringes.

Urban entrepreneurialism led several local authorities to act as property speculators, promoting urban projects to attract domestic and foreign investment (Lin and Ho, 2005). Since land was valued according to its location, the centres of the major cities were radically restructured (He and Wu, 2007; Shin, 2007). Many factories relocated to the outskirts, and the vacant land was sold to real estate companies (Yeh and Wu, 1996). This process was supported by local administrations responsible for converting land use, coordinating relocation, and assisting with site clearance. Moreover, each local cadre adopted ‘a discourse’ to brand and promote its own city. Such ‘discourses’ relied on planning activities, particularly the drafting of non-statutory plans and the promotion of international competitions. These legitimised urban transformations based on the replication of iconic spaces, such as ETDZs, Central Business Districts (CBDs), Transit Oriented Developments (TODs), and university towns. Consequently, a great expansion occurred in the urban fringes (Tian and Wong, 2007). This was not only supported by incentives to factories and business enterprises, but by the provision of infrastructures. Large-scale networks were realised both by local governments, as an initial condition for urban development, and investors, as a form of tax relief (Wu, 2003). Such a ‘growth machine’ occurred in two stages.

The first, during the 1990s, was the ‘land-enclosure movement’: a redistribution of land resources via non-market measures that boosted the creation of ETDZs (Deng and Huang, 2004; He, 2000). These were established to attract international investment, facilitate trade, and encourage new industries by adopting special finance and taxation policies. By 1996, development zones exceeded 15,000 square kilometres: more than the total area of all existing cities in China (Liu and Xu, 2019). This growth was driven by the lower tiers of administration (townships, villages, counties, and municipalities) that conducted both legal and illegal transactions to maximise revenue from land management (Lin and Ho, 2005). Although the central government promoted several initiatives to cool this development zone fever, the trend continued nonetheless, so that by 2003, development zones had expanded to cover more than 36,000 square kilometres. However, only 13.5% of their total area was effectively under development. Consequently, in 2004, the Ministry of Land and Resources abolished 4,813 ETDZs, that is, 70% of development zones nationwide (Hsing, 2010).

While the development zone fever had cooled down by the early 2000s, a second stage of grassroots urbanisation was growing. Instead of converting counties into cities, the administrative restructuring of the mid-1990s launched policies of ‘city administering counties’ and ‘annexation of suburban counties’ (Zhang and Wu, 2006). This encouraged major municipalities to seize control of their urban fringes by developing new towns, a strategy that relied on market-driven urban mega-projects (Hsing, 2010). Due to the changeable nature of land policies, these initiatives were undertaken by municipalities to convert as much land as possible as quickly as possible. The land reserve was then used as collateral to obtain the bank loans necessary for infrastructural provisions and, once the infrastructural network was in place, the new towns became ‘backup spaces’ that could easily be modified to meet the needs of different stakeholders over time (Sampieri, 2019). This urban expansion led to a metropolisation process with satellite towns, industrial centres, and vast rural areas being turned into suburban zones of unified mega-cities (Bonino et al., 2019; Wu, 2016a). Within this picture, new towns treated the totality of urban space as a commodity: planning, zoning, marketing, and infrastructure supply were combined to build global centres to attract domestic and foreign investment within a context of competing cities.

Regional agglomerations: fostering a comprehensive development

Since the mid-2000s, one of the major changes in urban policy has been the return to regional planning to encourage and coordinate large-scale infrastructural and urban development. Although regional planning was introduced soon after the economic reform (Fan et al., 2012), urban entrepreneurialism progressively undermined the top-down system, until the drafting of territorial plans completely ceased in the 1990s (Wu, 2015). This changed in the early 2000s, when national and regional institutions started promoting a process of governance upscaling centred on land policy (Xu and Yeh, 2009). This led the Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development (MoHURD) and the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design to draft the National Urban System Plan (2005–2020). The plan emphasised the role of ‘urban clusters’, that is, large urban agglomerations evenly distributed within the national infrastructural system. However, owing to MoHURD’s lack of power in implementing regional level policies, the plan was published without a statutory status. In any case, in 2006 the State Council required the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) to prepare the National Main Functional Area Plan, which was drafted in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published in 2010. This plan envisaged 17 urban agglomerations located along the main mobility infrastructures, and the mega-city regions of the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, and Jing-Jin-Ji region. Based on these guidelines, in 2014, the State Council approved the National Plan of New Urbanisation (2014–2020) that establishes 20 urban agglomerations encompassing more than 25% of Chinese territory and 64% of Chinese cities. These areas are expected to be the main drivers of economic and urban development by absorbing 75% of newly added urbanities (Fang and Yu, 2016).

Within the framework provided by the regional plans, 106 large-scale urban projects are now under construction. While those at national level are in the Coastal and Western regions, Central China hosts the majority of new municipal and provincial urban projects. The new large-scale developments are different from the ETDZs and new towns promoted under the impetus of urban entrepreneurialism. Two-thirds of those currently under construction are larger than 100 square kilometres, and 19 exceed 1,000 square kilometres (Fang and Yu, 2016). To reorganise such large sections of territory, new plans involve different levels of administration and engage with multiple spatial features. This comprehensive approach has turned planning activities into a ‘soft institutional space’ where official levels of governance (such as provinces, municipalities, and counties) and organisations without a specific administrative status (such as regional associations, city-region bodies, and mayors’ forums) may negotiate the future landscape transformations (Wu, 2016a; Xu and Yeh, 2009). Within this inclusive spatial and institutional framework, new urban projects are rearranging urban and rural areas, cultural and industrial zones, facilities, and natural resources. Hence, even though differentiated regional policies and zones of exception still exist, these planning activities are increasingly integrating the different landscapes.

While regional planning activities are reshaping the territory based on a top-down approach, several initiatives have been undertaken at lower levels. Even though the construction of new towns continues, other forms of grassroot urbanisation are gaining momentum. Among these, the most important are occurring in rural areas. These are driven by national and local policies that wish to mitigate the rural-urban divide. In fact, there is a significant gap between the salaries of urban and rural workers, while the lack of medical and educational services in the countryside adds to social inequality (Hong, 2021; Rozelle and Hell, 2020; Ye, 2009). These problems compounded the ‘three rural issues’: decline in agricultural output, deterioration of rural villages, and impoverishment of peasants (DuBois and Li, 2016). To address them, the Chinese administration has instituted various economic measures since 2003, coupled with urban programmes such as the Building a New Socialist Countryside (BNSC), Rural Revitalization, Beautiful Village, and Beautiful China (Ahlers, 2014; Su, 2009).

Even though these initiatives have been promoted at the national level, their implementation has been the task of local governments. ³ Each village is in charge of drafting a 20-year plan that, in line with the strategic regional plan, determines land use, functional zoning, infrastructure provision, and environmental protection (Bray, 2013). These long-term plans employ two approaches: the modernisation of the existing villages, and the demolition of ancient settlements and relocation of the villagers into new agricultural towns (Ahlers, 2014). Both approaches aim to reduce land consumption by creating more densely populated settlements. Thus, municipalities collect ‘land quotas’ that can be redistributed to other locations. ⁴ At that point, the system of strategic plans at provincial and higher levels is called upon to manage the reallocation of the quotas. Hence, these planning activities can be considered as the lower tiers of the large-scale urban projects. However, this practice is criticised for being nothing more than an alibi for the cannibalisation of rural areas for further urban development (Smith, 2021). While this may be true, such a comprehensive approach is also leading to a ‘townisation’ process that overrides the formal distinction between city and country (Oakes, 2020; Rowe and Kan, 2016; Yang, 2014). As result, rural areas are now equipped with new services and infrastructures and integrated into urban agglomerations to such an extent that is possible to view the ‘countryside as a city’ (Lee, 2016: 210).

Shifting planning activities: Development dynamics of Zhengzhou metropolitan region

The shift in urban policies examined in the previous section has radically affected planning activities. The urban entrepreneurialism phase was characterised by the self-promotion of massive new towns through highly regulated plans within clearly defined municipal areas. On the contrary, the plans drafted within the framework of the urban agglomeration policies involve several administrative bodies over large areas, thus, promoting a loose space to accommodate a myriad of uses and functions. These two approaches and their spatialisations can clearly be seen in the second-tier cities of inland China, such as Zhengzhou. Founded during the Shang Dynasty (Zhu, 2012), ⁵ Zhengzhou is the capital of the Henan province, with a population of 12 million inhabitants over a municipal area of 7,532.56 square kilometres. The city has always played a key role as one of the breadbaskets of China, and benefited from its strategic position at the intersection between two of the most important railway lines in the country: the Beijing-Hankou and Lianyungang-Lanzhou. These conditions favoured industrial and urban development during the socialist period, and, despite the city losing its importance during the first phase of open-up policies, it remained one of the major infrastructural hubs of inland China (Busquets and Yang, 2019).

Zhengdong New District: forms of centripetal urbanisation

In the early 1990s the municipal area of Zhengzhou was home to about 900,000 inhabitants. Despite being one of the targets of the Third Front Movement in the 1950s (Hsu, 1996), during the 1970s and the 1980s the city suffered an infrastructure and housing shortage due to underfunding. It entered a new phase of growth only under the impetus of the ‘development zone fever’. In the mid-1990s the municipality drafted the Zhengzhou General Masterplan (1995–2010) adopting a decentralised multicentre strategy based on four ETDZs around the city centre (Chen and Yao, 2013). These were to be home to factories and industrial activities, with just a few residential and commercial areas. The southern ETDZ (9 square kilometres) was designated for the relocated textile and electronics factories sited in the city centre, while the northern one (9.5 square kilometres) was intended for leisure and tourism industries. East of the urban core, another 12-square-kilometre zone was set up for automotive plants, while the Zhengzhou High-tech Industrial Development Zone was established on 18.6 square kilometres on the western side. By the end of 1990s, the plan had been partially implemented: the old textile factories were relocated, and new industrial plants were built in the western cluster. These transformations stimulated investment in fixed assets, which rose from 2 billion CNY in 1990 to 16 billion CNY in 2000, with investments in real estate increasing from 90 million to 3.4 billion CNY (Zhengzhou Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 2020).

These economic trends encouraged the local government to continue along the path of urban expansion. In 2000, the municipality commissioned local planning institutes to draft a plan for a new town to the east of the city centre (Xue et al., 2013). This was not considered satisfactory and, in 2001, the provincial government launched an international competition for Zhengdong New District: a new town of 1.5 million people centred around a Central Business District (CBD), a technology park, and a high-speed railway station. This would increase Zhengzhou’s population by more than a third, while doubling the size of the city by urbanising a new 150-square-kilometre area (Li et al., 2010b).

Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associates won the competition proposing a metabolist-style project for a symbiotic city (He and Zhang, 2007). The plan adopted a poly-nuclear layout organised into five areas separated by ecological corridors accommodating the major mobility infrastructure (Figure 1). The main nucleus (40 square kilometres) is located in the north-western part of the new town. This is home to two CBDs, commercial strips, buildings for tertiary activities, most of the residential areas, and a 3.5-square-kilometre artificial lake. The second nucleus extends across 50 square kilometres in the south-east of the new town and was planned to have a new railway station separating the residential area to the north from the High-Tech Industry Development Zone in the southern part of the section. The three remaining clusters are the Sport City Cluster (north), the Resort Residential Cluster (centre), and the Research City Cluster (south) (Li et al., 2010c).

Figure 1.

Zhengdong New District masterplan (2001–2009). Drawing by Leonardo Ramondetti.

The plan underwent several revisions during its implementation. From 2002 to 2009, the new town suffered from a severe shortfall in funding. The administrative committee generated 1.05 billion CNY from land compensation and took out a 5.55 billion CNY loan from banks (Xue and Wang, 2010). Together with other funds, it invested a total of 18 billion CNY (Xue et al., 2013). These were used to provide basic infrastructures, which boosted land prices to 4,000 CNY per square metre, the highest in the Henan province. During this phase, Chinese design institutes and international firms competed for the construction of buildings and parks. At the end of this redesign process, the ecological corridors were downsized, the south cluster was revamped to host a new high-speed railway station, and the two clusters along the eastern green belt became a single 22-square-kilometre nucleus where the university town is now located. Finally, a grid layout was adopted for the remaining land.

Soon after the construction of the main CBD, Zhengdong New District came to fame as one of the most notorious ghost towns in China (Shepard, 2015). In the meantime, Kurokawa’s design was sharply criticised for the overexploitation of water resources by its extensive system of canals and lakes, traffic congestion due to the road layout, and the non-human scale of the living environment (Xue et al., 2011). Despite this criticism, the new town is filling up: the main CBD has been completed and has 821 enterprises employing more than 25,000 people; factories, warehouses and commercial activities for automotive and logistics have settled in the industrial cluster south of the railway station, and provide work for more than 75,000 people, and the university town is home to 15 campuses accommodating more than 240,000 students (Henan Province Bureau of Statistics, 2021). In the meantime, most of the parks have been finished, line 5 of the metro connecting the high-speed railway station to the city centre opened in 2019, while line 4 is under construction to link the sub-CBD and the residential areas running north-south. All this boosts residential development: low-rise compounds, mostly luxury housing, have been built in the main cluster, which is gradually expanding northward, to the sub-CBD currently under construction in the centre of the artificial lake (Figure 2). As a result, in 2017 alone, Zhengdong New District absorbed 72.1 billion CNY in real estate investments, more than the combined total of all other districts in Zhengzhou municipality (Henan Province Bureau of Statistics, 2018). In spite of this, there are still doubts about the financial benefits of the new town, which have fallen short of the original predictions, and need further government backing (Shao, 2015). Moreover, the effective occupation of housing and use of spaces for commercial activities proceeds slowly compared to the original expectations, raising doubts on the viability of this development and recriminations on the inflexibility of the original plan.

Figure 2.

The sub-CBD of Zhengdong New District under construction, 2019. Photograph by Leonardo Ramondetti.

Zhengbian New District: novel forms of extended urbanisation

Zhengdong New District is still under construction; however, no sooner had the plan been drafted than national policies began to change, in turn affecting the methods employed in urbanising new areas. Since 2005, Zhengzhou has become crucial in its role as the capital of the Central Plains urban agglomeration. This has led the provincial government and its municipalities to adopt a new strategy based on two objectives: the creation of the biggest logistics hub in Central China, and the implementation of a coordinated development plan between industrialisation, urbanisation, and agricultural production (Fang and Yu, 2016; Wang and Tomaney, 2019).

As part of this strategy, since the mid-2000s, Zhengzhou municipality has engaged in numerous planning activities to promote the Zhengzhou Integrated Transportation Hub, the Zhengzhou Airport Economic Zone, and the Zhengzhou-Kaifeng Industrial Belt (Li et al., 2010a). In 2006, these initiatives condensed into a comprehensive project promoted by the Henan province: Zhengbian New District. This new urbanisation extends over a 2,100-square-kilometre area between Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, which has 4.5 million inhabitants. In 2008, the new district was included in the Henan Province Urban System Planning, and, in the following year, an international competition was launched for its design (Wang et al., 2013). This was won by the London-based firm Arup with a project titled Planning for Low-Carbon Urban Systems: The Zhengbian New District Plan. In 2010, the project was included in the Regional Strategic Plan of the Central China Economic Region, in turn part of the National Main Functional Area Plan published by the NDRC (Wu, 2015).

The design adopted for Zhengbian New District is radically different from that of Zhengdong. Zhengbian is a coordinated series of projects covering a much wider area (Figure 3). Arup planned to develop 500 square kilometres (24% of the total area), while the remaining 1,600 square kilometres would be devoted to agriculture, nature reserves, and leisure activities. Half of the urbanised area is designated for residential use (230 square kilometres), while the remainder is home to several functions, such as industry (72 square kilometres) and logistics infrastructures (50 square kilometres) (Zhengzhou Municipality, 2009). The plan organises the territory along two axes (Arup et al., 2010). The east-west axis is an 80-kilometre-long linear city connecting Zhengzhou and Kaifeng; it includes: Zhengdong New District, Kaifeng New Area, and four new clusters. Each has industrial zones located in the southern part, and commercial, administrative, and cultural activities at the centre. The entire development is connected by an infrastructure corridor made up of two highways and three railway lines and is situated between two ecological areas. The northern one serves as an environmental buffer along the Yellow River, and is used for leisure activities, luxury compounds, and agricultural parks. The southern one is the New Agricultural Zone, which will be home to new agricultural towns and food processing industries. The north-south axis is mainly for industrial activities. By developing along this infrastructural corridor on the western border of Zhengbian, Zhengdong New District (north) will eventually merge with Zhengzhou Airport City (south).

Figure 3.

Zhengbian New District masterplan (2009–2020). Drawing by Leonardo Ramondetti.

At first, the north-south axis was secondary to the urban corridor linking Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, but it is growing in importance. In 2014, the Henan province drafted the Zhengzhou Airport Economic Comprehensive Experimental Zone Development Plan (2014–2040), which was approved by the State Council in 2016 (Wang and Tomaney, 2019). In the same year, Zhengzhou Airport City was the first to be included in the national development strategy and mentioned in the thirteenth FYP (2016–2020) (Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 2016). As a result, while the original plan foresaw Zhengzhou Airport City covering an area of 100 square kilometres, the development now exceeds 400 square kilometres (Zhengzhou Municipal Bureau of Urban and Rural Planning, 2018). The urban layout of Zhengzhou Airport City is a grid pattern centred on the airport and extending east. It not only includes infrastructure and services, but such a wide variety of functions that it can be regarded as an ‘aerotropolis’ (Kasarda, 2018). In light of this, Zhengbian New District and its Airport City are now considered the means of integrating not only Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, but also Xuchang (the fourth largest economy in Henan), forming ‘the growth triangle of the Central Plains’ (Wang et al., 2013).

While planning activities continue, new developments are gradually taking shape. The infrastructural corridor between Zhengzhou and Kaifeng is now complete, as are the infrastructural grids of the clusters along the east-west axis. Furthermore, between 2013 and 2015, a second terminal was added to the international airport, and it is now expected to handle 70 million passengers and 5 million tons of cargo per year (Williams, 2017). In the meantime, numerous factories have been set up in the industrial clusters, and the logistic hubs are expanding to the east and north. Along with these major transformations, a multitude of minor projects are also currently underway. More than 300 villages have been demolished, and more than 100 new agricultural towns are under construction (Figure 4). In addition to these settlements, the farmland is also being reshaped by the establishment of experimental zones, new agricultural parks, and leisure areas. Finally, a wide infrastructural network made up of parks, canals, open spaces, scenic sites, and facilities has permeated the entire area.

Figure 4.

Zhugu New Agricultural Town in Zhengbian New District, 2017. Photograph by Leonardo Ramondetti.

Unlike Zhengdong New District, where every inch has been precisely marked out on detailed plans, Zhengbian is subjected to a proliferation of diverse initiatives. The result is a composite landscape: business mixes with leisure, such as golf clubs in agricultural parks; industry alongside amenities, such as schools and dormitories in high-tech factories; and luxury residences next to new agricultural towns. Each space is open to many uses and characterised in aesthetic to enrich the overall development with functions and meanings. This, however, does not generate a codified and pacific landscape. On the contrary, the planned flexibility goes side by side with unforeseen appropriations, such as roads turned into impromptu stages or productive sites transformed into discos (Sabrié, 2016). The result is a vibrant and lively development, far more provisional and complex with respect to the earlier new towns: significations are constantly staged and reviewed, while planned and unplanned alterations incessantly modify the landscape.

Conclusions

This article examines how new policies fostering the regionalisation of economic competition have brought about a shift from centripetal to centrifugal urbanisation. The case of Zhengzhou metropolitan region documents how planning activities have been redirected from strong polarities to malleable and pervasive spaces. In this light, new towns such as Zhengdong represent the products of an outdated concept: monumental centres prepared by international architectural firms to provide precise images where every scale and every detail was strictly regulated. On the other hand, under the impetus of coordinated development at every level of governance, today’s planning activities attempt to govern urban transformations via incremental initiatives. Zhengbian is emblematic, but not unique. In Henan alone, the provincial government has established 14 districts over a total area of 4,902 square kilometres. Eschewing top-down, rigid blueprinted models, the new plans incorporate the adaptability necessary to deal with huge landscapes, ever-changing policies, multiple administrative cadres, and uncertain economic conditions. Consequently, the spaces they generate are primarily ‘spaces full of potentiality’, where pervasive infrastructural networks are progressively equipping the land to accommodate multiple elements, create new environmental conditions, and scale up economies (Governa and Sampieri, 2020). These infrastructural platforms are the backbones of an extended urbanisation home to a myriad of uses: industrial districts and eco-cities, CBDs and agricultural towns, large stretches of countryside and huge logistics areas. Within these loose and deformable landscapes, the programme does not function in terms of morphological construction, rather the spatial layout is a dynamic surface that adapts to demand and opportunity. This new form of extended urbanisation invites us to reflect on two issues: the ‘state of uncertainty’ and the spatial fragmentation brough about by this shift in urban policies and planning initiatives.

Unlike strictly codified new towns, today’s developments are permeated by a ‘state of uncertainty’ where every project is constantly rediscussed until it is eventually realised (Governa and Sampieri, 2020). Thus, new developments are anything but static: they are unstable grounds in a state of constant flux. This casts doubt on their primary role as ‘spatial fixers’ for financial circuits operating at multiple scales: from local cadres territorialising capital in the metropolitan hinterlands, to global investors in search of low-paid labour (Lin and Yi, 2011; Shen and Wu, 2017; Wu, 2022). The changes in urban policies discussed under ‘Shifting urban policies: from territorial competition to regional agglomeration’ highlight the efforts to alter this ‘growth machine’ model. These, however, do not necessarily restrain urban growth; instead, they produce a new form of extended urbanisation that mainly relies on future urban imaginaries, narratives, and expectations to keep the money flowing (Ramondetti, 2022). Within this picture, the attempts to orchestrate development via coordinated planning play a key role: multi-level governance insures against the failures of previous experiences, such as the bankruptcies of many municipalities in the 2000s (Yin et al., 2018); while the multitude of projects indemnifies against any future transformations. This is evident in Zhengzhou metropolitan region, where a plethora of international firms and local design institutes, under the aegis of local, regional, and national administrations, are constantly adapting the projects underway to meet ever-changing demands. To what extent this will continue remains to be seen, as well as the effective capability to halt development and limit urban expansion when necessary.

Despite attempts at coordination, the plethora of plans results in fragmentated initiatives that produce composite spatialities. Fragmentation is a key feature of extended urbanisation (Keil, 2018); however, in contemporary China, this cannot be viewed solely as the result of economic forces, or the consequence of splintered administrative jurisdictions (Shen and Wu, 2017). In dealing with extensive territories and ever-changing conditions, fragmentation has become the strategy of today’s coordinated planning to generate composite spaces which benefit from the interaction with new infrastructures to welcome a large variety of artifacts and uses. This clearly emerges in urbanising the ‘rural agglomerations’ outside the bounds of Chinese cities (Marton, 2002). Although these have been compared to other Asian desakota regions (Chen et al., 2017; Lin, 2018), they are only in small part the consequence of grassroot development (Wu et al., 2013; Zhu and Guo, 2014). Conversely the fragments of Chinese extended urbanisation result from projects which attempt to improve, diversify, and brand every portion of the landscape to enrich every space with performance and meaning. The farming zones within Zhengzhou metropolitan region elucidate this: here, new agricultural towns, well-being facilities, and high-tech agricultural parks are planned to be exceptional artifacts, while being deeply integrated with regional infrastructural networks, consolidated urban spaces, and non-agricultural productions. The stratified relations (both material and symbolic) that the emerging heterogeneous urbanities establish with local and global economies and imaginaries call for new definitions to transcend standard dichotomic distinctions such as urban/rural or core/suburban areas (Oakes, 2020). Furthermore, despite increasing the commodification of the environment and the intensification of agricultural production (Yang et al., 2010), they cannot be considered purely sites for capital extraction, namely, the ‘operational landscape’ theorised by Brenner and Katsikis (2020). On the contrary, these spaces are at the forefront of the Chinese political agenda, which is striving to improve living standards both materially, housing and infrastructures, and culturally, facilities and welfare. While the effectiveness of these initiatives has yet to be demonstrated, the spaces emerging from the agglomeration processes invite us to consider the complexity of the urbanisation ‘beyond the city’ (Ghosh and Meer, 2021), and to further investigate how plans and projects will eventually materialise.