Introduction

The theme of the congress refers to one of those grand goals of city planning that – as so many other city planning promises - is in striking contrast with the reality of rapid urban development all over the world. For most city planners (and other critical minds as well), sprawl clearly has a negative connotation, conjuring up images of uncontrolled residential subdivisions and ribbon development, square miles of unused and derelict land, wasteful and unplanned conversion of valuable agricultural soil, clogged-up roads and expensive but under-used utility lines.

Other terms come to mind, such as the more factual “peri-urban development”, or the joking analogy of scrambled eggs (or Mexican omelette) as a graphical image of a contemporary city region. It is now almost impossible to draw a line between town and country – unlike in ancient times when the urban form used to resemble a boiled egg (the walled city) and later (when industrialisation had begun), a fried egg. (Cedric Price and then William Mitchell invented and used the delightful egg morphology to make their point). Not everyone finds sprawl harmful and unwanted though. Some economists have even discovered certain advantages in unlimited urban growth, and political scientists would disagree whether such large sprawling cities are necessarily un-governable or not.

Much of the now common unrestrained physical form of urban development, and with it, the economic and social implications of a sprawling urban continuum, appears to be the inevitable consequence of increasing automobile ownership and use, and even more so, of the global market forces that are at work in our urbanizing world, along with rampant rural-urban migration, and an increasingly unregulated private sector. The global fifty-percent line in urbanisation has already been crossed, and in Asia, it will very soon be reached.

China, as the largest country with a very rapidly growing urbanisation rate, has reached enormous proportions of challenges, but also of opportunities, in its mega-urban regions where an overwhelmingly large proportion of national wealth is generated. In contrast with an earlier era in the People’s Republic of China when everything, including urban growth, was claimed to be firmly under control, the Chinese government now finds it close to impossible to “control” urban growth. So in China, as much as in India or any other fast developing country, “cities without sprawl” would seem to amount to wishful thinking or un-attainable goals, or – to invoke another image that is hard to pin down – an important dimension of the idealistic goal of “sustainable city development”. At any rate, growth and proportions of mega-cities in the so-called developing countries are unprecedented; they are much greater than those in industrialized countries in history or at present; and the global environmental and social effects of urban sprawl are beyond imagination.

Is it possible at all to plan and govern such developments?  Do we not have the right kind of strategic concepts that would lend themselves as powerful instruments for achieving those “cities without sprawl”? Some of them are, in random order – the sustainable city, or perhaps the liveable city (which is even more difficult to define), the compact city (straightforward as a physical concept but hard to do in practice), national urban development strategies for better regional distribution of urban growth, regional networking, public transport (including the new miracle of bus transit, or perhaps retro-fitting of public transport systems), brown field development as well as urban conservation and regeneration, and several other concepts. Are they effective in practice, or do they just reflect utopian thinking, as much as the imperative of “cities without sprawl” would seem to do?  

Dalian, the host city, is a large industrial and commercial city that would offer a rich laboratory of proven and rejected strategies to learn from. China certainly has much to show in terms of urban development lessons, as much as China wishes to learn the lessons of other countries.

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