Abstract

Shenzhen, a new mega city founded under China’s ‘open door’ policy, has experienced dramatic urban development over the past thirty years. From humble beginnings as a fishing village before the 1980s, it benefited from locational advantage next to Hong Kong, an autonomous city with a global role in finance and trade. Shenzhen was first among cities in China to adapt the capitalist world’s urban development practices to an indigenous, centrally controlled land management system. As a new city, Shenzhen may best represent the role of planning in a time of economic transition. Urban planning in Shenzhen was ambitious in its reach, using ‘experimental reform’ as a vehicle for institutionalizing changes in management of the land resource. These reforms became generalized in China, leading to a recent decline in academic investigation of Shenzhen. While the city as ‘reformer’ seems to have run its course, new challenges upset the old assumptions and call for more research. Today, as industry moves inland away from increasingly costly coastal areas, the city is grappling with the need to restructure its economic base. The city has undertaken major infrastructural projects in a bid to secure its role as a major transhipment hub and logistics command centre, while also developing a rail-based mass transit system. The regeneration of disused industrial land and ‘urban villages’, built up to accommodate at low cost a huge factory workforce, are important ongoing city programmes. While the city extends its infrastructure to connect more effectively with the rest of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and with Hong Kong, more fundamental questions surround its role within a restructuring regional economy. Ambitions for international stature, bolstered by a large and young population base, a world-class port and modern facilities are challenged by a rapidly evolving regional economy.