URBAN  PLANNING

Xianyang’s municipal government has the following objectives:

• Promote urbanization and industrialization in the context

of the socialist market economy.

• Develop and improve the city’s functions.

• Create a modern city.

• Transform the pattern of infrastructure construction.

• Provide the proper environment for economic development.

The Challenge of Rapid Urbanization

The level of urbanization and per capita GNP are closely interrelated. Urbanization brings together people and productive forces, and organizes them in a way that makes intensive development possible. Advanced scientific and management techniques increase labor productivity, creating greater economic value than nonurbanized areas. Xianyang used to follow a policy of “industrialization without urbanization.”  Although its industrialization rate was 47 percent, its urbanization rate was only about 28 percent—a condition that hindered the healthy development of both urbanization and industrialization. Xianyang’s level of urbanization will reach 30 percent by the end of 2000. Then it will enter a stage of rapid development, during which the municipal authorities must welcome new ideas, dispel their misgivings about urbanization, overcome various manmade obstacles, formulate preferential policies, and promote the development of the central and smaller cities. At the same time, while they must not pursue urbanization indiscriminately, they must be prepared for its inevitability.

Conservation, Renovation, and Innovation

The city is a subsystem of the ecological system, like an embryo in the womb. The bigger it grows, the more it takes from the ecosphere. The ecosphere must provide the city with sufficient nutrition and absorb the city’s waste. Xianyang’s sustainable development depends on rational development; the efficient use of resources such as land, underground water, rivers, and so on; and the reduction and recycling of waste. The city also needs more parks and gardens in order to sustain ecological balance. It must regulate construction and stop destructive development. The city plan for flood control provides for the

establishment of a manmade ecological system along the Wei and Feng rivers. It is necessary to renovate the areas around the rivers, reinforce the dykes, dredge the waterways, and clear away the silt. Highly polluting factories and projects with high energy needs should be kept out of the planned areas. In order to protect important cultural relics and historic sites, building height, scale, distance, and style should be strictly regulated in conservation areas.

source: www.adb.org