Quanzhou, a prefecture city in Fujian province, is well known for its unique urbanization process – in situ urbanzaiton in China. Since the reform and opening up, Quanzhou has experienced astonishing urbanization. It completed 2015’s urbanization task ahead of the provincial schedule. Its urbanization level was higher than that of the country’s average for 7 percent in 2015. However, there are a lot of problems emerging in the rapid urban development and transition, such as the inefficient land use and urban sprawl. In order to achieve healthy urbanization, this project aims to formulate the strategy of urbanization, major areas of urbanization, three-year action plan, etc.
This project identifies major trends and features in Quanzhou’s urbanization. Upon these analysis, we assess the existing urban system plans and propose a new spatial system for urban and town development. This project also highlights to reconstruct spatial structure system, by forming “the bay-side metropolitan region and urban network with polycentric cities”. For the urban hierarchy, a five-tiered urban hierarchy is introduced to replace the old one, which is “central city – sub-central cities – small cities – key towns – towns”. In addition, this project put forward policy suggestions for five types of urbanization areas – high urbanization areas, high-speed urbanization areas, peri-urbanization areas, mountainous urbanization areas, small town and countryside areas. The five urbanization models proposed in this project are adopted by Quanzhou Government to guide the development of urbanization, and the project won the 2nd prize excellent plan of Fujian province in 2015.
