Tianjin Future Science City: A Chinese Flexible Planning Experience for Industry New Town

During the past three decades, the development of high-tech districts and economic-development areas became one of the main pillars that support the radical social and economic growth in Chinese Cities. with a planning agenda that pursues fast completion of construction, these towns contain unitary land use and inadequate considerations of urban uncertainty in the future development. Nowadays, as China became the second largest advanced and emerging economies in the world, well-planned and smart urban growth replaced the intensive urban expansion. Therefore, utilizing resilience to confront uncertainty in future development has become an important task in modern planning.

The planning provision of Tianjin Future Science City regularized the project’s overall framework and designed un-identical development disciplines for individual grids at the site to exploit elastic space that embraces uncertainty. The design scheme provides the urban infrastructure with a large-scale grid of 1kmX1km, which provides a basic development framework and accommodates usage changes within the grid. Variable development contents are allowed in each grid as long as they respect the fundamental planning guidelines. Similar to Lego, the grids are diverse but connectable elements that could be combined and transformed by planners to conduct variable development contents. However, it is true that such development methodology requires careful and dynamic maintenances, as well as deep integration with planning administrations.

From the practical point of view, the construction and operation of Tianjin Future Science City are generally considered successful. In conclusion, the thesis indicates the practical experience of Tianjin Future Science City and explaining the significance of resilience planning in assisting planners to increase land use efficiency and intensity. It is believed the experience also demonstrates resilience planning’s advantages in responding to market demands, and by no means evidenced the feasibility of elastic design method.