It has been standard Chinese urban policy to develop new towns in overpopulated metropolitan regions since the 1990s. This lecture by Jing Zhou takes the case of Tongzhou near Beijing as an example of the resulting mixture of planned and unplanned urban development.

Tongzhou town was first planned as a satellite town in the 1950s and founded on a historic harbour town. Its rapid transformation was prompted by a series of market-driven policies throughout the 1990s and 2000s after several decades of state planning. This lecture compares this situation to Almere, one of the largest new towns in the Netherlands, and will argue that modernist planning has been ineffective in creating the spatial and social diversity necessary for a vital new town.

Jing Zhou studied architecture and urban planning at Tianjin University and holds a master of urbanism from the Delft University of Technology. The Learning From… series takes its title from Learning From Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s influential publication, which analysed the commercial strips and architectural symbolism of Las Vegas in order to understand urban sprawl. In this spirit, the series brings together experts to explore specific urban conditions and their relevance to the future development of cities.

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