The Power of Plans - Shenzen

50 Shades of Planning

This episode is part of an international triumvirate, which has been put together with the help of old friend of the podcast, Ian Wray, and new friend of the podcast, Lucy Natarajan.

Ian, regular listeners will know, is a Professor at the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place at University of Liverpool.

Lucy is one of the editors of the Built Environment journal, a co-founder of Place Alliance, an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes and an Associate Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning.

Ian and Lucy compiled the December 2022 edition of Built Environment and sought in so doing to explore ‘the power of plans’. This, they endeavoured to do, by way of a series of internationally commissioned case studies on grand plans that have been shown to work, asking how they worked and why. In this series Sam Stafford explores with Lucy and Ian three of those case studies.

In this episode, in a recording made online in June 2023, Ian and Sam talk about Shenzen with Mee Kam Ng. Shenzen is a city that, when designated as China’s first Special Economic Zone in the late 1970s was a border town with a population of less than 250,000 and is now the country’s ‘Silicon Valley’, with a population of over 17 million.

Some accompanying reading.

Built Environment – The Power of Plans

https://www.alexandrinepress.co.uk/built-environment/power-plans

Ian’s recommendation.

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

https://groveatlantic.com/book/how-asia-works/#:~:text=In%20How%20Asia%20Works%2C%20Joe,Asia%20and%20why%2C%20and%20for

Mee Kam’s recommendations

Theorising Urban Planning in a Transitional Economy: The Case of Shenzhen, People's Republic of China

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40112599.pdf

Strategic Planning of China's First Special Economic Zone: Shenzhen City Master Plan (2010–2020)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649357.2011.626316

The Story of Shenzhen

https://www.metropolis.org/sites/default/files/resources/the_story_of_shenzhen_2nd_edition_sep_2019_0.pdf

Spatial Planning for Smart Sustainable Development?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649357.2022.2139075

Some accompanying listening.

Mee Kam’s recommendation.

Story of Spring (Guangdong Province's 30th Anniversary of Reform and Opening Up) by Dong Wenhua

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfRHaKwvOxs

50 Shades T-Shirts!

If you have listened to Episode 45 of the 50 Shades of Planning Podcast you will have heard Clive Betts say that...

'In the Netherlands planning is seen as part of the solution. In the UK, too often, planning is seen as part of the problem'.

Sam said in reply that that would look good on a t-shirt and it does. Further details can be found here: http://samuelstafford.blogspot.com/2021/07/50-shades-of-planning-t-shirts.html