The next 15 megacities #13 : It may be China’s most liveable burgeoning megacity, but Chengdu’s park city plans bear a price tag of forced evictions and relocations

“The goal is that every 300 metres you see green,” says Chen Lan, an expert in urban design and planning at Sichuan University in the emerging Chinese megacity of Chengdu. “You open a window, you see green, you see a park …”

With its mild weather, teahouses, quiet leafy streets and internationally known food, Chengdu in south-west China has long been rated one of the country’s most liveable cities.

For much of the city’s 2,000-year history as an administrative and agricultural capital surrounded by good land, Chengdu thrived in relative isolation in China’s hinterlands. Over the last two decades, though, it has experienced a burst of rapid growth, fuelled by Beijing’s “Go West” policy encouraging development in interior cities.

Q&A Where are the next 15 megacities? Show Hide By 2035 another 15 cities will have populations above 10 million, according to the latest United Nations projections, taking the total number of megacities to 48. Guardian Cities is exploring these newcomers at a crucial period in their development: from car-centric Tehran to the harsh inequalities of Luanda; from the film industry of Hyderabad to the demolition of historic buildings in Ho Chi Minh City. We'll also be in Chengdu, Dar es Salaam, Nanjing, Ahmedabad, Surat, Baghdad, Kuala Lumpur, Xi'an, Seoul, Wuhan and London. Read more from the next 15 megacities series here.

Nick Van Mead

In 1998 the city was home to 4.2 million people, according to United Nations estimates. With migrants pouring in from other parts of the province, that figure is now 8.8 million, and the latest UN forecasts predict more than 10 million will live in the urban agglomeration by 2026. Official Chinese data, which tends to include rural areas too, puts the current population at 16 million.

To deal with that growth, Chengdu city planners have made environmental protection a focus. Some liken the programme to England’s garden city movement, which emerged in the 1890s to counteract urban crowding and pollution.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Local people take tea in a temple garden in Chengdu. Photograph: plej92/Getty Images

Local people take tea in a temple garden in Chengdu. Photograph: Getty Images

But Chengdu’s urban renewal campaigns, like those of many Chinese cities, have resulted in mass demolitions and relocations – and critics say these projects are more about local officials inflating economic statics, impressing Beijing to climb up the party ladder, and creating a pretext for transferring public funds into private hands.

City of gardens, city of parks

Rather than just building parks in a city, the idea is also to build a city within a park, according to Chen. By 2050, Chengdu will be home to what local officials say will be the world’s largest network of paths for people to walk or bike. The Tianfu Greenway is planned to stretch 16,900km around the city, and will be linked to hundreds of parks, gardens and protected “ecological zones”, enveloping Chengdu in one massive garden. Some 1,585km had been completed by August last year.

Existing parks will be expanded. Highways, flyovers and bridges will be “greened” with flowers and plants. One of the new parks, the Longquan City Forest Park to the east of Chengdu, will be among the world’s largest, spanning an area of 1,275 sq km when it is completed in 2035.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tianfu New District masterplan, Chengdu. Photograph: Adrian Smith/Gordon Gill Architecture

Officials are also trying to preserve the rural outskirts of Chengdu. By 2022, 1,000 farming villages, known as linpan, will be protected. Decades of urbanisation have emptied out these ancient agricultural settlements, which are unique to the region.

“Chengdu is one of the most advanced cities in China – it’s one of the ones that are making environmental protection, public space and quality of life as the agenda,” says Salvatore Fundaro of the urban planning and design branch of the UN Human Settlements Programme, who has been working on projects in Chengdu.

The goal of these projects is to help Chengdu compete with major Chinese cities like Beijing or Shanghai while protecting it from the kind of urbanisation and development that has stripped some Chinese cities of their character. Chengdu, an early centre of Taoism, is known for preserving Chinese traditions in a way other urban centres have not.

Chengdu’s campaigns have gone through various iterations and names – “garden city”, “rural-city reunification” and now “park city” – but their various iterations have always been inextricably linked with politics.

Li Chuncheng, the former mayor and a top party official, first promoted the idea of Chengdu as a “World Modern Garden City” in the early 2000s. After he was arrested in 2012 over corruption, the term “garden city” fell out of favour.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tourists pose at a panda sculpture in Chengdu. The city is known for its China Panda Base, a centre of panda breeding and research. Photograph: Wang HE/Getty Images

Last year, China’s president, Xi Jinping, visited Chengdu and praised the concept of the gongyuan chengshi, or “park city”. Since then Chengdu officials have accelerated the project.

“Every word of ‘gongyuan chengshi’ has its meaning,” Huang Wei, of the department of major projects and public facilities of Tianfu New Area, one of the city’s new districts, told Chinese media in September.

“‘Gong’ indicates something everyone can share; ‘yuan’ refers to ecology ...; ‘cheng’ means the place to live with functions like transport, healthcare and education; and ‘shi’ represents production, a driving force for a city’s development.”

But this development has consequences. One of Li Chuncheng’s nicknames was Li Chaicheng, a play on his name that means “tear down the city”.

“There wasn’t any attention paid to the needs of the people and how these projects could positively affect people’s lives,” says Jiang Xueqin, a Chengdu-based writer and expert on education.

“Just because Chengdu puts up an international arts centre doesn’t mean international artists will come to perform and people will become more cosmopolitan and sophisticated. Urban planning really ought to be about improving public spaces so that people interact with each other more.”

Local residents have also been a casualty of the “park city” push. Zhou Wenming, 48, is the last holdout among more than a dozen families who have been persuaded to leave an area on the eastern side of the city that developers are turning into a park.

It is already under construction, with mounds of dirt jutting into the small garden that he and his elderly parents use to grow vegetables. His plot of land, which has been in his family for at least four generations, will be turned into a basketball court.

“This has nothing to do with the people,” he says. “It only benefits the property companies who build houses on or around this land. It doesn’t benefit the people at all.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zhou Wenming. Local authorities appear to be using pressure to intimidate his family into leaving an area developers are turning into a park. Photograph: Lily Kuo

Zhou is not opposed to leaving as long as legal procedures are followed, like providing residents with legal documents and compensation. So far, local authorities appear to be using pressure to intimidate his family into leaving. Last year, when he travelled to Beijing to petition against the eviction, his wife was slashed by a man on a motorbike. Their windows are regularly broken at night.

Many evictions and relocations happen without the buy-in of local residents. In Fujia village, in the south of the city, parts of the district are due to be torn down by June this year for construction of a greenway. Yet few residents have heard of the plan. Many are resigned to leaving, and some have already been relocated once before.

“If we have to leave, we leave. There’s nothing we can do,” says one woman, standing outside a mahjong parlour she runs. Across the road is a driving school and next door is a hair salon. Although most of the people here are waidi ren, from outside Chengdu, almost everyone on this street has been here for the last 10 years.

“Of course it will be hard for us,” says the woman, who asked not to give her name for fear of retribution from local officials.

‘Wherever there is empty land, people will farm it’

Many residents, though, say Chengdu is one of few cities in China where officials have made a concerted effort to improve the quality of life. People there have access to affordable housing, a good public school system, and quality medical care, according to Jiang.

The streets are lined with trees and clearly marked bike lanes. Even in mid-December, retirees, parents and children are using neighbourhood parks and walkways. In the larger parks, such as Renmin Park, locals sit in public areas playing chess and drinking tea. Tourists come year-round to visit the city’s famous panda breeding centre.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chengdu greenway track with the New Century Global Center – the world’s largest building in terms of floor area – in the background. Photograph: Philippe Lejeanvre/Alamy Stock Photo

In other ways, Chengdu could do more to take advantage of greenery and public spaces residents have already created. Throughout the city there are seemingly random gardens between buildings, strips of land by the side of the road and other unoccupied areas.

Local residents, many of them farmers who moved to the city, farm any unused land, growing produce to sell or eat themselves. They organise the land themselves, and everyone sticks to their own plots. “Wherever there is empty land, people will farm it,” says Chen.

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Some of these ad hoc gardens are close to part of Chengdu’s greenbelt project, the Panda Greenway, a sidewalk running next to the Third Ring Road, a major traffic artery. Cars and trucks whizz past.

The only pedestrian around is Zhang Xiuhua, an elderly woman walking by the gardens. She rarely ventures as far as the greenway because of the dust and pollution from the cars. She was once a farmer, and moved to Chengdu to be with her daughter who works at the local university.

The gardens have been fenced in, a sign they will be torn down. Down the road, green netting has been thrown over another garden. It too will be turned into a park, she has heard.

Zhang believes replacing these garden areas with high-rises and parks is a good thing. “Development is good for a city,” she says. Asked why, she pauses, looking at the gardens. “I don’t know, actually.”



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