Urban Renewal as Master Planning Philosophy in China New Urbanization Strategy: Chaonan Desakota as a Case Study

Massive city development and construction have occurred in post-open door China, hundreds of new cities and new towns appeared in China. However, people found an awkward issue in these cities. Ghost city or empty city appears in many parts of the country. Because of the low qualified urbanization, environmental and social problems become more and more. The traditional blue print master plan is so popular across China that every city drew its own time and time in last thirty years. This top-down urban planning philosophy really stimulated China development. But now, this planning philosophy failed in many planning practices. New urbanization strategy (NUS) is proposed under this background and became one of the hottest words in China. According to NUS, China is undergoing two important processes. One is that urban renewal became the main topic of Chinese urbanization; the other is that private sector became the key driver instead of Top-bottom plan, which mean that urbanization based on new urban area construction is changing to urban regeneration and bottom-up became the main planning approach in this new urban era. Renewal is no longer an urbanization process but a methodology. Instead of traditional blue print plan, renewal philosophy could help the plan more practical. This new planning philosophy eventually forces the government to corporate with or even to rely on the private sector. The paper examined a very special case of Desakota in Chaonan district, Guangdong Shantou. Desakota is a special phenomenon in the urbanization process Asian countries, as well as an important field of urban studies. Desakota almost contains all typical factors of NUS. In Desakota area, the traditional blueprint master plan shows its weakness in intervention. Therefore, it becomes a big challenge that how to develop a long-term vision, to give reasonable recent actions, to effectively solve the region's economic development, as well as to improve the environment problems in this kind of areas. This paper takes the practice of the master plan of Chaonan, Shantou, trying to integrate the blueprint and action planning, and sums up the Structural Progressive Renewal (SPR) as the new master plan methodology.