Building China: Rise of the Superblock

Le Corbusier’s infamous 1929 “Plan Voisin”

By the 1990s Jacobs’ ideas about mixed use, walkable neighborhoods that encourage social integration and discourage the use of cars had become the mainstream in Western urban planning, advocated for by a group of planners called the New Urbanists (I have my problems with them but we’ll get to that another time). Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Chinese and Western planners — horrified at the cityscapes popping up that resembled something out of Corbusier’s most sinister fantasies — begged the Chinese government to not repeat the mistakes that the West, especially America, had made by building cities around cars and segregating residential and commercial space. But an even more important reason behind the continued insistence on superblock planning is the reliance of Chinese city governments on land lease revenue.

Source: radiichina.com