American planning in republican China.pdfVIP

Planning Perspectives, 11 1996 339–377 American planning in republican China, 1911– 1937 J E F F R E Y W. C O D Y Department of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong This paper argues that in China, between the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the onset of the full- fledged Chinese war of resistance Kanzheng against Japan in 1937, American planners and Chinese municipal experts trained in American universities initiated significant planning schemes in several Chinese cities. This influence marked a crucial change in Chinese city planning because from the mid-19th century to 1911 it had primarily been British, French or German planners who had exerted foreign influence on Chinese urban form, particularly in the treaty ports of eastern China. Three of the best examples that demonstrate this shift of emphasis to American-based ideals of municipal progress are the plans for Guangzhou Canton in the early 1920s, the new capital plan at Nanjing Nanking and the greater Shanghai plan in the late 1920s. Although some scholars have analysed the Shanghai and Nanjing plans, few have explored the ways city planning during the republican period reflects a pattern of North American influence in the reshaping of Chinese urban form. In identifying this pattern, this paper will argue that Guangzhou was a first testing ground where Chinese politicians, within a decade after the first American city planning conference of 1909, consciously tried to apply up-to-date American planning principles associated with the ‘city functional’, the ‘city scientific’ or the ‘city efficient’ to a Chinese city that they perceived as inefficient. There were two initial spheres of influence associated with this American connection: 1 an institutional one, in which Guangzhou planners experimented with a commission form of American municipa