ABSTRACT

In contrast to the history of urban planning itself, the global historiography of planning is still quite young, and it is even younger in China, where only in recent decades has the political and academic environment allowed scholars to research the history of planning in specialized, rigorous, and critical ways. The Urban Planning Society of China established its first Academic Committee of Planning History and Theory in November 2012 (Dong 2013), nearly twenty years after the International Planning History Society was inaugurated in January 1993, succeeding the Planning History Group, founded in England in 1974. At the same time, the phenomenal changes wrought by China’s urbanization on its environment, and its extensive engagement with the rest of the world after decades of relative isolation, have enhanced the professional and academic importance of planning within the country, and also raised deep questions about what the planning of China’s city-regions might mean in global-historical terms.