Statecraft Urbanism: Building Garden City in Shenzhen

At the heart of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone lies the Overseas Chinese Town (OCT), a regional icon known for its high-quality commodity housing, fancy coffee shops and restaurants, garden-like environment, and outdated theme parks. In the 1960s and the 1970s, it was a borderland that saw the escape of tens of thousands of mainlanders seeking refuge in Hong Kong, and a state farm housing the returning overseas Chinese from Vietnam and Indonesia. This talk traces the history of planning and building OCT following a garden city model in the mid-1980s and onwards under China’s Opening-up policies and “United Front” agenda. In this 1,500-acre development, tropical landscapes, narrow and winding roads, exquisite theme parks, and exotic architectural styles comprise a new strategy to integrate overseas elite groups into China’s economic reform. Designing and building the garden city forms a new alliance among state reformers, overseas business elites, and intellectuals within the real estate industry.

This event is co-sponsored by the Penn Institute for Urban Research, Penn Global and the Penn Wharton China Center.

Dr. Li HOU is a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Prior to 2023, she served as Professor of Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai. Her scholarship addresses the history and theory of urban planning, comparative planning regulation, as well as urban policy-making and politics. Her representative works include award-winning Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State (Harvard Asia Center, 2018), History of China’s Urban Planning Discipline (China Science and Technology Press, 2018), and Richard Paulick in Shanghai, 1933-1949: The Postwar Planning and Reconstruction of a Modern Chinese Metropolis (Tongji University Press, 2016).

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