Planning a mega-city's future: An evaluation of Shanghai's municipal land-use plan.

This article provides a detailed evaluation of Shanghai's municipal land-use plan (SMLUP). It fills a gap in the literature that has examined Shanghai's urban growth and economic restructuring, but has neglected to evaluate the city's municipal plan. This article sets the evaluation of the SMLUP within the administrative and institutional context of the preparation of comprehensive land-use plans in China as well as the extensive literature on Shanghai's urban spatial structure. It identifies a number of strengths and weaknesses of the SMLUP. Overall, the SMLUP was found to be a rather technical document that attempts to balance the supply of agricultural and development land. The discussion traces the weaknesses to poorly defined planning terms and concepts within the plan, as well as narrow regulations governing the creation of comprehensive land-use plans. Inconsistencies are also found between policies and objectives contained within the SMLUP and the Comprehensive Plan of Shanghai. The paper concludes that a more comprehensive and holistic plan evaluation framework is required if Chinese city-regions are to be governed by better land-use plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]