Urban Sustainability and the Urban Forms of China's Leading Mega Cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou

Rapid urbanisation and economic development in China since the 1980s have taken place while sustainable development has increasingly dominated the global planning trends. The three leading cities in ChinaBeijing, Shanghai and Guangzhouhave invariably adopted sustainability principles in their urban form planning strategies. However, their actual urban development has not yet realised these sustainability tenets. This article argues that such sustainability performance has resulted from the marketisation reforms in the urban sector. As compaction was not the governments' conscious effort to improve sustainability, the sustainability benefits and disbenefits of these three cities associated with their urban forms differed from those postulated in the compact city model. Urban policies were found to be more influential on some sustainability benefits/disbenefits than urban forms. The better successes of Shanghai and Guangzhou in developing new urban conglomerations over Beijing speaks for the need to consider the economic structure of the host city in devising multi-nodal urban forms.