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Looking into the Supergrid and Superblock Structure in Chinese Cities: Taking Xi’an and Nanjing as Examples

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Chinese Urban Planning and Construction

Part of the book series: Strategies for Sustainability ((SPPSDE))

Abstract

Supergrid is a large-scale network of wide roads that defines a series of cells as Superblocks. Uniquely in China, each Superblock contains a number of walled living quarters next to each other assisted with a few narrow streets to minimize through traffic. Together, they make a Global-local transportation system as one of the most predominant city skeletons of modern Chinese cities. While Barcelona’s planning movement has been converting street blocks to Superblocks since the 1990s, the State Council of China released a set of planning guidelines in 2016 and suggests the opposite: transforming the current Super grid-and-block structure to a finer network by disassembling existing gated communities within Superblocks. This was strongly opposed by the people, who emphasize the importance of the wall to their safety. Such conflict between the policy and people’s reaction reveals a lack of understanding of the structure in Chinese social and planning context.

This chapter provides a comprehensive exploration of the development of the Superblock structure in Chinese planning history and elaborates the modern planning practice by examining one of each Superblocks from Xi’an and Nanjing as case studies. Through investigation, this chapter points out that the use of Superblocks in combination with walls and gates around living quarters is a unique Chinese spatial planning logic despite the influence of modern western planning ideas. It is important to rethink the applicability of the proposed guidelines and incorporate the traditional planning concept in modern city design.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Policy No.GB 50220-95: This regulation is called “Code for City Road and Traffic Planning and Design” (《城市道路交通规划设计规范》). It was used to regulate and standardize traffic and road planning, and terminated in March first, 2019.

  2. 2.

    GB/T51328-2018: This regulation is called “Urban Transportation Planning Standard” (《城市综合交通体系规划标准》). It has been published in 2018, and replaced the GB 50220-95 as the newest regulation for road planning Chinese cities on March first, 2019.

  3. 3.

    Those studies are: Zou and Bian (2000), Wang (2003), Liao (2004), Wu (2005), Huang (2006), Li and Yu (2006), Xu and Yang (2007), Li and Li (2007), Yang and Min (2008), Liu and Li (2009), Song and Zhu (2009), Xu (2009), Xu et al. (2009), Hu (2010), Wang (2010), Dou (2010), Song (2010), Liang and Su (2011), Feng et al. (2011), Wei and Qin (2011), Hu et al. (2011), Liang and Su (2011), Deng (2013) and Wallenwein (2013)

  4. 4.

    The orientation of buildings based on the south-facing building principle meant that the Supergrid network contained more north-south Global roads and smaller streets running in an east-west direction (Zhu 2004, see Figure 3.4).

  5. 5.

    Global Road: Mainly refers to the wide arterial roads that form the Supergrid; Glocal Street: Mainly refers to the streets that connect neighboring Superblocks; Local Street: Mainly refers to the streets within a superblock that create direct access to global roads at the edges, but do not go across the global roads into its neighboring Superblocks; Internal Street: Mainly refers to the local streets that do not directly connect to the edges of a Superblock providing internal links within Superblocks.

  6. 6.

    Local Gate: Mainly refers to the gates within a superblock that create direct access to global roads at the edges; Internal Street: Mainly refers to the gates that do not directly connect to the edges of a Superblock providing internal links within Superblocks.

  7. 7.

    Consumption Activity: represents a number of wealth-using activities that are related to the use of any commodity or service in cities; Production Activity: represents a number of wealth-creating activities (both physical and intellectual); Service Activity: represents a number of activities that are related to the assistance of consumption, production or living. It is mainly about the non-profit oriented social service; Residence: represents a number of activities that are related to living and residing, including all kinds of apartment and houses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Qingdao University of Technology, Qingdao, China

    Xiaofei Chen

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  1. School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Lanchun Bian

  2. School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Yan Tang

  3. School of Environmental Design, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan

    Zhenjiang Shen

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Chen, X. (2021). Looking into the Supergrid and Superblock Structure in Chinese Cities: Taking Xi’an and Nanjing as Examples. In: Bian, L., Tang, Y., Shen, Z. (eds) Chinese Urban Planning and Construction. Strategies for Sustainability(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65562-4_3

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