Brownfield redevelopment toward sustainable urban land use in China

Abstract

Brownfield redevelopment is a new urban land use strategy to pursue the ideal of sustainable development. It relieves environmental pressure and resolves the glaring contradiction between urban land idleness and urban sprawl. It addresses issues of urban land use and farmland protection in China. This paper compares brownfield with greenfield, and defines brownfield and its redevelopment. It elaborates general and special government policies for this sustainable land use strategy in the context of China. General policies contain two aspects: clarifying brownfield redevelopment’s priority in Chinese urban planning and land use and setting a general quantitative redevelopment target. The extent of the government’s special policies, which aim at coordinating three factors in the redevelopment process, namely governments, developers and users, are divided into five areas: statistics and categorization, assessment and remediation, financial supports and tax incentives, environmental and legal liability, and publicity and guidance. The paper concludes the major functions of different levels of Chinese government in the redevelopment process, i.e. making general strategy, formulating legislation, spectifying regulations and technical standards, estimating and categorizing brownfield sites, drawing up brownfield planning, providing information and financial support, guiding developers, publicizing the strategy to the public, and checking reuse results.