19-23 | September Dalian (China)

At the invitation of the Urban Planning Society of China (UPSC), ISOCARP will hold its next Congress in Dalian, China. Its Secretary General, Shi Nan, is chairing the Local Organising Committee.

The theme, proposed by the hosts: “Urban growth without sprawl”, is particularly timely, as urban sprawl is a key feature of today’s urban growth worldwide, not least in China.
Urban Sprawl is mixing built space and residual open fields. Indeed some 3 billion people live in “urban” areas but that notion only means the transformation from natural to artificial spaces.
Making liveable places, caring for people and nature and favouring social inclusion, is more than ever a duty to the decision makers and their professional advisers.

The theme of the congress refers to one of those grand goals of city planning that – as so many other city planning promises - is in striking contrast with the reality of rapid urban development all over the world. For most city planners (and other critical minds as well), sprawl clearly has a negative connotation, conjuring up images of uncontrolled residential subdivisions and ribbon development, square miles of unused and derelict land, wasteful and unplanned conversion of valuable agricultural soil, clogged-up roads and expensive but under-used utility lines.

Other terms come to mind, such as the more factual “peri-urban development”, or the joking analogy of scrambled eggs (or Mexican omelette) as a graphical image of a contemporary city region. It is now almost impossible to draw a line between town and country – unlike in ancient times when the urban form used to resemble a boiled egg (the walled city) and later (when industrialisation had begun), a fried egg. (Cedric Price and then William Mitchell invented and used the delightful egg morphology to make their point). Not everyone finds sprawl harmful and unwanted though. Some economists have even discovered certain advantages in unlimited urban growth, and political scientists would disagree whether such large sprawling cities are necessarily un-governable or not.