Future Communities – An Important Part of China’s Smart City Construction

Introduction

When we trace back to the past, as early as the ancient Greek period, Plato put forward the vision of the future shape and structure of the city to focus on the fairness and justice of the city, from the ‘Ideal State’, ‘Utopia’, ‘idyllic city’, ‘vertical city’, to today’s ‘resilient city’ and so on, urban planners and city planners have never stopped to the future of the city form and structure (Li, R., Xiao, J. and Hu, W. 2023). From ‘Ideal State’ and ‘Utopia’ to ‘Idyllic City’, ‘Vertical City’, and nowadays ‘Resilient City’, etc., urban planners and urban planners have never stopped pursuing better urban models and fantasising about the future.

With the trend of highly informatised and digitalised cities around the world, modern urban development needs to keep pace with the times, and the use of emerging technologies and digital methods by urban planners and designers has become an important topic in the field of urban planning and design. China’s rapid economic and technological development has been accompanied by the rough construction of public facilities to solve some of the congestion problems, but as cities are places of high concentration of economic activities and population, many new urban problems and challenges have emerged, such as safety hazards, land use constraints, and environmental pollution.

In order to face the future, the Communist Party of China put forward in the report of the conference, adhere to the people’s city for the people, the people’s sweeping people to build, improve the level of urban construction, planning, change the mode of urban development, to create a resilient, livable, smart city.

Therefore, in the new era of urban development and construction, the future needs of urban space development should be taken into account, breaking the traditional planning and construction mode, integrating intelligent concepts and new science and technology, and re-stimulating urban vitality.

Definition

Smart city: an urban form that makes full use of information technology and digital means to improve urban management, optimise resource allocation and enhance the quality of life of residents. Its features include intelligent transport systems, intelligent energy management, digital governance and many other aspects.

Future community: the concept of future community was first put forward by the government of Zhejiang Province, China in 2019, which is a kind of city centred on people’s aspirations for a better life, with the values of humanism, ecology, and digital discourse, and with the basic connotations of amicable and common governance, green intensification, and intelligent sharing, to build nine scenarios of future neighbourhoods, education, health, entrepreneurship, architecture, transportation, low-carbon, services, and governance, and to create a sense of belonging, comfort and a sense of the future, and create a new type of urban functional unit with a sense of belonging, comfort and future.

Scenario Design and Technical Requirements for Future Community

Health Scenario: Building a vibrant and healthy national fitness system and an intelligent medical system.

Governance scenario: community residents’ self-governance and party management.

Neighbourhood scenario: upgrading diverse shared neighbourhood spaces, community neighbourhood culture display and construction.

Service Scenario: sustainable property management, provision of high-quality commercial services, community emergency and safety protection.

Education Scenario: connecting with quality basic education resources, construction of the ‘Happy School’.

Traffic Scenario: Convenient slow-moving system, intelligent public transport network

Architectural Scenario: Ecological architecture, vibrant shared neighbourhood centre

Low-carbon scenario: resource recycling, open-source low carbon life

Entrepreneurial scenario: intelligent service, information sharing community entrepreneurial living room.(Zhu, X. and Le, W. 2024)

Future Community Practice

Fuchun future community in Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province, from the needs of the residents, combined with new building technology, to create a multi-functional composite future community, to achieve a major upgrade of the settlement support, mainly including people’s services, culture and sports, health, entrepreneurial services, four types.

Figure1-Fuchun Future Community, Longwan, Wenzhou(Qiang Zhao2024)

Vegetable farms and shared canteens can meet daily catering needs; one-stop management halls can be used to understand the current situation of the community through the monitoring data in the big screen, and the community includes a community medical and health care station, which can provide convenient health care services; day-care centers and elderly service centres can provide elderly services at home for families that do not have the conditions to take care of the elderly at home, and they can choose to provide full custodianship, semi-custodianship, and only provide meals, etc., according to the needs of different levels of care services. Different levels of care services are available. The community has set up two talent housing buildings, which can provide 336 apartment-type talent housing and 211 90-145 square metres talent housing. The vitality and creativity of the region cannot be separated from the introduction of talents, and the favourable housing purchase and rental policies attract talents to return to the region and take root in the region, thus providing impetus for the development of the region.

Figure2-Fuchun Future Community, Longwan, Wenzhou(Qiang Zhao2024)

Figure3-Fuchun Future Community, Longwan, Wenzhou(Qiang Zhao2024)

Reflecetion

Although the political systems and forms of settlement in European countries are very different from those in China, there are many things that can be learnt from the construction of smart cities, especially the future community as an emerging form of urban living settlements. Among them, the proposed governance scenario of residents‘ autonomy and the neighbourhood scenario of shaping community culture are conducive to enhancing residents’ sense of identity and belonging to the community and promoting neighbourhood exchanges. Nowadays, when low-carbon life is advocated, initiatives such as traffic scenarios, building scenarios and low-carbon scenarios are conducive to the construction of sustainable transport and ecological buildings, as well as the saving and recycling of various resources and energy. The transformation of urban living settlements by means of information technology and digital technology also enables managers to make better responses to emerging urban problems, and to improve the happiness index and sense of security of residents.

Reference

Li, R., Xiao, J. and Hu, W. (2023). Research on Modular Design Methodology for Future Communities. 2023 Proceedings of the Chinese Society of Urban Planning, No Data(No Data). doi:https://doi.org/10.26914.

Zhu, X. and Le, W. (2024). Research on Future Community Planning Index from the National Space Planning Prespective. Zhejiang Architecture, 2024,41(05)(1008-3707), pp.63–68. doi:https://doi.org/10.15874.

Sebastian Weise.(2024).The digital-augmented city(Lecture)TCP8090:Principles and Practice of Urban Design.Newcastle Unicversity.

Image Reference

Zhao, Q. (2024). Fuchun Future Community, Longwan, Wenzhou. ARCHINA. Available at: http://www.archina.com/ [Accessed 25 Nov. 2024].