Opportunities and challenges of China spatial governance and planning system reform: evidence from Kaihua county and Yudu county

From 2014, China has been initiating to re-establish the national spatial system followed by “Bottom-up” and “Top-down” models. “Top-down” refers to the national formal institutional reform and “Bottom-up” refers to the implementation of “multiple-plans integration” in provincial and local-level pilot cities. The latter would be focused on in this paper to explore the results and experience of the spatial planning reform in China, because the local level especially the county level is the basic unit for the implementation of “multiple-plans integration”, the experience of county-level pilot reforms has a significant impact on the construction of national spatial planning system across the country. This paper begins with the analysis and development of spatial governance and planning systems in Europe and China, based on the course “Territorial Governance and Spatial Planning Systems” during the Master's degree. Secondly, it elaborates the evolution of spatial governance and planning system in China. Also, the reform of the spatial planning system in China is discoursed further to gain a better understanding of “multiple-plans integration”. During the reform, Kaihua County and Yudu County are taken as main cases, both of which are included in 28 “multiple-plans integration” pilot counties list identified by four ministries and commissions: the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Housing, Urban-Rural Development (planning function was integrated by Ministry of Natural Resources in 2018), the Ministry of Land and Resources (planning function was integrated by Ministry of Natural Resources in 2018), and the Ministry of Environmental Protection (Replaced by Ministry of Ecology and Environment in 2018), to penetrate the outcomes and remained challenges of spatial planning reform in China through the deepening study and analysis of these two cases. Finally, on the basis of the above research, it makes comparison, discourse analysis and puts forward some policy recommendations plus future research perspectives.