Gailiang Dushi: The Garden City, Urban Improvement, and Visions of Modernization in Early 20th Century China

Abstract

Recent research in planning history has significantly expanded the understanding of the international dissemination of the garden city idea in the 20th century. These works have helped to direct attention away from the more researched cities in Europe and North America to 'non-Western' contexts, including colonial and semi-colonial territories that served as experimental grounds for ambitious modern planning projects. This paper builds on this scholarship by examining how the garden city idea was first introduced to China via Japan in the early 20th century and subsequently utilized by various urban reformers and development agents as a means to promote urban improvement, economic development and nation-building. It will begin by tracing Chinese writings on the subject that first appeared in academic journals and mass-market texts in the mid 1910s. While the basic descriptions of the forms and organization of the garden city differed little from those in foreign language texts, they tended to highlight the urgency to adopt a 'Western' planning model by criticizing the backwardness of China