Tianyuan Dushi (田園都市): Garden City, Urban Planning, and Competing Visions of Modernization in Early 20th Century China

Abstract

This paper examines how the garden city idea was introduced to China via Japan and Europe in the early 20th century and subsequently promoted by Chinese intellectuals and urban administrators as a means to promote urban improvement, economic development and nation-building. While the grand planning visions proposed in this period remained largely on paper, some aspects of the garden city were implemented in the cooperative housing schemes conceived by Chinese businessmen who sought to develop “model settlements” that exemplified the positive norms of a “civilized” society. By examining the multiple interpretations of the garden city and its limited realization on Chinese soil, this article elucidates how a foreign planning concept was disseminated in a non-Western context and the specific ways in which it interacted with existing discourses about the city, the countryside and the roles of the state and citizens in the construction of competing visions of the urban future.