Evaluating the Social-spatial Effect of Transit-oriented Development

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is easily to be seen as an economy focused planning theory, just seen as the nationwide infrastructure fever. One of the major implement fields is countless new town planning throughout the country, TOD as an “import” strategy becomes a slogan of large scale of urban expansion in Chinese cities, attracting lots of investment like headquarters, 5-star hotels, expansive housing etc. Comparing to the TOD strategy itself, the Chinese TOD is more like camouflage covering for overall gentrification in the local area. A more academic or specific term for it should be TPD, which as mentioned before, is only use public transport as a catalyst. In the real world, the urban structure doesn’t transform into a public transport city.

In practicing “Transit-oriented Development (TOD)” strategy, the Chinese government also create the SOD mode which means “Service Oriented Development”. By using the administrative power, government steers the market to desired new town area by plan new public facilities like schools, hospitals, sports facilities and even the new political centre. Usually, this method was used combined with TOD strategy, which could attract lots of investment in a short time. This is usually not very common in the western world for less powerful government in planning affairs, but it is a good choice to solve the traffic congestion in the downtown area when performing in the centre where there is high ridership.

My research focuses on the social issues related to public transportation in the urban area with the theory of TOD and SOD theories in China, using the city of Shenzhen as the case study. It discusses the issues between this economy-focused development plan and a large number of floating people who flooded into this city for fortune, searching for the solution for urban inclusion, social justice and sustainable development.