Chengdu Park City Indicator System

Summary

Creating Chengdu as a Park City involved a new city strategy, linking environmental dimensions with culture, services to citizens and economic growth.

Background and Objective

With a plan that runs into the middle of this century, Chengdu’s strategy is to create a more sustainable urban environment with an improved quality of life, resulting from protected biodiversity and heritage, reduced energy consumption and carbon footprint, and enhanced services for the city’s 16.5 million inhabitants. UN-Habitat’s initial contribution to the project involved researching park cities around the world to analyse parallel experiences and producing a collection of international best practice. A ‘Park City Indicator System’ was then developed by UN-Habitat, allowing Chengdu to monitor and evaluate its project by assessing it against five dimensions of people, place, planet, prosperity and participation. In line with the United Nation’s ‘Decade of Action’ and demonstrating a commitment to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, Chengdu has created a Park City Demonstration Area in Tianfu New Area to challenge traditional urban development and present a new paradigm of creating cities within parks. The whole Tianfu New Area is aimed to re-create an ecological skeleton, networks of blue and green spaces and rebuilding the relationship between man and nature. A collection of biking and walking trails are developed that will eventually connect hundreds of parks across the metropolitan area. Eventually, it will form the world’s largest green path network at 17,000 kilometres long. More information: https://unhabitat.org/un-habitat-helps-chengdu-scoop-top-urban-planning-prize Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsFD76Ji3pk&ab_channel=WorldAssociationoftheMajorMetropolises