Urban Growth in a Rapidly Urbanized Mega City: Wuhan

Abstract

Wuhan, the largest mega city in central China, is not only a historic and cultural city but also a regional economic, transportation and educational centre. In the past six decades, Wuhan has witnessed massive changes in national and local policies of urbanization and urban development. Its spatial and temporal growth has shaped a representative urban morphology, which is interpretable from socio-economic and spatial processes in each corresponding period. Since 2000, Wuhan has entered a new era of economic boom and started the construction of metro system. However, such rapid urban development has addressed great challenges to local urban planning. After reviewing the process of its urban growth and evaluating the roles of urban planning, this paper aims to analyze the challenging issues in transport, population ageing, migration and environment and ecology. We argue the current local data infrastructure is insufficient to support comprehensive or integrated planning in Wuhan.