Evaluation of urban planning implementation from spatial dimension: An analytical framework for Chinese cities and case study of Beijing

Abstract

Most existing studies on urban planning implementation (UPI) evaluation examine the conformity between planned and observed spatial urban development. The results are, however, typically too general to provide adequate policy recommendations for planners and researchers. The stages between creating a plan and its outcome are seldom discussed in detail, primarily because of the absence of an applicable analytic framework and data. In the paper, we propose a framework for UPI evaluation from spatial dimension which provides an in-depth and accurate application to show how the conceptual framework can be applied for assessing conformance and performance (sequential conformance) of plans proposed by Hopkins (2012) could be applied in practice. We examined the degrees of conformance and sequential conformance between an urban master plan, detailed plans, development permits and observed development outcomes, using Beijing as an example. The results reveal discrepancies between all basic stages of plan implementation, and the poor planning implementation was primarily due to the existence of large areas of development without development permits. These results suggest that the poor match between a plan and its outcomes may result from poor plan using, not poor planning. Therefore, attention needs to be paid not only to creating plans but also to monitoring the performance of various levels of plans and development permits in the UPI.