Priming Sustainability: The Kunming Urban Region Development Project

Abstract

For the last ten years, the city and region of Kunming has been marked by rapid urban growth and a strong trend towards modernization. Until 2020, the economy is expected to expand strongly and the city's population to double. Such a pace of growth normally lead s to a situation in which issues related to society, the environment, and issues of cultural heritage are increasingly neglected. Due to these dramatic circumstances, the city partnership between Zurich and Kunming, which has been in place since 1982, developed gradually from a cultural exchange into an intensive technical cooperation between the two cities, aimed at steering the strong development of Kunming toward a more sustainable path. With the involvement of the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) and the ORL Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ORL-ETH), three phases of the overall project for the Kunming Urban Development and Public Transportation Masterplan (KUDPTM) have been carried out. The main contents of KUDPTM were regional development, traffic management and public transportation, urban landscape planning and networking and dissemination. Main successes were the implementation of the first bus line in China and the now ongoing efforts to establish a strong regional public transport system. Furthermore, the project-based collaboration during the last nine years has strongly contributed to the improvement of the urban planning and management skills of Kunming's officials, especially when dealing with sustainability issues.