Abstract:

China’s urban development is undergoing a dual transition: from rapid growth to steady development and from large-scale incremental expansion to the quality and efficiency improvement of existing urban areas. The logic of modernizing the people’s city must therefore take the form of intensive development, whose rich implications are embodied in the essential attributes of the modernized people’s city. Taking intensive development as the main thread, the key is to grasp the complex tensions among people-centeredness, urbanity, and modernity. Systematic transformations of a city’s internal elements can bring these three dimensions into deep coordination and mutually reinforcing interaction, ultimately generating a qualitative leap in urban development. The logics of value, space, and governance jointly shapes the breakthrough points for intensive urban development. Specifically, the logic of value emphasizes the public nature of goals, the social character of participating actors, and the universal accessibility of outcomes; the logic of space entails compact and efficient planning, ecological harmony and sustainability, and renewal that preserves the foundations of urban civilization; and the logic of governance emphasizes intelligent cognition, public-good-oriented tools, and adaptive systems. In terms of implementation, intensive urban development requires integrated coordination and open connectivity to reshape its driving forces, multi-scalar co-governance and civilizational continuity to reconstruct urban space, and digital-intelligence empowerment and embedded resilience to advance governance innovation.

Key words: modernized people’s city, intensive development, people-centeredness, urbanity, modernity