In a review article published in issue 1966 of the “Social Sciences Weekly,” Tian Chuan reported that the Central Urban Work Conference (hereinafter referred to as the “Conference”) was recently held in Beijing. This marks the first urban work conference convened by the central Party leadership in a decade. The general secretary Xi Jinping attended the conference and delivered an important speech, which provided scientific answers to the significant theoretical and practical issues concerning urban work in the new era and on the new journey. The speech outlined a new blueprint for building modern, people-centered cities.
The shift in China’s urban development model is a systemic and in-depth transformation. Relying solely on changes in a single dimension cannot fundamentally resolve development challenges or achieve sustainable development. “We need to profoundly grasp the laws of urban development in China under the new situation, optimize the modern urban system, establish a new spatial pattern of balanced urban-rural development, and create a new logic for the supply and demand of urban space,” said Yuan Xin, vice president of the Urban Planning Association of China. He emphasized the need to transform the use of existing space, explore new value, improve new services, enhance urban resilience, and optimize urban spatial structure through urban renewal. Cities should aim to build innovation-oriented communities, develop new-quality productive forces, cultivate new ecosystems, and strengthen new driving forces. To achieve high-quality connotative development, cities need more aggregation of talent, knowledge, and technology, as well as more intensive use of resources.
Yun Shuang, director of the Tsinghua Tongheng Urban Planning and Design Research Institute, highlighted that the core lies in relying on digital-intelligent technologies to achieve precise services and proactive governance. This involves deeply exploring citizens’ demands through semantic analysis and other intelligent technologies, building an intelligent loop of “demand insight-resource allocation-effect evaluation,” and achieving precise matching of service supply. It is also necessary to upgrade the citizens’ hotline to the core of urban governance, use data models to predict potential problems, optimize resource allocation, and highlight the institutional advantages of China’s governance system through precise and efficient services.