China Urban Housing Congress 2008

On behalf of the China Planning Network, I invite you to participate in the China Urban Housing Congress as part of the CPN China Week 2008 in Beijing, July 14-20. It is the 5th year continuation of CPN's effort to fuse western knowledge on urban development with China's unprecedented experience. Could you please help distribute the announcement to your department? Thanks a lot! CPN China Week 2008 packages four activities:

• China Urban Housing Congress 2008……………........... July 14-15
• China Urbanization Roundtable in Local Cities………..... July 16-17
• China Urban Transportation Congress 2008……............ July 18-20
• CPN Initiative: China's Urban Travel Ranking System and CPN Whitepaper: State of China's Urban Transportation

Please visit http://chinaplanningnetwork.org for more details.

China Urban Transportation Congress 2008

The 1st China Urban Transport Congress was successfully held in Beijing in August 2007 with the widest support from MIT, TRB, UITP, WCTRS, Elsevier, AGS, World Bank, UNDP, ACSP, APA, TfL, CTA, APTA and four ministries from China. The three day congress welcomed over 80 presentations in the plenary conference and 10 parallel sessions. All the speaker bios and presentations are available online:

• Speakers
• Presentations
• Photos
• Videos

The 2nd China Urban Transportation Congress's spotlight themes are 1) initiating China's Urban Travel Evaluation Framework and City Ranking System; 2) Developing and Reforming China's National Standards for Urban Transportation. Discussion topics include managing congestion, public transport development, green transport, integrating land use and transportation, social aspects of urban transport, financing urban transport projects in China, mega-city transportation planning, and Olympic Games: last minute observation and what happens afterwards. Please visit http://ChinaUrbanTransport.com/ for details.

China Urban Housing Congress 2008

The main question the Housing Congress aims to ask is: is the urban housing price in China too high? Can Chinese families, both urban residents and rural migrants, afford it? Are government policies to stabilize housing price effective? Five points of view will be examined in this Congress:
1. Urban households: the house price to income ratio has shifted from disproportionately low in China prior to the housing reform to disproportionately high nowadays—e.g. 9.4: 1 in Beijing in 2005, which is much higher than the 5: 1 ratio considered by World Bank as affordable for local residents or 3:1 by the United Nations. How have Chinese families managed to afford housing? By distorting their expenditure pattern in favor of housing, by inter-generational borrowing, by significant mortgaging…?
2. Rural migration to cities: if it is difficult for urban residents to afford housing, it is almost impossible for the rural migrants, who not only cannot afford commercial housing but also are not eligible for affordable housing provided by local government. Is affordable rental housing a good long-term solution? If so, what options are there for delivering it effectively?
3. Central government: the State Council and Ministry of Construction and 8 other ministries have been jointly publishing series of national policies aiming to stabilize the housing price. Have these macro controls and regulations been effective? Looking from a larger context, how do we evaluate the whole transition from welfare housing provision to market-driven housing provision? Have we recognized the boundaries beyond which the market mechanism will fail and has failed? And how shall we respond to it sufficiently?
4. Local government: local governments control all the land and land inflation has opened up a new channel of funds for city development. 30-40% of local government revenues are estimated to originate from property, either directly or indirectly. They have powerful incentives to promote the property sector as a means to raise revenues. Is reforming local government finance one key aspect to the housing price problem?
5. Experience from outside: what aspects of efforts to develop affordable housing in other countries can be considered relevant for China?

For a summary of CPN 2006 conference including an extensive discussion on urban housing in China, please visit http://chinaplanningnetwork.org/english/CPN3rdAnnual.htm

CPN Initiative: China's Urban Travel Ranking System and CPN Whitepaper: State of China's Urban Transportation

In collaboration with China Central Television (CCTV) and/or Xinhua News Agency, CPN initiates the China Urban Travel Ranking System, which aims to develop the largest scale, independent, public-participating social survey on China's urban travel, and we will publish the CPN Whitepaper: State of China's Urban Transportation based on the annual surveys. The scholars from the West and China are responsible for the structure of the survey, while the contents are from the public voting and surveying. CPN is solely responsible for the result, making it, for the first time in China, an independent assessment of China's urban transportation. We will introduce the latest concern such as CO2 footprint, energy consumption, social equity, affordability, cross-mode integration, information provision, mobile media etc into the evaluation indicators, so that the survey not only is an information collection exercise, but also an education process for the public in the widest population. Given the fact that decision makers in the cities and states pay extraordinary attention to these Ranking results, these concerns can be fed into the decision making process effectively. This will be in one session of the CPN Transport Congress.

China Urbanization Roundtable in Local Cities

Together with each year's conference, we organize a tour to other Chinese cities, which has been warmly welcomed by the westerners. This year's tour would be in one of the three cities: either Changsha, Chengdu or Wuhan. The date has been confirmed as July 16-17. The two day tour includes roundtable discussion with mayors, transport directors and planning directors and visit local places of interest and major urban transport or housing projects.

Thank you very much for your support to China Planning Network. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions and suggestions about the CPN China Week. We look forward to meeting you in Beijing!

Best,
Jinhua

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Jinhua Zhao
Executive Commissioner, China Planning Network
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.ChinaUrbanTransport.com/
http://www.ChinaPlanningNetwork.org/

PS: China Planning Network (CPN) was established in 2004 and has since advanced from simply an academic interest group to become an independent voice that affects the education, research, practice and policies in China's urban development. CPN has moved forward on its mission to systematically introduce western knowledge and experiences to China and more importantly CPN has started pursuing its vision of cultivating China's own discourse on urban development. As MIT President Susan Hockfield wrote in 2006: "Through the efforts of the China Planning Network, MIT and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, continue to lead the world to bring the advanced knowledge on urban planning and development to bear on China's urbanization challenges." For more information, please visit http://chinaplanningnetwork.org/english/about.htm