Xiao Chaowei: Leading Modern Urban Construction with the People-Centered City Philosophy
Cities are essential carriers of modernization and beautiful homes for the people to live happy lives. Since the 18th CPC National Congress, the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has scientifically grasped the general trend of urban development and gained deep insight into its laws, putting forward a series of important expositions and major policy decisions regarding urban work. From the 2015 Central Urban Work Conference, which emphasized "persisting in building people's cities for the people," to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s 2019 proposal that "cities are built by the people and for the people," and further to the 2025 Central Urban Work Conference’s objective of "building modern people’s cities that are innovative, livable, beautiful, resilient, civilized, and smart," the concept of the "people’s city" has pointed the way forward for urban construction in the New Era. On the new journey, how to profoundly grasp the scientific connotation of the people's city, integrate it comprehensively into the practice of urban construction, vigorously promote high-quality development, and continuously create a new situation in modern urban construction is a major task of the times that we must answer well.
I. Grasping the "People's City" Concept through the Trajectory of China's Modern Urban Construction
As the material carrier of modernization and the spatial representation of human civilization, the trajectory of urban development is both a spatial projection of economic and social development and a profound reflection of the historical process of national modernization. The magnificent history of urban construction in the People's Republic of China (PRC) profoundly reflects the significant leap of the "people's city" concept from practical exploration to systematic theory and intensified implementation.
In the early period of the PRC, during the initial stage of industrialization when a thousand things remained to be done, and facing the reality of being "poor and blank" [1], our Party shifted its focus from the countryside to the cities, striving to "transform consumer cities into producer cities." Urban construction in this period was subordinate to the urgent needs of national industrial accumulation, with resources prioritized for industrial construction. Urban space was restructured into "danwei-system" [2] spaces serving production, with walled-off "compounds" (dayuan) acting as the basic cells of the city. While this development keynote—centered on production with daily life subordinate to it—compressed urban consumption and public space to an extent, it laid the spatial foundation for China’s industrial system in a relatively short time and accelerated the process of socialist industrialization.
Since the launch of Reform and Opening-up, China has initiated the largest and fastest urbanization process in human history, releasing unprecedented urban vitality and potential. With the deepening reform of the land and housing systems, urban construction entered a phase of rapid development, with new district development and old city renovation unfolding in tandem. Urban spatial forms and construction intensity underwent significant changes. Through sustained, large-scale urban construction practice, China effectively alleviated the housing shortages that had long constrained the urbanization process. The capacity to supply residential space was markedly enhanced, the living conditions and environments of the people continued to improve, and hundreds of millions of rural migrant populations entered cities for employment and life, gradually realizing their dreams of settling down. This stage of rapid development objectively accumulated rich material wealth, perfected urban functional systems, and substantively responded to the basic material needs of the masses for modern life, while also amassing powerful potential energy for modern urban construction in the New Era. However, this extensive, expansion-led urban development faced the dilemma of diminishing marginal returns, as resource and environmental constraints tightened and problems such as "a thousand cities with one face" [3] and the erosion of cultural lineage gradually emerged.
Since the 18th CPC National Congress, General Secretary Xi Jinping has clearly put forward the concept of the "people's city," emphasizing that "cities are built by the people and for the people," "advancing a new type of urbanization centered on people," and "incorporating the concept of full-life-cycle management into every link of urban planning, construction, and management." This series of important expositions profoundly elucidates the value orientation, goal tasks, and approaches for urban construction in the New Era, representing a profound grasp of the laws of urban development. Guided by the "people's city" concept, China's urban development has achieved historic accomplishments that have attracted worldwide attention: the urbanization rate of the permanent population jumped from 53.1% in 2012 to 67% in 2024; the "two horizontal and three vertical" [4] urbanization strategic layout has basically taken shape; a cumulative total of over 68 million units of various types of affordable housing and shantytown renovation housing have been built, creating the world’s largest housing security system; a multi-level historical and cultural protection and inheritance system has preserved the city's cultural lineage and "fireworks of life" (yanhuoqi) [5]; and ecological restoration projects have allowed emerald waters and lush mountains to reappear in cities. Chinese cities have made solid strides in structural optimization, kinetic energy conversion, quality improvement, green transformation, cultural continuity, and governance efficiency, increasingly becoming the key pillar of the people’s beautiful life.
Reviewing the trajectory of urban construction since the founding of the PRC, especially the achievements in the New Era, we can deeply recognize that the "people's city" concept transcends material space production dominated by instrumental rationality. It is essentially a profound transformation reshaping the relationship between people and the city, aiming to achieve a shift from "appreciation of things" to being "people-centered" through the social reconstruction of space. By reshaping urban construction goals, operating mechanisms, and governance methods, the "people's city" concept organically unifies the improvement of people's livelihoods, developmental transformation, and governance modernization, making the city a highly comprehensive and distinctive practice field in the process of Chinese-path modernization. Modern urban construction in the New Era, led by the "people's city" concept, is moving beyond pure material creation toward a new realm where all-around human development and social civilizational progress are unified, presenting a new form of human urban civilization.
II. Facing Problems and Challenges in Modern Urban Construction
Currently, China's urban development is undergoing a broad and profound transformation, bidding farewell to the extensive development model of large-scale incremental expansion and fully entering a new stage of intensive development focused on quality improvement of existing stock. The development of social productive forces, changes in population structure, protection of historical and cultural heritage, and urban governance all place higher demands on urban development. Modern urban construction must face a series of deep-seated problems and challenges.
First, high-quality economic and social development, particularly the surge of new quality productive forces, requires "iterative renewal" and reshaping of spatial supply and functional organization. Traditional manufacturing, represented by steel, cement, and textiles, is characterized spatially by large-scale standardized workshops and concentrated industrial land. Coupled with the drive of local land finance [6], this objectively pushed the chaotic "spreading pancake" style of urban expansion. Currently, new quality productive forces—represented by new-generation information technology, artificial intelligence, and other fields—have fundamentally changed the demand for space. They require flexible R&D spaces that stimulate innovative thinking, open innovation platforms that promote cross-sector exchange, and high-quality clusters of factors to attract and retain talent. Overall, these demand characteristics are "small yet refined, highly composite, strongly linked, and rapidly iterative." This fundamental shift from "hard" to "soft" and from "large" to "refined" requires us, in the practice of urban construction, to systematically promote the coordination of regional layouts, the compositing of land-use structures, the diversification of spatial forms, and the elasticity of functional organization.
Second, changes in population structure have led to more diverse functional demands for cities, which are reshaping the pattern of urban spatial needs. On the one hand, population aging is becoming increasingly severe. By the end of 2024, the population aged 60 and above accounted for 22% of the total population, while those aged 65 and above reached 15.6%. Intensifying aging puts greater pressure on the urban public service system, with demand for elderly care and community medical facilities growing rapidly. On the other hand, the residential needs of both "old" and "new" citizen groups are undergoing new changes: a large number of "old citizens" living in old residential communities are trapped by the "livability" dilemma of aging infrastructure and a lack of public space. Meanwhile, new citizens and youth—the vitality and future of the city—face the difficulty of "affording a home" while also raising diverse demands for work-life balance, social interaction, and personalized living experiences. These intertwined structural contradictions urgently need to be resolved systematically through more refined and targeted urban development strategies.
Third, as the soul of the city, historical culture faces the risks of "losing its soul" and "losing its flavor" in practice. One risk is the short-sighted behavior of "losing the soul." Some regions have still not escaped the extensive urban development model of "tearing down and rebuilding on a large scale." They commit destruction in the name of renovation, severing the city's cultural lineage and social texture. This causes the city to lose the soul it relies on for habitation and the spatial carrier of collective memory, while ignoring the interests of original residents and driving up the living costs for new citizens and youth to integrate into the city. Another risk is the homogenization of local character, or "losing flavor." Some construction projects lack deep exploration of local culture, blindly replicating uniform commercial models and excessively pursuing short-term economic benefits. This leads to "a thousand cities with one face," where historical districts degenerate into lifeless "fake antiques." Therefore, how to deeply integrate historical lineage with modern life and new quality productive forces—preserving historical depth while satisfying the people's need for a beautiful life—is becoming a key test of the quality and humanistic warmth of urban construction.
Fourth, the misalignment between governance effectiveness and people's expectations constitutes a deep-seated contradiction in the modern urban governance system. Faced with the characteristics of high density, high mobility, and rapid change in modern cities, governance in some fields still follows traditional patterns of "experience-based decision-making" and "passive response." There is a lack of efficient coordination mechanisms between cities, regions, and departments. Combined with the "information island" effect caused by data barriers, this results in lagging risk perception, making it difficult to achieve early warning and prevention. These governance pressures are transmitted layer by layer, further exacerbating the "a thousand threads through a single needle" [7] overload dilemma at the grassroots level. The granularity of urban governance determines the "temperature" of the city. If we cannot use precision policies to break through the persistent ailments of extensive management and bridge the "last mile" of serving the masses, the veneer of happiness in the people's city will be hard to polish.
While seeing problems and challenges, we must also recognize that China's modern urban construction possesses many advantages and favorable conditions. The Party's centralized and unified leadership provides the fundamental institutional guarantee for urban construction, enabling the coordination of resource allocation and policy orientation at a higher level, and translating overall deployments into multi-level, systematic institutional arrangements. New quality productive forces are accelerating into the urban construction process. New technologies represented by AI, digital twins, drones, and "urban brains" [8] are continuously expanding the city's capabilities for perception, analysis, and governance, providing important support for achieving precise planning, refined construction, and efficient governance. In fact, problems and challenges are exactly the key points of focus for advancing modern urban construction. We must give full play to our advantages, focus on problems, tackle difficulties, and build cities into spaces for the high-quality life of the masses.
III. Solidly Promoting the Implementation and Effectiveness of the "People's City" Concept in Modern Urban Construction
Building modern cities concerns the sense of gain, happiness, and security of hundreds of millions of people; it concerns the profound transformation of the economic and social development model and the overall leap in the modernization of the national governance system and capacity. It is a complex systemic project involving the overall situation of economic and social development. We must deeply implement the spirit of the Central Urban Work Conference, target the problems and challenges facing modern urban construction, and work together on key levels such as regional coordination, the living environment, cultural protection, and collaborative governance to put the "people's city" concept into practice.
Regional coordination: breaking through the limitations of individual city development and using urban clusters and metropolitan areas as the framework to build a pattern of synergistic development among large, medium, and small cities. Looking at the evolution of cities globally, cities like London and Tokyo have moved away from a path of single-city sprawl; urban clusters and metropolitan areas have become the core spatial organizational forms carrying modern development. The 2025 Central Urban Work Conference deployed seven priority tasks, emphasizing in the primary task to "develop cluster-based, networked modern urban clusters and metropolitan areas." Modern urban construction should break through the administrative boundaries of individual cities, use "integration" to break down regional barriers, and promote the orderly and free flow of production factors such as capital, labor, and technology. The focus should be on achieving the integration of public services like elderly care, medical care, and education, allowing boundaries to dissolve so that the masses in surrounding areas can equally enjoy the fruits of modern civilization from the central city, thus effectively solving the problem of unbalanced and inadequate development. Simultaneously, we must act according to local conditions (yindi zhiyi) and clarify the missions of cities at different levels: the core for mega-cities and super-large cities is "optimization and quality improvement," leveraging their unique advantages to enhance global competitiveness and radiation-driven power while focusing on solving the housing problems of new citizens and youth and achieving a leap in new quality productive forces. Medium and small cities should base themselves on their own endowments and enhance livability to accommodate industries and talent. Vast county seats should serve as the "pivotal links" for urban-rural integration, promoting urbanization with the county seat as an important carrier to make up for shortcomings in public services. Through the overall drive of urban clusters, we can achieve intensive and efficient land use, industrial transformation and upgrading, and common economic growth.
Improving the living environment, putting the construction...
"Good housing" serves as the foundational point for modernization in city construction. The Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee [9] proposed building "good houses" that are safe, comfortable, green, and smart. As the development of housing in our country enters a new stage where equal emphasis is placed on existing inventory and incremental growth, the people's demand for housing has shifted from the question of "whether it exists" to a focus on the quality of "how good it is." To adapt to this shift, housing supply must elevate from quantity to quality, coordinating the fulfillment of both rigid housing needs [10] and the demand for improved housing, promoting an upgrade in residential quality while guaranteeing basic settlement. Therefore, it is necessary to coordinately promote the "building" of good houses in new construction and the "renovation" into good houses through urban renewal. Furthermore, we must establish a "full life-cycle" construction philosophy. At the planning and design end, we must start from the nuances, strengthening designs that are age-appropriate, child-friendly, and barrier-free; at the construction end, we should vigorously promote new construction methods and green building materials to solve common problems like leaks and poor soundproofing that have long plagued the masses; at the operation and service end, we should introduce digital homes and smart property management, allowing technology to empower the residential experience. By building safe, comfortable, green, and smart "good houses," we can drive the systematic construction of "good neighborhoods, good communities, and good urban districts," moving from "everyone having a place to live" toward "everyone having a high-quality place to live."
We must persist in prioritizing protection, constructing a protection system that spans from macro-level patterns to mid-level textures and down to micro-level forms. Historical culture is the soul of a city. To advance modernization in city construction, we must continuously improve the system for the protection and inheritance of historical culture. In terms of protecting famous historical and cultural cities at the macro level, the emphasis is on "guarding the pattern," strengthening systematic control over the city's natural landscape features, traditional axes, and overall spatial form to ensure the symbiosis of the city’s natural geographical environment and its humanistic historical pulse, maintaining the integrity of the urban character. In terms of protecting blocks at the mid-level, the focus is on "extending the texture," strictly implementing the requirement that "the old city cannot be demolished any further." We must conduct comprehensive surveys of old cities and their historical and cultural blocks, gaining a clear understanding of the cultural heritage resource base in old residential quarters, old blocks, and old factory districts. By delineating the strictest protection boundaries, we can prevent cultural fractures caused by excessive commercialization and guard the city's "spirit of place." Regarding the protection of historical buildings at the micro level, we must resolutely discard the extensive model of "massive demolition and massive construction" [11] and replace it with organic renewal and adaptive reuse. We should maintain the original social ecology and neighborhood structures, exploring inclusive urban renewal that "retains people, retains forms, and retains nostalgia" [12].
We must persist in the systematic concept, constructing a new pattern of "co-construction, co-governance, and sharing" [13] characterized by scientific diagnosis and precision governance. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized the need to "create a social governance pattern of co-construction, co-governance, and sharing." This requires us to deeply embed the "People's City" concept into the entire chain of urban governance, driving a systematic leap in governance efficacy. We must innovate the concepts, models, and means of urban governance, leverage the leading role of Party building, improve the working capacity of grassroots communities, and clear the "nerve endings" of urban governance. We should strengthen "digital-intelligent health checks," shifting the focus of governance forward to source-level analysis and judgment. Through big data analysis and artificial intelligence technology, we can accurately locate the "focus of infection" [14], determine governance priorities, and achieve the leap from "experience-based decision-making" to "data-driven decision-making." We should also improve the response closed-loop by deeply integrating "handling complaints immediately" [15] with "evaluation and feedback." Starting from the people’s demands, we should push the logic of governance to extend from "addressing one issue as it arises" to proactive governance that "infers the whole from a single instance and acts before a complaint is made." This will form a virtuous cycle of "planning-construction-evaluation-feedback-improvement," striving to achieve a resonance between urban governance and the gathering of the people’s hearts.
Modernization in city construction is not a specialized project in a single field, but a systematic project coordinating spatial reconfiguration, institutional innovation, and governance transformation. Looking toward the "15th Five-Year Plan" [16] period, we must run the "People's City" concept through the entire process of urban planning, construction, and governance. We must continue to exert effort in deepening the concept, providing institutional frameworks, and coordinating pathways to build a modern People's City that is more vibrant and endowed with a greater sense of happiness.