I. Location of Project

Guizhou Province

II. The Special Conditions and Difficulties of Guizhou’s Spatial Development

Guizhou’s natural conditions include: karst features, a densely populated inland province with rich natural resources, and a backward western province that has been making remarkable economic progress. Based on this, it has three typical spatial characteristics: high tension between man and land, overlapping and contradictions in resource and space, and fragmented, mixed land use prone to change. Thanks to its unique resource endowment, Guizhou has made remarkable achievement in development. That being said, it also faces problems in three aspects: first, the pressure of food and energy security; second, the pressure of urbanization and continuous optimization of spatial structure; and third, low efficiency in coordinated management of production, people’s living and ecology.

III. Strategic Planning

In light of the General Secretary’s calling for "creating a colorful new future of Guizhou with people living comfortable life and ecological beauty", the project team stated the vision for space development in the territorial planning of Guizhou Province taking account of its special conditions and difficulties, and formulated a three-pronged spatial strategy, aiming to explore a new high-quality development path that keeps a balance between development and preservation, and harmonious coexistence between man and nature, so as to achieve the development goal of spatial modernization of Guizhou.

First, open and inclusive strategy. The planning adopted the forms of both centralization and dispersion to improve the efficiency of space organization. We coordinated various development and protection responsibilities with the big picture in mind, using cluster of cities to promote efficient urbanization and agglomeration, and using attractions zoning to promote diversified rural development.

Second, security and resilience strategy. The planning stroke a balance between development and preservation to alleviate the dilemma of environmental carrying capacity. On the premise of strictly protecting important areas within the ecological red-line, we identified other areas beyond the red-line that also required special ecological control, and innovated a variety of ways to secure the bottom line of development safety, stating clearly the upper limit of the development and utilization of water, land and carbon resources.

Third, green and coordinated strategy. The planning incorporated the recruiting capacity of non-agricultural employed population into the rules for the performance evaluation and incremental allocation of land use in cities and prefectures, clarified the minimum proportion of industrial land in development zones, moderately relaxed the regulations for such types of land as garden land, woodland, pastureland and water bodies, stated clearly the optimization direction of energy, transportation and urban structure forms conducive to low-carbon transformation and relevant indicators. Emission reduction and carbon sinks were used as the main means of ecological trading to balance the dynamics between protection and development in the province.