Chengdu first choice for studying world cities

Updated: 2011-10-21 16:45

(chinadaily.com.cn)

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The high-level seminar on Rising World Cities in Emerging Countries was held on October 15 in Chengdu, which brought together well-known experts both at home and abroad. At the seminar, "world city"was the most frequently used term by these experts. Peter Tyler, fellow of the British Academy, pointed out that, "China's development has great influence on the world while Chengdu is the first choice for us to study world cities".

"Chengdu is a city with an astonishing development speed and I never expected to see so many world 500 top enterprises and vigorous scientific innovative enterprises here" said Peter Tyler after visiting Tianfu Software Park. He also shared an interesting point among others. "I noticed that many young people work in the Software Park. According to my understanding, most of them graduated from the local colleges and universities. After receiving higher education, these young people would rather stay here for their career than go to other big cities. This can best demonstrate that Chengdu has enough capital and advantages to retain talents."

As for his reason for selecting Chengdu, Tyler said previously scholars from Europe (especially West Europe) always focused on the eastern coastal cities of China when they studied China. But, in recent years, the development speed of Chengdu has been so fast that more and more people have begun to turn their attention to Chengdu. They have familiarized themselves with the city, have invested there and also live there. Chengdu has attained higher levels of internationalization. More importantly, Chengdu has not abandoned its unique culture features during its process of internationalization. It is a city that integrates the features of the east and the west and that's where its charm lies. Tyler also saw Chengdu as a city that has emerged post 20th century, making it a good case when studying world cities and their competitiveness.

As a female scholar, Kathy Pain, Professor of Real Estate from Henley Business School, University of Reading, had an emotional point of view in the investigation. She said, "From the perspective of development, for many world renowned cities the development of industrial civilization also brought with it the flourishing of the cultural and creative industries, the two supplement one another, it's quite a natural process". Chengdu paid special attention to this point.

Dennis Smith considered that if the urban development and positioning of Chengdu are studied in global coordinates, one of the advantages of Chengdu (the development advantage of Chinese cities also) is that government is able to use more resources to plan and position the city uniformly and scientifically, and to have a long-term plan for the city's development. "At present, Chengdu also faces challenges such as: how to maximize the effects of capital to coordinate the development of the economy, environment and other aspects so as to benefit the people. I was told that one of the city's development concepts is co-build and share. The strength of the whole society can be used to build the city and transform challenges into opportunities," said Smith.

Smith, a famous British sociologist and professor at Loughborough University, could not help but praise Chengdu: "I want to write a book called 'Chengdu Circle' in the future. I will describe how such a fabulous city emerged in Western China in this book".