Xiong’an New Area (CN: 雄安新区) is a new mega urban area and smart city project that encompasses three counties and 500 villages located in a strategic area that lies within the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei triangle. What makes this project unique is, not only the scale and the vision, that it is directly under the management of the CCP Central Committee and the State Council.
What also makes it something special is the price tag, with some research firms quoting figures between 1 and 2.4 trillion RMB.
The area was officially announced on April 1, 2017 with a master plan later released for an initial area covering a 100 sq. km later expanding to 2,000 sq. km area.
The planning and construction phase is expected to run until 2022 following which is followed by the relocation phase and shifting of several state-owned enterprises into the newly developed area from Beijing and beyond which is expected to take until 2035. The next phase from 2035 to 2050 is to develop the area into a modern socialist city to which there are only vague specifics as to what may look like.
It has several goals including
- relieving pressure on Beijing with non-capital functions moving to the new area
- create a modern socialist city
- explore new models of growth
- raise the prosperity of the Hebei region
- creating a world-class smart city
- a hub of hi-tech industry and innovation
- green development and ecological protection
- connecting the Beijing/Tianjin/Hebei regions into a megalopolis (known as Jing-jin-ji 京津冀城市群) which is currently home to 112 million people
- to be a low carbon city utilizing 100% renewables
Industries likely to take hold here will likely be heavily state-backed, including research institutes, high-end technology enterprises, IT companies, bioscience, new-age materials, while attracting innovators into state-backed collaboration spaces employing facets of the sharing economy.
crazy !
