3 Housing development on typical megaplot, c. 2011
4 Typical megaplot
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Common Frameworks, Part 1
2 Typical master plan, with colored patches indicating land use, c. 2008
for housing the proletariat, as in Britain and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. It was now predictive, in the form of speculative real estate. The socialist city, which emphasized production in both function and symbolic representation, had been reconceptualized as the developmental city. To capture the flow of capital in the city, the state increased the level of urbanization and allowed rural to urban migration. Rural counties are subject to the leadership of the city; the city’s resources are extracted for speculative profit. An urbanization process that offers the least resistance to capital, encourages speed in its realization, and absolves the state from the provision of public goods found its physical model in the megaplot. The 1989 City Planning Act vested in local government the right to regulate development and authorized it to prepare tiered plans for development. At the apex of this process is the master plan, a document accompanied by a series of maps that outlines the designated functions of a city, its development goals, target size, and general land-use structure. Guiding the growth of a city over twenty years, it is essentially a general perspective of the prospective city.6 Once approved, the master plan becomes a statutory plan. The document represents the city as patches of color, each one designating the land use for a developmental plot, or megaplot (fig. 2). These parcels are necessarily large, ranging from approximately four hectares in city centers to forty hectares in its peripheries, and are surrounded by oversized arterial roads. The responsibility for secondary roads, along with other public goods, is transferred to the developer. These planning trade-offs are often negotiated between local government and developers rather than legislated; flexibility makes investment more attractive and development of the megaplots more likely. However, more often than not, the delivery of public goods is delayed (sometimes indefinitely) because it is an expense that generates no profit for the developer. The architecture of the megaplot can be divided into two categories—the norm and the exception. The former is architecture at its most efficient, a product of pure real estate logic that maximizes the number of units or the amount of floor area allowable on a plot with the lowest construction cost alongside an image sufficiently tolerable for purchase. Buildings are usually monotonous residential towers or slab blocks with remedial landscape beautification inserted into the leftover spaces on the ground. The form of