A Common Vision among Divergent Interests: New Governance Strategies and Tools for a Sustainable Urban Transition

The urban age in China offers good opportunities for progress and innovation in the country, and also poses serious challenges. The urban expansion to the surrounding rural land creates multiple challenges and conflicts for urban governance. The paper will explore approaches and potential solutions for these challenges, including governance innovations and tools for transformation. It presents the lessons learnt from a number of projects, which were opening new potentials by fostering transformative governance, fruitful inclusive consultations at local, regional and national level, and learning from multi-stakeholder dialogues to achieve sustainable urbanisation. In taking the urban age with inclusive procedures and solutions forward, we conclude that China's valuable experiences in urbanisation efforts should be shared with other actors at urban, national and international levels.