As a discipline, community planning originated in Western developed countries. It is also termed ‘community development planning’ or ‘neighbourhood development planning’. According to the Localism Act that received Royal Assent in 2011, community planning not only “gives communities direct power to develop a shared vision for their neighbourhood and shape the development and growth of their local area”, but also “provides a powerful set of tools for local people to plan for the types of development to meet their community’s needs and where the ambition of the neighbourhood is aligned with the strategic needs and priorities of the wider local area.”1

In China, the confluence of social transformation, urban development and disciplinary transformation presents new challenges and opportunities to the knowledge and technical system innovations related to community planning. Authors of this article conceive of community planning as a practice of participatory socio-spatial reconstruction, the practice that entails five dimensions (i.e., society and culture, economy, environment, service, and governance).

The dimension of society and culture has a dual focus on the people who live, work, and consume in a community and the development and inheritance of a culture shared by those people so as to realize a development endogenous to the community. The dimension of economy includes protecting and fostering traditional industries of a community as well as developing and promoting its local specialty products. For community economy provides the foundation for developing the community sustainably and boosting the community’s self-confidence. The dimension of environment refers to the development of and improvement to human settlement, which includes protecting and restoring natural environment, portraying landscape features, and building and maintaining pleasant man-made environment. The dimension of service is “the last mile” of realizing residents’ social wellbeing, which pertains to issues such as education, culture, healthcare, care for the elderly, and housekeeping. Service should be specialized, yet always encouraging mutual support among neighbours in the same community. As a key concept in community planning, governance emphasizes the participation of multiple players (e.g., government organizations, social organizations, local units, and residents) in raising the awareness of local community issues, reaching consensus about objectives of local communities, addressing local issues through deliberation, and collaborating in planning and implementing the development of local communities. This participatory approach is different from the conventional top-down approach that starts with goal setting by the government and proceeds with goal implementation and resource allocation.