China's urban map of the future features livable model towns and satellite cities. An Expo Best Practices star is Tianjin's eco-friendly Huaming Town where farmers live in the modern countryside, writes Chen Yiqin.

All over China, farmers are leaving their land to make way for city expansion or to seek opportunities in cities. Handling relocation can be tricky, but Tianjin Municipality has earned praises for its new eco-friendly Huaming farmers' town.

These farmers haven't left the land: They get the best of both worlds.

They still work their fields, but they live in modern, solar-powered complexes with lots of open space and trees - and modern amenities and shopping. Family members who don't actually work on the land can get city jobs.

A replica of parts of the town and displays about it will be showcased in the World Expo 2010 in the Urban Best Practices Area (UBPA).

It will be one of six China exhibits among a total of 55 international examples of successful and innovative handling of the issues of urbanization in the 21st century. The Shanghai Expo theme is "Better City, Better Life."

Huaming Town was praised by the 20 experts of the International Selection Committee of UBPA.

It is the latest of Tianjin's new towns and lies in the city's east, adjacent to the capital of Beijing, itself a large municipality.

Huaming Phase I, where construction began in 2005, now has a population of 13,000 farm people from Zhangzhuang Village of around 40,000. Population will increase as more farmers move for a more citified lifestyle.

The locus of farmers' lives are shifting away from the old village of mud and brick houses, run down but spacious.

Huaming Town has become a model showcasing China's efforts to build a "new countryside" and cope with city problems of congestion, traffic, pollution, isolation from nature and other woes.

It looks like a regular new metropolitan neighborhood. The stylishly designed clusters - no more than five or six stories - with open space are not built by a real estate developer, but by the Tianjin government.

Farmer Song Lianhui says he was thrilled in October to receive the keys to two apartments for his seven-member family. The apartments, each more than 100 square meters, are close to each other.

"One will be kept for my younger brother for his marriage, and my parents can stay in any one they want," he says.

The family received more than 21,000 yuan (US$3,040) in relocation funds.

"That's enough to equip and furnish one of the apartments very nicely," Song says.

Huaming Town groups farmers into a centralized, well-managed neighborhood without changing the fields they are contracted to cultivate.

The move satisfies farmers' desire for a more modern and urban lifestyle and better schools for their children.

It also frees other people in the family who want city jobs, says Liu Jiangang, deputy director of Tianjin Development and Reform Commission.

Huaming Town is near the city's newly developed Binhai New Area, similar to Shanghai's Pudong. Near the city port, it specializes in international logistics and processing manufacture.

The government estimates that about 28,000 jobs will be created in Binhai in the near future. Some of Huaming Town's farmers, 40,000 in the future, could take 10 percent of the total new jobs, officials estimate.

Zhang Changhe, Party secretary of Huaming Town, says the farmers' old houses of clay or bricks were worth 20,000 yuan to 50,000 yuan, though they were quite spacious. Most get apartments larger than 80 square meters and worth over 550,000 yuan.

(Shanghai Daily April 28, 2008)