In June 2020, the Development and Reform Commission issued the Notice on the Publication of Typical Experiences and Warning Cases of Characteristic Towns, and the new policy emphasized that the construction of characteristic towns should highlight the distinctive industrial features of segmentation and high-end, the intensive and efficient use of space, and the integration of production, life, and ecology, and the four functional features of industry, community, culture, and tourism. "The construction of feature towns should emphasize the distinctive industrial characteristics of subdivision and high-end, the characteristics of intensive and efficient spatial utilization, the integration of production, life and ecology, and the multifunctional characteristics of industry, community, culture and tourism.

Featured town to promote the development of eight industries

Featured town refers to the reliance on a particular featured industry and characteristics of the environmental factors to create a comprehensive development project with a clear industrial positioning, cultural connotations, tourism characteristics and certain community functions, is a tourist attraction, consumer industry gathering area, new urbanization development area of the three districts together, the production of the city of the new urbanization model. It is a new type of urbanization model that integrates tourism scenic spots, consumer industry gathering zones and new urbanization development zones. Usually, perfect infrastructure support, sound social public **** services, urban management humanity and related policies will boost the development of featured towns.

Featured towns can be divided into eight categories according to factors such as regional culture, location advantages and natural features, such as historical and cultural type, suburban leisure type, emerging industry type, featured industry type, transportation location type, resource endowment type, eco-tourism type, high-end manufacturing type, financial innovation type, and fashionable creativity type. Such as ephemeral culture type, must meet three conditions: one is to town history vein clear to follow; the second is the town cultural connotation focus outstanding, distinctive; three is to town planning and construction of the continuation of the historical vein, respect for history and tradition.

Considering the development of characteristic towns across the country, the construction of small towns will boost the development of eight industries, namely, tourism, trade and logistics, science and technology, health, dual-creation, agriculture, education and manufacturing.

Policy to help standardize the construction and development of small towns

Since 2014, when Zhejiang Province first put forward the "small town with characteristics" and successfully operated, the country set off a wave of construction of small towns with characteristics, and the state and local governments have introduced policies to support the creation and development of small towns with characteristics. The national and local policies have been introduced to support the creation and development of specialty towns. However, in the process of rapid advancement of construction, due to the local understanding of the characteristics of the town, positioning errors and other reasons, making the characteristics of the town construction and operation of many problems.

In December 2017, four ministries and commissions jointly issued Several Opinions on Standardizing and Promoting the Construction of Characteristic Towns and Characteristic Small Towns to strengthen the supervision and management of the construction and management of characteristic towns with inconspicuous characteristics, real estate-oriented tendencies, high local debt, and damage to the ecological environment, marking the entry of the nation's characteristic towns into a period of standardized construction.

In June 2020, the Development and Reform Commission issued the Notice on Publishing Typical Experiences and Warning Cases of Characteristic Small Towns, which further guided the standardized and healthy development of characteristic small towns, and formed typical experiences and warning cases.

The new policy emphasizes that characteristic towns focus on cultivating and developing in advantageous areas such as urban agglomerations, metropolitan circles, urban peripheries and other conditional areas, strictly cultivating and developing in non-administrative micro-industrial agglomerations as spatial units, highlighting the distinctive industrial features of segmentation and high-end, highlighting the characteristics of intensive and efficient space utilization, highlighting the production-life-ecology " The three-life integration", industry, community, culture and tourism "four-in-one" multi-functional characteristics.

In September 2020, the Development and Reform Commission issued the Opinions on Promoting the Standardized and Healthy Development of Characteristic Small Towns, which gave characteristic small towns the new positioning of "micro-industrial agglomerations".

Specialty towns are blossoming across the country, with investment scales reaching trillions

Currently, the National Housing and Urban Development Bureau has announced a ****403 national-level specialty towns, of which 127 are in the first batch, and 276 are in the second batch. In terms of population size, there are 32 specialty towns with a population of more than 1 million and 6 specialty towns with a population of more than 200,000 people.

According to the current has been initially completed, the operation of the characteristics of the town required to invest in the construction of the scale of capital, an average of a characteristics of the town investment of about 6 billion yuan (remove the largest and smallest to take the average value), the scale of the smaller less than 1 billion, while the larger can be up to 10 billion or more.

According to the Notice on the Cultivation of Characteristic Towns issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, about 1,000 characteristic towns with their own characteristics will be cultivated by 2020, and the scale of the investment they will generate will reach about 6 trillion yuan.

Real estate companies as the main body of development and operation of featured towns

The developers of featured towns are mainly national real estate developers. Since the state proposed the development of feature towns, various themed feature towns have sprung up all over the country, including the layout of real estate giants such as BGN, Evergrande, Huaxia Happiness, OCT, Greentown and so on.

In August 2020, Yihan Think Tank released the 2020 Top 50 comprehensive strength of China's featured town operators, which mainly focuses on real estate development, including head real estate companies such as Overseas Chinese Town, China Youth Travel Service (CYTS) and Greentown.

PPP boosts the development and construction of featured towns

Participants in featured town projects under the PPP model mainly include the government, development operators (social capital), and financial institutions. Government departments are responsible for preliminary planning and guidance, bidding for the selection of partners, and granting franchises to project companies. Social capital can be a single enterprise or a consortium of several enterprises, and cooperate with the government to set up a special project company (SPV) as the main body of PPP project implementation.

Financial institutions provide financing services for project construction. Due to the lack of experience in PPP projects in special towns, consulting organizations can be set up to serve their projects, assuming important functions such as policy consulting, operation and management services, and technical support.

Promoting the PPP financing model is an effective solution in the case that the construction of featured towns faces a large amount of financing needs and the government has insufficient funds.The PPP model, as a cooperation model between the government and enterprises, has been widely used in the fields of infrastructure implementation and public ****service construction, and many countries and regions are increasingly relying on the PPP model to improve the construction of urban infrastructures.

The PPP model can reduce the government's debt burden on the one hand, and on the other hand, the introduction of social capital is conducive to accelerating the construction of characteristic towns, accelerating the development of urbanization, and improving the living standards of residents.

Specialty towns become carriers of new industries

Specialty towns are generally suitable for the layout of the periphery of large cities, on the one hand, the transportation is relatively convenient, easy to form a crowd diversion, on the other hand, relying on the big cities to improve their own services and facilities in the form of health care, finance, information and other resources.

Unlike traditional towns, specialty towns are mainly centered around an emerging industry. Such as higher education, cultural creativity, cloud computing, big data, biotechnology, health services or new economic forms and clusters, mainly intellectual labor.

Meanwhile, in terms of environment, it requires beautiful natural ecology, comfortable living environment, and perfect space for communication and relaxation. Different from the service agglomeration area, the featured town pays more attention to the synchronous construction and improvement of industrial agglomeration and comfortable environment in the industry. It focuses on the harmony of "production, city, people and scenery".

The reason why small towns with special characteristics can become a new engine for the development of emerging industry agglomeration includes: the fast and safe information and transportation network of big cities provides hardware support, making it spatially independent; the practitioners are mainly intellectual laborers, with higher incomes, and there is a spatial demand for a suitable human environment; the cluster effect reduces the cost of information search, service support, and the cost of identity and interpersonal communication. The cluster effect reduces the cost of information search and service support, as well as identity and interpersonal communication.

For more data, please refer to Strategic Planning and Typical Case Analysis Report on the Construction of Characteristic Small Towns in China by Prospective Industry Research Institute