Marine Spatial Planning at the Municipal Scale: Lessons from China and Sweden

With rising sea levels and a growing trend for floating development initiatives around the world, the urban seascape is fast becoming a new frontier for aquatic urbanism and presenting new challenges for spatial planners. Given that urban planning is essentially land-based, and the sea is a fundamentally different environment from the land, can an emerging marine spatial planning (MSP) provide answers to the challenges of planning for this increasingly urbanized seascape? Case studies of Chinese and Swedish municipal MSP will be examined critically in this chapter to understand why and how municipal MSP has been developed and to what extent they can address some of the current and future challenges of planning for urban seascapes. Based on the literature review, we explore the origins, contexts, priorities, legal frameworks, and planning systems of municipal MSP, then examine the key issues, approaches, processes, and outcomes of marine spatial plans of selected cities in the two countries, and the influences of terrestrial planning traditions on MSP. Finally, key findings in the comparison between the Chinese and Swedish case studies will be presented to draw lessons, and identify the remaining challenges for planning urban seascapes to support a more sustainable future for aquatic urbanism.