If you were a Tianjin resident, no matter from where you start, you would discover a street corner greenery space of more than 1,000 square meters within 500 meters, a large or medium-sized public greenery area of 5,000 to 10,000 square meters within 1 kilometer, a district-level park within 3 kilometers, and a municipal park or a large scenic area within 10 kilometers. This scenario had become reality by the end of 2008. For Tianjin, the extra large veteran industrial city in North China, city beautification and improvement is a renewed dream.
As a city of 600-year history, the greenery coverage level of Tianjin is relatively low. At the end of 2002, the total area of urban greenery coverage was 101 million square meters, with park green space area reaching 34.66 million square meters. Forestation rate, greenery coverage rate were 27.30 percent and 19.22 percent respectively, and per capita park green space area was 5.63 square meters, which ranked the medium or low level among China’s provincial capital cities.
Tianjin has profoundly accelerated its pace of afforestation, and the total area of new greenery space built in Tianjin has reached 130 million square meters, exceeding the total area of greenery construction in Tianjin in the previous 50 years. The city has started to improve its appearance at a large scale. Tianjin Gardens Bureau has implemented afforested landscape improvement and reconstruction on 11 level-2 rivers with the total length of more than 80 kilometers in the downtown of the city and newly added greenery space of more than 4 million square meters. It also organized and implemented forestation projects supporting 33 freeway, 6 entrances to the city and 6 large-scale intersections. Meanwhile the Bureau built forestation shelter belts of 32 meters on both sides of 6 railways in the city. The total length of these projects extends more than 70 kilometers, with new greenery space of more than 5 million square meters. In 2007, Tianjin afforested along another 8 city entrance roads, 12 city entrance streets, 47 Olympic streets, and 17 pieces of key areas, with newly added greenery areas reaching 13 million square meters.
According to Tianjin Gardens Bureau, Tianjin pays much attention on the construction of urban ecological greenery space and the conservation of ecological separation area. It had developed 8 large-scale scenic areas with a total area of more than 14 million square meters into urban nature reservations and ecological separation zones and gave them special protection to form an ecological corridor of Tianjin together with green belt in outer ring road.
In addition, there are 8 districts and counties building up forest parks and ecological greenery space of a total area of 16 million square meters. Tianjin combines old city reconstruction and improvement with afforestation efforts. In the projects concerning the reconstruction of dangerous shabby cottages and re-development of city downtown area and the upgrading of ageing residential areas, Tianjin focuses on addition and improvement of former urban greenery spaces. The greenery area in new residential areas has exceeded 6.55 million square meters, and subsidiary greenery space of newly built enterprises and institutions has reached 14.34 million square meters. Temporary greenery area was also added to the idle land parcels after relocation.
