Langfang Dachang Movie Town gets rave reviews at global forum

By Yuan Shenggao | China Daily | Updated: 2018-11-02 07:35

China's Langfang Dachang Movie Town project was named as a Global Model of Characteristic Town at the 2018 annual session of the Global Forum on Human Settlements in Bangkok, Thailand at the end of October.

The project, developed by China Fortune Land Development, also known as CFLD, was one of three winners worldwide in the characteristic town category, part of the Sustainable Cities and Human Settlement Awards.

It is the first time that the CFLD's sustainable operation philosophy for building and running industrial towns has been recognized by such a mainstream international organization in the industry, according to the company.

The forum, held on Tuesday and Wednesday and organized by GFHS and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, centered on the theme of advancing urban innovation toward achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 - making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

The two-day event attracted more than 500 participants, including diplomats, mayors and government officials from different countries, as well as representatives of international organizations and from various trades.

Those in attendance included Hongjoo Hahm, acting executive secretary of UNESCAP and GFHS Chairman Anwarul K. Chowdhury.

During the event, Langfang Dachang Movie Town won the GFHS award jury's praise because of its forward-thinking vision of a solid ecosystem combining the film and television industry and tourism.

The town has taken the integration of "industry" and "urban settlements" into consideration in its spatial planning, embracing huge prospects of the movie-themed tourism industry and contributing significantly to sustainable cities' development, said Lyu Haifeng, secretary-general of the GFHS.

Just eight kilometers from Beijing's emerging "subcenter" Tongzhou district and 30 km east of the China World Trade Center in downtown Beijing, the movie-themed town is located in the Dachang Hui autonomous county in Langfang, Hebei province.

Aimed at becoming a top Chinese movie industry town, it has attracted a wide spectrum of cultural resources from Hebei, as well as neighboring Beijing and Tianjin.

To date, more than 100 Chinese and foreign companies involved in the creative industry have signed agreements with the town, pledging combined investment of more than 16.5 billion yuan ($2.37 billion).

Leading companies that have settled in the town already include Jin FX, which created lifelike simulated wolves for the award-winning film Wolf Totem, and Base FX, which claims on its website that it has participated in visual effects postproduction on an array of blockbuster movies including Captain America, Star Trek, Star Wars, Mission Impossible, Pirates of the Caribbean and Transformers.

The town has six state-of-the-art studios, three internationally advanced 4K studios and three landscape workshops currently in operation.

Implementing a development strategy that places emphasis on both "incubation and industrialization" and focusing on growth driven by a "film-television plus "campaign, Dachang Movie Town is committed to promoting the integrated development of culture, technology and finance, as well as building a complete creative film-television industry chain and a new industrial ecosystem, according to its developer CFLD.

CFLD Executive President Chen Huaizhou said that with the core concept that each industrial town has a featured industry, his company is cooperating with local governments under public-private partnership to create a new type of industrial towns.

Backed by its professional team, CFLD offers a customized industrial development plan for every project, leveraging its global resources and providing a series of services ranging from attracting investors and managing projects to intelligent operation, to ensure "each of our industrial towns is sustainable in operation", Chen said.

GFHS, a nongovernmental and nonprofit international organization established in New York in 2008, is "committed to sustainable cities and human settlements".

The forum's annual session has been held for 13 consecutive years around the world.

Other winners of the Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements Awards 2018 included the city of Bilbao in Spain, honored as a Global Green City, and Smart City in Barueri, Brazil, awarded for Global Urban Innovation.