Competing visions: urban planning in Tumen after the establishment of Manchukuo

This study examines the planning process and spatial structure of the 1934 Tumen urban plan during the Manchukuo period, comparing its proposals with the later urban fabric. Competing interests among the South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR) and its affiliated Economic Research Association (ERA), the Kwantung Army, and the Manchukuo government shaped the process. Negotiation produced three proposals, revised in sequence as the ERA Plan, Military Plan, and Manchukuo Plan. Each gave priority to a different concern, namely railway land management, border defense, and administrative rationalization. The three proposals were registered to a common metric coordinate system, digitized as vector layers, and overlaid with the 1985 Tumen city map as a reference layer for relative spatial continuity. The Tumen Urban Street Plan, registered separately because of its larger scale, was used to trace the pre-existing road network absorbed into the later fabric. The comparison combines land use areas and ratios among the proposals with measures of street, block, and intersection correspondence against the 1985 fabric. The superseded ERA Plan, rather than either later proposal, corresponds most closely to the urban fabric recorded in 1985. Formal authority over the planning process therefore did not determine which proposal left the strongest spatial trace.