Recently, the Municipal Planning Bureau held a hearing on the "Kunming Urban and Rural Planning Regulations (Revision)" (Draft for Comments). The new regulations not only further emphasize the importance of environmental impact assessment and improve urban design content, coordinating the city's architectural layout from both the overall plan and three-dimensional space, but also place greater emphasis on protecting the "sky" and the "underground." Where modifications to regulatory detailed plans involve height adjustments within key height control zones, the spatial form and urban skyline control plan for Dianchi Lake must first be amended, so as to effectively control landscape view corridors; temporary buildings are required not to develop or utilize underground space, avoiding waste of underground space resources and the difficulty of restoring the land to its original state after clearance.
　　The new regulations particularly highlight improving urban design content and emphasize the importance of urban design. At the same time, they explicitly incorporate the requirements for urban design outcomes into the master plan and regulatory detailed plans, which helps with long-term control of the city's appearance and skyline. The main purpose of the revision is to strengthen ecological protection at the legislative level, ensure the organic unity of urban and rural construction and development with the ecological landscape, and effectively control landscape view corridors to ensure the transparency of the urban landscape. Management of the urban skyline is made more explicit in particular. Since the "Spatial Form and Urban Skyline Control Plan Around Dianchi Lake" has now been reviewed and approved by the Municipal Planning Commission, the revision once again emphasizes its importance in order to strictly implement the plan and scientifically plan the urban skyline.
　　While focusing on skyline control, management of underground space is also a major highlight of the new regulations. In recent years, with Kunming's urban development, land resources have become increasingly scarce, and special projects involving people's livelihood and public interests (such as public toilets and parking garages) have been difficult to implement. To meet the living needs of the people and improve urban and rural public supporting facilities, Kunming plans to address this by constructing temporary buildings. Therefore, for such special projects concerning people's livelihood and public interests, control requirements are proposed to be appropriately relaxed, with only general provisions on the approved service period, number of floors, and height requirements for temporary buildings and structures. However, underground space development is somewhat irreversible, and temporary buildings should not develop or utilize underground space; otherwise it would cause waste of underground space resources and make site clearance difficult, with the land hard to restore to its original state after clearance. Therefore, the new regulations specifically clarify that temporary buildings may not develop or utilize underground space.
　　In addition, municipal pipe networks are required to be planned and implemented simultaneously with municipal road projects, and the scale of newly built municipal pipelines should meet planning requirements. In accordance with the utility tunnel plan, utility tunnels shall be built to centrally lay municipal pipelines. This is mainly to avoid repeated excavation of municipal roads, waste of public resources, and obstruction of traffic and citizens' travel. During the revision, requirements were specifically added for simultaneous excavation and implementation of municipal road project construction and municipal pipelines.