About — Dadgogo

My name is Jiang Da. I have spent about fifteen years working as an urban planner in China: land-use plans, district plans, new-area masterplans — the kind of drawings that get stamped, argued over in review meetings, and then either built or shelved.

I started writing here because of a gap I kept noticing. There is a lot of English writing about Chinese cities, and much of it is good, but almost all of it is written from the outside — by journalists, academics, and analysts reading summaries. Very little comes from someone who has sat in the room while the decisions were drawn. I have. So I write it down.

The main work here is the Fifteenth Five-Year Plan. Between 2026 and 2030, every Chinese city sets out what it will build, which industries it will back, and what it expects of its housing market. These documents are public, detailed, and almost entirely unavailable in English. I read them and explain what they mean, one city at a time. I expect this to take years.

What you will find here

Four sections, and they do different jobs:

Plans — the city-by-city guide to China's Fifteenth Five-Year Plan. What each city is betting on, how much it intends to build, and what the plan quietly assumes about its housing market.
Maps — maps I have drawn or found worth explaining. Cycling routes, master plans, urban data made visible, with the reasoning behind them.
Workshop — small tools for people who work with maps and urban data, and honest notes on how they get made. No sign-up, no account.
Silicon City — what machines moving through cities will actually demand of them: curb space, charging, floor loading, vertical circulation, and the building codes none of it fits yet.

How I work

I build everything myself, mostly in plain HTML, JavaScript and PHP, usually as a single file. I am not a trained software engineer; I taught myself because I kept needing tools that did not exist. That constraint shows in the work — the tools are small, fast, and do one thing.

I have also trained image-generation models on architectural drawings, which is where a lot of my scepticism about AI and space comes from. A model that can produce a convincing facade has learned almost nothing about how a building stands up or how people move through it. That gap is most of what I write about in Silicon City.

I write in English here on purpose. Not translated from Chinese: written in English, for readers who work on cities anywhere.

What this is not

It is not a news site. When I write about a plan, I am describing what a published document says and what it implies in practice — not arguing about whether it should exist. Where I am uncertain, I say so. Where I am describing one city rather than a national pattern, I say that too.

Get in touch

If you work on cities, data, or maps and want to compare notes, email me at kingpus@gmail.com. I read everything and I answer most of it. One-to-one conversation is the part of this I enjoy most.