Book excerpt: 'Urban vitality in Dutch and Chinese new towns' identifies the spatial and non-spatial factors and conditions that facilitate the development of urban vitality in new towns. It is aimed to reveal the impacts of spatial design, urban planning and governance approaches on the degree and patterns of local urban life of new towns in China and in the Netherlands, based on a comparative study of two cases: Almere in the north wing of the Randstad region in the Netherlands and Tongzhou in the metropolitan region of Beijing in China. In theory, economic, social and cultural urban life constitutes urban vitality. The study does not intend to tackle the economic and sociological concepts in themselves, but to focus on the interrelationships between space and society.