What can democratic countries learn from China's urbanization report?

The recent report by the World Bank and the Development Research Center of China's State Council aiming to address the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in China called "Urban China: Toward Efficient, Inclusive, and Sustainable Urbanization" points out the following 6 main areas of work:

1. Amending land management institutions to foster more efficient land use, denser cities, modernized agriculture, and more equitable wealth distribution; 
2. Adjusting the hukou household registration system to increase labor mobility and provide urban migrant workers equal access to a common standard of public services; 
3. Placing urban finances on a more sustainable footing while fostering financial discipline among local governments; 
4. Improving urban planning to enhance connectivity and encourage scale and agglomeration economies; 
5. Reducing environmental pressures through more efficient resource management; 
6. Improving governance at the local level.

While some of the concepts including here are common to other western urbanization theories such as Transport Oriented Development, TOD, when including connectivity, environmental concerns and density, there are some interesting new inputs in this list.

As can be seen, the concept of urbanization goes way beyond of just building an efficient city, it includes to a great degree an improvement in the governability of cities by including issues as labor mobility, urban finances, and governance at the local level. This extends the idea of urbanization further away from just buildings, to actually having a functioning urban system. 

The obvious lack of use of market mechanisms compensated by an emphasis in government regulation is to be expected with the political system of China. However, this system is exactly what could actually bring this complex plan into a reality. Long-term sequenced planning was a key factor for building Special Economic Zones such as Shenzhen from a small fishery town to a major city of 10 million people and southern mainland China's major financial center (info taken from here). The political stability of China is required for the development of such a big urbanization projects (Shenzhen development started in 1979). 

While China has been proved capable of making such remarkable reforms once it sets a plan, it is not so clear what can the "western world" learn from this experience as it seems the fundamental political and economic systems are so different that a similar enterprise would be close to impossible in an democratic system where leaders change their ideologies and programs so drastically. What will the market response for this be is what is left to see in countries like India where similar urbanization efforts are probably also needed, but the political system only allows to push a few pieces of the required reforms at a time (such as the Low Emissions Transport Toolkit tested in 3 cities and now trying to be expanded into a tool for nationwide Low Carbon City Planning)

With pressing issues in so many sectors (climate change, natural resources, traffic congestion, economic efficiency, logistics, etc.) in the  cities of the world, big steps should be taken to anticipate and expected increase in urban population. China can definitely be a place to look for ideas in the future in this area.