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October 23, 2014

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Home » Opinion » Chinese Views

Chaotic urban expansion overstretches services, leads to crowds or ghost cities

By Li Xinran | October 23, 2014, Thursday | Print Edition

WAKING up on Monday morning, I decided to go to work by taking the Metro. I used to take bus line No. 49 because it stops near my home and my office, but the bus route is no longer convenient because of endless traffic jams during rush hours.

The 4-kilometer journey can take 45 minutes or longer.

However, the underground world is not much better. Since my last Metro travel almost a year ago, it has gone from bad to worse. When the train stopped and opened its doors, its carriages were already full. People on the platform in front of me still tried to pile in. You could imagine the scene within.

It is not a matter of just digging more tunnels. By the end of July the city had 332 Metro stations and 567 kilometers of track, but there is still a gap between transport capacity and the rapidly expanding number of passengers.

For a city the size of Shanghai to function properly, there must be proper measures of containment.

There is always talk of giving priority to public transport, but that is meaningless unless it is substantiated by more active controls over the owning and use of private cars.

There is also a need to recognize the limit to which a city like Shanghai can rationally expand. Xinmin Evening News reported last Monday that there could be 30 million permanent residents in Shanghai by 2050. That would actually represent a big slowdown in growth from what the city has seen in recent years.

Shanghai has about 24 million residents now, and it was projected that the city’s population will reach 24.8 million next year. Previously, the city planned for 21.4 million people by 2015.

A fast-growing city can easily overstretch its infrastructure, not only in terms of transport, but also housing, education, medical care, care for the elderly and public security.

I doubt whether the city’s infrastructure can serve so many people. Everybody can see that public spaces downtown are almost exhausted while more and more locals who have lived in the central city for decades have to move to the outskirts.

The confrontations between square dancers and some residents reflect the lack of space for people to exercise. When I was a child, most residential communities were barrier-free. Today they have evolved into heavily guarded, privatized residential compounds.

Many big cities have policies of attracting people from other provinces, but obviously they lack the resources, or sincerity, to help the migrants take root in their adopted cities.

When the mode of growth is being copied on a national scale, it simply does not work. While some cities are getting more and more crowded, we are also witnessing the rise of ghost cities. Unbalanced development is a necessary outcome of massive migration in one direction.

Disneyfied cityscape

The Chenggong district of Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, is an empty region. There are no traffic jams because there are no cars on its broad streets. Apartment buildings there are also empty.

Like many other ghost towns, Chenggong came into being due to an ambitious government plan. Officials, eager for GDP growth and promotion, are totally out of touch with the area’s demographic conditions.

Peter Rowe, professor of architecture and urban design at Harvard University, once told me that most growth, in China and elsewhere, comes when there is already something there. A city of millions of people is not going to suddenly appear in the desert. That’s why new towns turned into ghost towns immediately after they were built; there was nothing there before.

That’s also why millions of people have flocked to regional hubs like Xi’an, Wuhan and Shenzhen and the country’s top-tier cities of Shanghai and Beijing. At the same time, the original inhabitants were relocated to homes dozens kilometers away.

Shanghai’s biggest shikumen complex is very close to where I live. But it has been empty for quite a while.

Developers renovated it for future use. Its former residents now live far away. My childhood neighborhood is now locked behind closed black doors guarded by security staff.

Many cities vie with each other in erecting tall, sometimes grotesque, landmarks. However, in my view a city should first of all be livable for its residents. Ideally a city is where people enjoy their life, free from hustle and bustle, having reasonably easy access to local resources.

The satisfaction of these native residents is worth much more than the “wow” factor from visiting tourists when confronted with glittering skyscrapers or a “Disneyfied” cityscape.

Chinese Views


 

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