> The new urbanisation guidelines encourage mixed-use development and recommend that all residents should have improved access to a diverse range of public and commercial amenities – schools, supermarkets, retirement centers, hospitals, parks, and cultural centers – within range of where they live. There is a special emphasis on green space: the guidelines decree that all city dwellers should have access to public parks, gardens, and other open areas.
They have already tried to do that for years. Many housing developments consist of tower blocks surrounded by a garden, with the ground floors used for convenience stores, hair dressers, etc.
That’s not what the article is talking about. Not tower blocks, think more like Xuhui or Changning in Shanghai where you have tons of eight story or ten story apartment blocks with the first or first two floors of street facing buildings being small retail, and instead of super blocks that take twenty minutes to walk around, like in Pudong, ones more like in Paris or New York, much smaller.
A perfect dense city looks like Brooklyn, Harlem or Paris, not like Pudong.
Nothing remotely like Pudong or Puxi in Shanghai. I’m very fortunate to live within walking distance of two small parks in Changning and that is way better than most of Puxi. If you want to see a good example of urban planning look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and there’s plenty of the first two.
Whatever a perfect city looks like it does not look like Pudong or any of the rest of the last two decades of development in China with their super blocks, malls, residential gated communities with no retail and everything set up for cars.
I've lived in Shanghai and currently live in Singapore, and Singapore seems waay more car-centric, more like an American city than anything I've seen in China. Really wide roads almost everywhere, mandatory car parking in office buildings, scarce crossings, some incredibly pedestrian-unfriendly intersections. As an example, there are + intersections where only 3/4 of the possible crossings are supported, so as a pedestrian you may have to wait for three sets of traffic lights just to cross from one side of the road to the other (e.g. first down, then across, then back up again, like 🠓🠒🠑). The cars also seem to drive way faster than Shanghai, maybe because there's less congestion (it's a wonderful city to be a driver). It also has pedestrian crossing lights that only activate upon a button press, so if you're even a moment late you have to wait until the next set of red lights (whereas in Shanghai the pedestrian light is always enabled).
The most egregious example of this is the crossing in Raffles Place from Pekin street over Telok Ayer to the indoor hawker centre. Or more accurately, the lack of a crossing, so that every lunchtime and rush hour masses of people have to scuttle nervously across the road as angry drivers zoom by.
Compared to the other cities I've lived (Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai), Singapore is by far the most stressful to be a pedestrian for me.
> If you want to see a good example of urban planning look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and there’s plenty of the first two.
I'm not disagreeing with that. This is very far from the examples you cited, and more in line with large buildings surrounded by parks that I mentioned. In fact Singapore has drawn on Le Corbusier's idea of "Unité d'habitation" (which I mentioned in another comment)...
A few interesting claims by Yukon Huang, former World Bank director of China:
In the last few years, CPC aims to equalize urbanization growth and have set internal migration to limit tier1 cities growth.
However in reality, major Chinese cities are less dense than comparable tier1 cities elsewhere. Major urban centres density in particular have decreased 20% in the last 10 years. I believe this accounts for the substantial number of shadow migrants. Minor Chinese cities are much more dense than comparable cities elsewhere.
Apparently traffic planning is done by the military in major cities, there's a conspicuous absence of one way streets and other planning blunders leading to congestion. I'm not sure if it's blunders or prioritization different goals, after all regardless of who plans, there are competent traffic engineers working at the highest level. China's airspace is also largely planned by the military and constrained to extremely narrow flight corridors leading to all sorts of inefficiencies and widespread delay. Hence popularity of high speed rail. Regardless there's still a lot of urban optimizations to be made. He is one of the few that thinks large Chinese cities should be larger.
It would be interesting to see how China implements these new urban policies with constraints of existing urban development. Wonder if they'll run into the same development woes as other large cities. On the other hand Chinese superblocks are sufficiently large and dense that they should easily sustain mix-use revitalization. Selfishly just waiting for some movement on arcologies.
Indeed, he restates a common notion: Chinese cities are not dense and big enough. Chinese policymaking is a very strong echo chamber even among the few nominally independent technocrats.
I meant exactly this. A common saying among the establishment is that Chinese cities "got too big," when in reality the issue is the opposite.
At least in Shenzhen, the officials are split in 2 camps. One is all about importing more workers to keep the industry going, another is for turning Shenzhen more into a Dubai for rich kids.
>The new urbanisation guidelines encourage mixed-use development and recommend that all residents should have improved access to a diverse range of public and commercial amenities – schools, supermarkets, retirement centers, hospitals, parks, and cultural centers – within range of where they live. There is a special emphasis on green space: the guidelines decree that all city dwellers should have access to public parks, gardens, and other open areas.
This portrays the city as only a residential entity with residential amenities. Where are the productive uses of land, such as factories, refineries, shipyards, office buildings, warehouses, food markets, etc. that are needed for a thriving economy. "Mixed use" should account for placing places of employment in proximity to residential areas so that transportation costs and time consumed by commuting are reduced.
Or are cities to be exclusively centers of consumption?
Mixed use employment areas don‘t really reduce commuting time, especially if you have a multiple income household where people work in different areas. Tokyo is extremely mixed use and still has long commute times.
Chinese residential city blocks aren’t any denser than American ones, they do have more green space though. Paris is one of the densest cities in the world and it doesn’t really get taller than eight stories high.
Levallois-Perret is a commune bordering on central Paris, and a comparable size to a single arrondissement (subdivision within Paris proper). For example, the 11th arrondissement [1] is 50% larger and 100% denser than Levallois-Perret. But it doesn't count because it isn't it's own separate administrative area.
All this to say: the closer you look, the harder it is to rank places by population density. The comment point was that high population density can be reaching without high rises.
Aren’t Parisian apartments also really small? I’m in a 90 sq m two-bedroom in Seattle and I shudder to think what I’d have to pay in central Paris for that.
The trick with density is all about making those skyscrapers occupied.
The giant vacant housing inventories have not gone down much over the years. Cheap housing sells well, but giant mansion apartments that got trendy at around 2012-2015 are really unsellable, and there were really a lot of them built in urban centres.
Believe me or not, Shanghai has few places with 10 years old "brand new" apartments.
Few people people can afford giant mansion apartments, but that doesn't mean they all stay vacant. With a lot of improvised plumbing and wiring plus drywall each of the original giant rooms can be turned into a much tinier apartment that can be rented out individually. I have lived in such a converted apartment and while it was pretty obvious that the original floorplan wasn't made for so many small units, I got used to it pretty quickly.
They always will be. The Chinese place much more value on owning (as opposed to renting) than other people do.
That is why the rhetorical enemy of communism in China was "landlords". It's why a fundamental platform of the current CCP is that landownership is illegal. ("the land belongs to the country", 土地是国家的)
It's also because there aren't really alternative investment forms. Investing abroad is heavily restricted. Local investment markets are not mature enough for there to be Chinese equivalents of 401ks. And local pensions aren't great.
Housing is pretty much the only thing in China that has generated positive return on investment.
Whatever about other parts of China I do not believe there are 10 year old developments in Shanghai with brand new apartments unless you mean people who are holding unfinished concrete shells as investments and there are some of those in central, lived in developments.
Getting any place within ten minutes taxi ride of a metro occupied is easy. Might be hard to sell it but you can rent it easy.
It is exactly what it is. 400m2+ apartments overloaded with styrofoam barocco decorations, appliances, furniture, ready for people to move in, just sitting there and rotting. I saw photos myself: plastic parts yellowing, styrofoam curlies cracking, organic materials getting mouldy here and there, and centimetre thick layer of dust on everything.
When they were put on the market 10 years ago, they were sold at such unimaginable, even for China, markups that even multimillionaires would've not gone for them. It was clear that the only buyers for them would've been some nouveau riche suckers.
They will not find buyers these days anymore. The example above is still on the side of the extreme, but say 3-4 year old developments being 50% vacant is a norm for 200m2+ apartments.
I find this difficult to believe. Chinese apartments are not sold furnished like you describe. They’re sold as bare concrete shells. Apartments like you describe are overwhelmingly rented, not sold. Usually when people buy a pre-owned apartment they strip it down to the concrete and redo everything.
Well, they are more efficient and free up space so you could have green spaces around them.
See a bit what Le Corbusier was doing with its "Unité d'habitation": A large building that also included amenities and a park around it.
Edit in response to Barry below: Whatever Le Corbusier's faults, "Unité d'habitation" [1] was indeed designed to be pleasant and liveable, and including a school (originally) and a floor for shops and amenities.
Examples of this working in practice would be appreciated. Le Corbusier’s name is mud among urban designers because he focused on how things would look in scale model or from an airplane, not on whether it made for a pleasant or livable environment. Architects love him obviously, but like Frank Lloyd Wright his individual residential buildings are surprisingly affordable because they’re great to look at rather than to live in.
Le Corbusier’s ideal city was something like Brasilia, which he designed. Hostile to pedestrians, made for motorists, with no mixed use spaces anywhere, with residential, commercial and industrial spaces completely separated.
If they can pull this off – awesome.