[peter_l_downs]

> 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.

If they can pull this off – awesome.

[mytailorisrich]

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.

[barry-cotter]

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.

[mytailorisrich]

> A perfect dense city looks like Brooklyn, Harlem or Paris, not like Pudong.

That's your opinion. These places are short of green spaces.

[throw0101a]

Then build more parks. But the "towers in the park" form of land use has been found not to work:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_in_the_park

[barry-cotter]

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.

[logicchains]

>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.

[barry-cotter]

I bow to your greater experience of Singapore but I struggle to see how anyone could feel safer as a pedestrian in Shanghai than Singapore. It’s not as bad as Beijing but the median (car) driver here is just dangerous and that’s without taking account of the scooter drivers going wrong way or running red lights or driving on the foot path.

Most of Shanghai has really wide, four lane roads or wider in the new built areas that are most of the city like Pudong or Qingpu. The rest sounds worse in Singapore but the only parts of Shanghai with narrow streets are in old Puxi.

[mytailorisrich]

> 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)...

[barry-cotter]

Dense urban areas with mixed residential, commercial and retail spaces all within walking distance of each other are the antithesis of Le Corbusier’s vision of a perfect city. He would have been appalled by Singapore, if possibly less appalled than by Paris which he would have liked to raze to the ground and rebuild.

[bobthepanda]

Short of green spaces, or short of useful green spaces?

In general dividing green space into small segmented areas per tower is not useful for most activities for humans or wildlife.