[dirtyid]

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.

[baybal2]

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.

[bobthepanda]

That’s not current policy though; Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen are trying to cap their populations.

Current policy is to urbanize the western regions to reduce regional imbalances.

[baybal2]

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.