Has China Reached Peak Urbanization? | Hacker News Reader

Has China Reached Peak Urbanization?

bloomberg.com

46 pointstokenadult45 comments

Easy answer: no.

The US is 81% urbanized.

And here's a comparative chart of PPP per capita vs urbanization: https://theaspiringeconomist.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/urbani...

China's per-capita PPP is about 12-13k, so doing the obvious extrapolation gets you a 65-70% urbanization rate (as opposed to the article's claim that a 60% target is 'too high').

Beat me to it :-) I am curious how much better cities have to become in order to achieve 70+% urbanization. Certainly massive gridlock and smog isn't going to attract people.

Narrow streets :)

http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php#.V47PTc...

It's a fun read and I always flick through it every time it gets posted, but I feel like it's swimming in anecdotes so I take it with a grain of salt.

Of course those streets are wide by (some) Chinese standards where they build entire blocks with 10+ story buildings meters apart.

The Chinese cities I've visited (Beijing mostly, a little bit in Qingdao, Shanghai, and Suzhou) are full of gigantic streets. It's amazingly unfriendly for pedestrians, considering how many there are. Six lane roads are quite common, and the tight little streets shown in that article are reserved for the rare places which have avoided redevelopment due to tourist appeal or whatever.

Between the huge streets and the crazy drivers, I really don't enjoy walking around. Typical American cities are much better in that respect, although many fewer Americans take advantage.

Interesting, I have the opposite experience. I much prefer walking in streets designed by central planners to accommodate modern crowds (Singapore, central Beijing, central Chengdu...) than twisty narrow streets there for historical reasons (Hong Kong, especially the stretch from Central to Sheung Wan, especially on weekends; but also the "preserved" hutongs in Beijing).

The reason is crowds: try walking through Sheung Wan, or Singapore's preserved shophouse streets in Chinatown, on a Sunday afternoon and see what average speed you achieve... And you can also spot crazy drivers better in a large, wide-roaded grid than round the corner of a hutong where you have to spot the direction of the rapidly approaching noise so you know which side to jump. Not to mention: the sun can actually shine if the roads are wide, in tight streets you are in the dark even at lunchtime.

Smog is a problem which can be solved, as much of Europe and the US have demonstrated. China will eventually move industry out of the cities and drive with catalytic converters.

Where tight streets might win is when they are coupled with a pedestrian area. "No cars" is still the most pleasant walking experience.

Some "preserved street" everybody visits is going to suck, sure. For something like that, more space is better. But if you go to one that isn't just a tourist attraction, they're very nice. For example, there's one I've been to a couple of times, I think it's Nanluogu, where the main street is unbelievably crowded but if you just hang a left or right, suddenly everything becomes fairly quiet and calm.

Beijing doesn't really have that many wide streets. The worst inside the 4th ring road is Chang'An Jie and a few streets inside 2nd ring that are mostly gov buildings, which just happens to be where all the tourists go. But a typical residents wouldn't encounter such streets every day or even every month. Even Zhongguancun DaJie is only really 4 lanes in most places, and even that is sky bridged crossing in many places.

The US is hostile to pedestrians. As a visitor a while, I had to be much more aware of drivers as I walked around, and two times (one in Texas, one in Cali), while crossing the road with the walk lights, I had to stop dead in my tracks or I would have literally walked into the side of a car turning in front of me. I felt safer jaywalking in NYC than crossing legally in some other cities, which was weird...

China would blow your mind, then. The concept of pedestrian right of way doesn't exist, not even when you have a clear walk signal. Cars will approach from left, right, front, and back, with no care in the world. You had to stop twice in your tracks to avoid a car turning in front of you? Try doing that multiple times every time you cross the street, all while checking both sides to make sure nobody flat-out runs you over.

Shanghai has very narrow streets and very wide ones. That just depends where you are. Streets that for whatever reason can't be crossed by pedestrians are dealt with by having pedestrian underpasses or overpasses, though.

Under/overpasses are still very pedestrian unfriendly.

How so? You can cross the street at any time you feel like it, with zero risk of being hit. In my experience they are vastly more pedestrian-friendly than crosswalks. What problem are you thinking of?

The overpasses at lujiazui are very popular with tourists who want to pose in front of the pearl tower for a photo. Try that in the middle of a street.

Over/underpasses are extra physical effort, which quickly gets old when you pull that luggage bag, carry groceries, have physical disability or are over 60 years old. They encourage jaywalking in the streets designated for high traffic. In the cities, they seem to be rarely in the place you'd want them, often being at a decent detour distance from the crossing corners.

> They encourage jaywalking in the streets designated for high traffic.

This is a very odd objection. Those streets are generally physically impassable for pedestrians, traffic or no.

Perhaps if they are fenced. Otherwise I've seen people jaywalking near an underpass countless times. Across Eastern Europe, Norway, Taiwan, Spain, Italy..

To be clear, I'm taking about the peak of the urban village which isn't very representative of China as a whole.

http://www.city-data.com/forum/world/1773063-top-10-densest-...

http://www.yi-may.com/THE-GREAT-MIGRATION

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=56594707&postco...

http://www.mascontext.com/issues/19-trace-fall-13/the-chengz...

http://popupcity.net/villages-in-the-city-a-guide-to-south-c...

http://densityatlas.org/casestudies/profile.php?id=61

So far it doesn't seem to be deterring them too much either...

China's cavalier attitude towards smog and environmental pollution is destroying the planet. I could never live there because you can't even see 50 feet in front of you in Shanghai; I've heard Beijing is much worse, but I wouldn't dare ever visit because of health reasons.

Here's a photo outside of my hotel during my stay in Shanghai: http://imgur.com/xW9SoZP.jpg

Surely, people don't want to migrate to urban areas in part because of the smog.

Those buildings look French.

Chunks of Shanghai were owned by European powers for about a hundred years. The influence persists, as do many buildings (although the ones in this picture surely aren't from that time).

There was a sizable French Concession in Shanghai's International Settlement and its architecture style is widely emulated. My relatives used to own an old school row house (shikumen) in the former French Concession, but sold it off for new development.

Funnily enough, that neighborhood has been turned into an upscale shopping and entertainment district, and many of the new shops are built in a shikumen style.

Correct, my photo was taken in the French Concession.

> China's cavalier attitude

... and the cavalier attitude of those buying China's exports.

"A significant portion of Chinese emissions of air pollutants in recent years has resulted from the manufacture of goods intended for export, new research by a team of Chinese and international scholars found, reflecting the increasingly global nature of China’s environmental crisis."

"The U.S., as a major buyer of Chinese-made goods, has a stake in China curbing its emissions. For each of the pollutants examined—including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and black carbon—about 21% of export-related emissions in the year 2006 were tied to Chinese exports to the U.S, the researchers found."

“If all the emissions were reallocated according to where goods are consumed…emissions of many of China’s trade partners would be much higher,” they wrote. In the case of the U.S., for example, emissions of the four pollutants analyzed would have been 6-19% higher in 2006 “if the emissions embodied in its trade with China were included.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/01/21/u-s-exports-it...

Every country exports goods. Manufacturing these goods will produce some amount of pollution.

For an individual importing from China, it is rare to impossible to get accurate figures on the environmental impact of what you're importing.

Lax environmental oversight is the CCP's choice and the CCP's choice alone.

Most of this air pollution is from poorly designed and operated coal powerplants and poorly maintained cars not factory's. It's a problem of poor regulation not exports.

Well, it isn't poor maintnence, but cheap maintnence. If you follow the rules and your competitors don't, you are quickly out business. A classic prisoner's delimna. For cars, the cars are fine but the gas they put in them is not.

nice, you hit the nail on the head with this reply.

True, but not particularly useful. Trying to control pollution through purchasing decisions is a very crude tool and only works when the buyer has good information.

Taxing or prohibiting pollution is a much more direct way to influence the situation, and that's up to China.

Beijing is amazingly bad. I don't think visiting would do any serious damage, but living there certainly does. A day like the one in your picture would be an excellent day in Beijing. On a bad day, the closest building in your picture would barely be visible.

I don't know how many people care, though. I don't think there's great awareness of the health consequences of pollution, and I got some puzzlement when talking about the negative consequences. I feel like it's seen as more of an aesthetic problem.

I don't think it's scaring many people away from the cities. Economic opportunity is far more important for most people than far-future diseases. Beijing has a huge problem with illegal immigration from rural areas, with millions of people living there without residency permits.

>China's cavalier attitude towards smog and environmental pollution is destroying the planet.

The entire planet? That seems a bit much.

I suspect every industrializing country goes through a heavy pollution stage.

"By the 1940’s, Pittsburgh was dark at all hours of the day.":

The Lake Erie area was so polluted by the 1960s the Cuyahoga River actually caught fire. The lake itself was pretty much devoid of life near land:

http://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/58

Plus the killer fogs in London. And don't forget Lake Karachay, which the Russians used as a nuclear wasted dump.

"Starting in the 1960s, the lake began to dry out; its area dropped from 0.5 km2 in 1951[1] to 0.15 km2 by the end of 1993.[6] In 1968, following a drought in the region, the wind carried 185 PBq (5 MCi) of radioactive dust away from the dried area of the lake, irradiating half a million people.[3]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

Hungry people can't afford to worry too much about pollution, and even after the political will exists to clean up the air and water it still takes time to actually do it.

> The Lake Erie area was so polluted by the 1960s the Cuyahoga River actually caught fire.

Seems like a good time to bring up http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016... (Quoted below nearly in full)

> As journalists descend on Cleveland to cover the Republican convention, it is inevitable that news stories mention the infamous 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River. The story of this fire is largely a fable, however, as I have documented at length. Much of what people write and read about the fire, and its historical context, just is not so.

> The June 22, 1969, fire was not much of a fire at all. More importantly, it was not the first river fire, on the Cuyahoga or elsewhere. River fires were quite common in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. There were several fires on the Cuyahoga over this period, as there were fires in Columbus, Detroit, Philadelphia and lots of other places. Yet prior to the 1960s, and the awakening of the modern environmental movement, river fires did not attract much attention outside of local communities. Fortunately, local communities saw river fires as a problem, and took action.

> What was different about 1969 was not that a river had gotten so dirty that it caught fire but that industrial rivers had been cleaned sufficiently that river fires were no longer common.

Isn't China doing a better job with mass transit? Look at how much the Shanghai metro has grown, for example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro#/media/File%3...

Better with respect to whom? (Comparative adjectives require something to compare)

Since Shanghai has somewhere around 24 million people [1] and is ranked 10th in population density [2] in the world, I would expect it to have a "better" system regardless of who you compare it with. By contrast, the first US city in the top 125 cities is San Francisco at 104th, and a population density 5 times smaller than Shanghai.

However, "better" is more than just how big the system is. Beijing has a huge subway system, but using it to go across the city takes an hour (e.g. from Sihui to Zhongguancun). In fact, it seems like every mode of transport in Beijing travels at the speed of a bike. A cab gets stuck on the ring roads; the bus requires waiting and has lots of stops plus traffic lights; the subway requires a walk to/from the station, plus waiting, plus a likely 5 min transfer walk, plus waiting, not to mention that you'll be standing up that whole time, and squished if during rush hour. (On the plus side, when I was there it was practically free at 33 cents a ride.) Unfortunately, biking in Beijing is like swimming with sharks (cars) in muddy waters (air). So... Beijing has a huge system, but is it "better"? Well, yes and no...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai

[2] http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-...

sorry, didn't rtfa (bloomberg and wordpress blocked in china), but what constitutes urbanized? from what i understand, most people in the us live in suburbs, i wouldn't call that urbanized living, i would call new york city, sf, chicago as urbanized, maybe count some of the burrows, but that can't equal 81%.

What if it's other way round? People move to cities because they can afford to.

In my country there is calculation that some 80% of all wealth is bound to infrastructure. So leaving behind one infra and building another would be the most expensive thing a family could ever do. Middle class of poor country would stay in inherited house.

We can see in many poor countries that a major driver of moving people to urban centers is the opposite: They can't afford not moving. This results in the many huge and still growing slum areas in and around many major cities. I also refer to the many headlines about Indian farmers committing suicide, although of course one has to be careful with generalizations.

> A good step would be a program to deliver clean water to the hundreds of millions of Chinese who currently lack it.

Fair point.

> Another would be a national plan to control urban floods, like those that have afflicted central and southern China in recent weeks.

Uhm... This is not a simple task. When dealing with natural disasters, you can only do so much to control it, and countries rather focus on the mitigation of the effects. You cannot just "control floods" in China or "control hurricane" in the US context.

> Finally, the government needs to reform the antiquated "hukou" permit system that prevents rural migrants from easily acquiring the rights and services that their urban counterparts are entitled to.

It is already happening. Give it a few years.

China is trying hard to spread out its urbanized population to more cities. Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong/Shenzhen/Guangzhou/Dongguan are just too crowded. But it's not a "back to the land" movement; it's about moving more people and industries to other cities, some of them newly built.

Of course, most people want to be in the big cities because that's where the money and good jobs are.

It's more about moving people from the countryside, who have never lived in cities, into cities. It is not so much about moving people from some cities to other cities.

Incidentally, this is the largest and most successful anti-poverty program ever implemented. People whose families have lived in terrible generational poverty, in the same village for thousands of years, in some cases since before the invention of writing, are now able to buy iPhones.

And unable to become free again: bank credits, cars, ads, junk food, pollution, spying, different sorts of control, expensive medicine which they're forced to use because of pollution and junk food, stress, telling them how to live from mass media.

Free again? You call living in shit and mud for all of your (short) life, not by the choice, a freedom?

Sure you skip invasive ads and pollution. But your diet is still abysmal, just try living on rice and soy beans for a few months. The healthcare is poorly accessible, while party control, spying, draft etc are just as omnipresent as everywhere throughout China.

They were not free before in any meaningful sense, because they lacked agency in every decision about their lives. Poverty trapped them in the same place, in the same occupation, for their entire lives.

Despite what you see as the drawbacks of modern life, the people who have moved to the cities are far, far better off, and freer, than before.

Considering the efforts China takes to prevent people from moving into cities from the countryside I'd say they've not reached any sort of natural bound.

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