Building China: Rise of the Superblock

In Beijing, you just have to get out of the third ring road before these are very common. The first placed I lived in was not like that, it was an older building in a fairly urban area, but after that it was a bunch of complexes (nicer apartments, it was difficult to find something nice outside of a complex), still only a few blocks away from restaurants (or a mall), but all with guarded gates.

It really shows when you want to go somewhere. You can just go from point A to point B, you can’t cut across the huge apartment complex in the middle, you have to instead go around it...that can get really annoying. Likewise, there are only a few roads that let you get between places (eg trying to go from northeast Beijing to sanlitun area, there is only one way across the airport expressway before it ends).

My Chinese friends generally also feel safer in China than in the Western EU. What I noticed in Chengdu and Shenzhen, literally everyone walks with their nose glued to a smartphone (very frequently iPhone). Apparently robberies are not a common thing.

OTOH I've heard pick-pocketing is quite common in Beijing and Shanghai.

And no, many Southern Chinese cities still have complex layouts in their historical districts (e.g. Suzhou, Nanjing, Yangzhou). Just check them out on Google Maps. No one in their right minds will build anything without following a grid pattern at least loosely in the post-WWII era. Having reasonably wide roads to accommodate traffic is just basic urban planning. Many rapidly growing Chinese cities suffer from chronic traffic congestion because even the roads built in the 90s don't have enough capacity to handle so many cars. Maybe the "eight-lane highways" were needed because of that?

Urban planners just like big wide straight roads and with automobiles they can really indulge themselves. They look neat and tidy on a plan and impressive in real life. Building for officials and planners, not for living. That said the party-state is very much alive to the possibility of revolt and I’m sure some people thought about the military implications of urban planning but I’d say the primary motivation was ease of planning and building more than crowd control concerns. A competent military force would be quite capable of crushing an urban revolt even if both sides were armed with nothing but rifles. Professionals beat amateurs at everything and when the professionals have not just drill, discipline and training on their side but overwhelming fire power, air support and better communications the difference in capabilities becomes comical.

https://www.citymetric.com/fabric/paris-barricades-how-hauss...

The only walkable cities in the US were developed before the rise of the automobile, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. Any city with areas that requires you to own a car to participate in civic life is a failure of urban planning. That describes more or less all urban development in the US since WWII.

> And how would these failures not be explained by poor zoning laws in the US?

Poor zoning and land lease dominated urban development are both failures of urban planning, though the mechanisms are different. Walkable, mixed use urban development is the ideal, whether you’re talking about dense neighbourhoods of apartment blocks with ground level retail like central Paris or Amsterdam or decent suburban growth with detached or semi-detached single family homes where people can walk to an area with shops, pubs and restaurants, a town centre.

Car centric urban design makes living without a car a miserable experience, is a cancer on the growth of local communities and infantilises the young by making them dependent on their parents to go anywhere to do anything.

Land leases are a red herring when it comes to superblocks too. There’s no reason why local governments couldn’t make money with smaller, more walkable blocks like you see in Manhattan or in central Paris. You need internal roads within parcels of superblocks to roughly the same extent you need them between smaller blocks. The government could have leased out the same area to the same developers and have had them build smaller blocks.

My personal bugbear when it comes to Chinese urban planning is the dearth of green space. Pudong was the countryside 30 years ago and now it’s built up. If you compare it to Singapore the latter comes off incomparably better. The four or eight lane highways in between blocks in Pudong are just awful, car centric, an avoidable mistake.

- Governments are incentivized to promote development above all else, which means that unsavory tactics like unfair compensation of rural farmers is rampant.

- At the same time, governments are incentivized to prop up property prices. The housing price to income ratio is a multiple of those even in Western cities, making it unaffordable for most citizens. And the central government cannot deflate a plainly obvious property bubble threatening the economy, because then developers won't make land-lease payments and the local governments will default en masse.

This is the cart before the horse. Beijing didn't start out as a large city. It is municipal annexation that makes Beijing a large city, which is fairly common in China, e.g. Beijing and Xiong'an, Guangzhou and Panyu, Nansha.

Every flat surface is parked over with cars, often for weeks, decomposing on kids playgrounds. All activities happen in the center of the city or in big malls anyway.

I introduced a lot of people to HN, but they get turned off by these pro-West propaganda and leave. Such a turn off. I try to avoid news about China, Russia, India and anything from my beloved continent of Africa because I know comments will be mostly negative.

I am not a fan of echo chambers. I am forced to tolerate this echo chamber because of tech-related news. How I wish HN that can focus 100% on tech and related news. That was going to be awesome for people like me who don't like to be force-fed propaganda. Tech news is the only thing keeping me from quitting it altogether, but amount of propaganda being pushed to the front page will really push me to the edge.

With higher density, certain services become profitable. Food delivery, more frequent and lower latency package delivery. 24 hour stores. Wider variety of restaurants. Art museums, live action theatres, sports arenas all tend to be in or near cities.

A larger city also has less political squabbling because, at the end of the day, the mayor is (typically) elected at large. Look at DC and Arlington for nearby cities with arbitrary borders and the political struggles that can create. Not that big cities are immune to this sort of thing, of course, just not resistant.

This is why cities tend to annex neighbors. NYC took on Queens and Brooklyn, which already had towns and a city. Regional planning was possible then.

There are disadvantages though. Price, less green space, less space in general, likely higher pollution than the countryside.

UHN International Village

https://goo.gl/maps/gJq8kLHckHBygWXK7

It is a huge complex that absolutely has no vehicle traffic. It is very unlike the older places next to it (as you can see on the map, they actually have roads).