Recommendations from the first meeting of Chinaās urban policy unit in 38 years
citymetric.com
citymetric.com
If they can pull this off ā awesome.
A perfect dense city looks like Brooklyn, Harlem or Paris, not like Pudong.
That's your opinion. These places are short of green spaces.
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 š š š ). 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.
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.
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 "UnitƩ d'habitation" (which I mentioned in another comment)...
In general dividing green space into small segmented areas per tower is not useful for most activities for humans or wildlife.
Not surprising at all, but I didn't know what they mentioned next:
>Although China [...] is working to build over 7,000km of new subway lines in cities across the country by 2020
As somebody living in the U.S. this has me absolutely floored. I'm feeling some extreme transit envy.
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.
Current policy is to urbanize the western regions to reduce regional imbalances.
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.
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?
For the record, it is 24th in the world:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...
And there are other French cities above it: Levallois-Perret is 8th at 26,432/km^2.
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.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/11th_arrondissement_of_Paris
* https://smartdensity.com/mid-rise-buildings-that-work-the-pr...
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.
Rents in China are still super cheap in comparison to the property and land price.
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", åå°ęÆå½å®¶ē)
Housing is pretty much the only thing in China that has generated positive return on investment.
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.
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.
See a bit what Le Corbusier was doing with its "UnitƩ 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, "UnitƩ d'habitation" [1] was indeed designed to be pleasant and liveable, and including a school (originally) and a floor for shops and amenities.
Le Corbusierās 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.
There probably aren't:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_in_the_park
Toronto is demolishing its community housing that was built this way and rebuilding in more modern ways. The residents hated it.