> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
Mixed use employment areas don‘t really reduce commuting time, especially if you have a multiple income household where people work in different areas. Tokyo is extremely mixed use and still has long commute times.
Chinese residential city blocks aren’t any denser than American ones, they do have more green space though. Paris is one of the densest cities in the world and it doesn’t really get taller than eight stories high.
The trick with density is all about making those skyscrapers occupied.
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.
Well, they are more efficient and free up space so you could have green spaces around them.
See a bit what Le Corbusier was doing with its "Unité 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, "Unité d'habitation" [1] was indeed designed to be pleasant and liveable, and including a school (originally) and a floor for shops and amenities.
[+] [-] peter_l_downs|6 years ago|reply
If they can pull this off – awesome.
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kapura|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dirtyid|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Merrill|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bobthepanda|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ephemeralism|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|6 years ago|reply
* https://smartdensity.com/mid-rise-buildings-that-work-the-pr...
* https://www.planetizen.com/node/67761
[+] [-] baybal2|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|6 years ago|reply
See a bit what Le Corbusier was doing with its "Unité 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, "Unité d'habitation" [1] was indeed designed to be pleasant and liveable, and including a school (originally) and a floor for shops and amenities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d'habitation