
Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years - okfine
https://www.citymetric.com/fabric/china-s-urban-policy-unit-just-met-first-time-38-years-here-s-what-it-recommended-1904
======
peter_l_downs
> 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.

If they can pull this off – awesome.

~~~
mytailorisrich
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.

~~~
barry-cotter
That’s not what the article is talking about. Not tower blocks, think more
like Xuhui or Changning in Shanghai where you have tons of eight story or ten
story apartment blocks with the first or first two floors of street facing
buildings being small retail, and instead of super blocks that take twenty
minutes to walk around, like in Pudong, ones more like in Paris or New York,
much smaller.

A perfect dense city looks like Brooklyn, Harlem or Paris, not like Pudong.

~~~
mytailorisrich
> _A perfect dense city looks like Brooklyn, Harlem or Paris, not like
> Pudong._

That's your opinion. These places are short of green spaces.

~~~
barry-cotter
Nothing remotely like Pudong or Puxi in Shanghai. I’m very fortunate to live
within walking distance of two small parks in Changning and that is _way_
better than most of Puxi. If you want to see a good example of urban planning
look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and
there’s plenty of the first two.

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.

~~~
logicchains
>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 🠓🠒🠑). 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.

~~~
barry-cotter
I bow to your greater experience of Singapore but I struggle to see how anyone
could feel safer as a pedestrian in Shanghai than Singapore. It’s not as bad
as Beijing but the median (car) driver here is just dangerous and that’s
without taking account of the scooter drivers going wrong way or running red
lights or driving on the foot path.

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.

~~~
logicchains
Shanghai traffic is quite congested, which slows it down considerably compared
to Singapore. Drivers (at least to me) also seem more cautious in Shanghai,
maybe because of the draconian penalties for hitting someone. 蓝村路 is a
concrete example of a road that feels safer to cross due to traffic moving
slowly, if you've ever been there. 浦电路 is another one.

------
Kapura
>The new guidelines also emphasise the need for a diverse mix of public
transportation options, including light rail, buses, and subways.

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
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.

------
Merrill
>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?

~~~
bobthepanda
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.

------
ephemeralism
Should probably add (2016) to the title.

------
xvilka
I guess we will see more skyscrapers then since more density is required.

~~~
barry-cotter
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.

~~~
throw0101a
> _Paris is one of the densest cities in the world and it doesn’t really get
> taller than eight stories high._

For the record, it is 24th in the world:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_density)

And there are other French cities above it: Levallois-Perret is 8th at
26,432/km^2.

~~~
SECProto
Levallois-Perret is a commune bordering on central Paris, and a comparable
size to a single arrondissement (subdivision within Paris proper). For
example, the 11th arrondissement [1] is 50% larger and 100% denser than
Levallois-Perret. But it doesn't count because it isn't it's own separate
administrative area.

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://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/11th_arrondissement_of_Paris)

