
Building China: Rise of the Superblock - andrewhbrook
https://radiichina.com/building-china-rise-of-the-superblock/
======
marco_salvatori
Little in this article meshes with my experience living in large Chinese
cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Specifically, I have not
observed the social problems mentioned "crime, ... social segregation, and
destroyed community and neighborhood life". I believe a good description of
the average large, Chinese city experience is: lots of cars and people but
mixed development with plenty of shops, schools, markets, eating locations,
parks, and public transport in easy walking distance. To me, the article comes
across as an opinion piece - it was all bigger than the author would have
preferred.

~~~
odiroot
From my very short experience in China (just under 2 months) the cities feel
super safe (excluding terrible driving). But this is just an anecdote,
naturally.

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.

~~~
baybal2
A friend of mine from Allwinner had his apartment burglared (despite living in
a walled community,) a coworker had his money stolen out of his bag in a cafe.

Shenzhen was not always that safe. Back 10 years ago, the city had unenviable
reputation, but it went from one of most unsafe to one of safest.

That was done at the cost of having a police post every 100 meters (quite
literally,) and it is not cheap.

~~~
ekianjo
Shenzhen was almost nothing 10 years ago and now it has something like the GDP
of Hong Kong. It has changed massively in a very short time.

~~~
njepa
Not 10 years ago. Maybe 30 years ago. There were a number of 40-50 floor
skyscrapers being completed in the '90s.

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jgbond
I read an article years ago about how urban design in China post-Tiananmen has
deliberately incorporated features that prevent mass protests. Narrow,
labyrinthine alleys are hard to clear out and control. With sprawling, eight-
lane highways, it's relatively easy.

~~~
ssnistfajen
If you can find a link to the article about post-1989 urban deisgn in China,
that would be great. I doubt any contemporary urban area anywhere in the world
are built (or re-built) in the form of "narrow, labyrinthine alleys unless
it's about preserving historical structures. The major roads of Beijing within
the 2nd Ring Road were built mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly inspired by
Soviet urban planning. Perhaps you were talking about Haussmann's renovation
of Paris?

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?

~~~
sgt101
Funny how natural structures don't tend to grids. A grid indicates a
uniformity of need, urban systems are diverse. With diverse structural need.

~~~
intertextuality
They tend not to be grids because a lot of cities were built before the advent
of cars, and renovating would be basically impossible.

Cities that had the opportunity to rebuild (like Chicago after the 1871 fire)
make use of grids.

~~~
greatpatton
Grid structure is not dictated by cars. Roman cities were based on a grid
structure.

------
Andhurati
The article doesn't really provide any arguments against superblock planning.
Is she assuming that the failure of America's city planning is readily
apparant? Why? And how would these failures not be explained by poor zoning
laws in the US?

Why wouldn't I want to be able to live in a safe and efficient semi-arcology
if I could afford it?

~~~
barry-cotter
> Is she assuming that the failure of America's city planning is readily
> apparant? Why?

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.

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SiqingYu
Beijing is a large city with 16,810 km² area. Building superblocks is a
reasonable choice in Beijing. Local government and residents also benefit
hugely from the land leases revenue. Transportation is not bad in Beijing,
considering that public transit and bike-sharing are even more ubiquitous
nowadays.

~~~
barry-cotter
This does not jibe with my experience in Beijing. I’ve lived in Shanghai for
seven years and visited Beijing for maybe two weeks but I’ve spent more time
in traffic jams in Beijing.

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.

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otabdeveloper2
Is the Chinese "superblock" the same thing as a Soviet "microdistrict?

If so, the article is off the mark, the whole idea of the concept is a less
car-centric life. You're supposed to commute to work by public transport and
walk inside your "superblock" during leisure time.

~~~
omgtehlion
And it failed spectacularly in mid-90s-early-2000s.

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.

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dougb5
"It’s hard not to believe that gated superblock developments, which
nauseatingly often include daycare centers, cram schools and other amenities
for residents’ children within the superblock gates."

I feel like I'm missing something here. Why is it even objectionable, let
alone "nauseating", for these amenities to be available within the
superblocks?

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profalseidol
Most articles in this website are somewhat anti-china and most are short.

~~~
madiathomas
I am glad I am not the only one who feel this way. Hacker News is a well-oiled
pro-West propaganda machinery lately. Not sure if it is nationalism forcing
people to be hostile towards China, Russia, India and anything not from the
West.

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.

~~~
oytis
> Not sure if it is nationalism forcing people to be hostile towards China,
> Russia, India and anything not from the West.

I don't see a lot of negativity towards India on HN. Many people here are just
anti-authoritarian, which hacker community has been from the beginning.

~~~
z2
I'm oversensitive to this and my comment is sort of off-topic, but I've seen a
fair bit of confusion, especially on China, where people fail to distinguish
between the authoritarian government, nationals, and people of ethnic descent.
This confusion has led to some awful comments, like "I obfuscate my code
before sharing with my Chinese colleagues because they are here to steal."
What does that even mean? Chinese by name? By accent? By passport and secret
party membership? I'd almost prefer to see tropes, e.g. "Russian hacking" or
"Chinese social credit score" than thinly-veiled attacks or blatant over-
generalizations on entire populations.

------
Merrill
In a country with a fairly low GDP/capita, the form of development must have
been heavily influenced by economics. The capital cost per dwelling unit and
the cost of delivering utilities (electricity, communications, water,
sewerage, etc) and transportation must be taken into account.

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qwerty456127
Why does everybody insist on living in a huge single city? Why not just build
more smaller cities interconnected with highways and public trains (for those
of you who haven't been to Europe - trains can be very fast, capacious and
comfortable)?

~~~
Zach_the_Lizard
Transportation and other infrastructure is cheaper to build on a per capita
basis. It's easier to find work and workers, especially more specialized
workers.

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.

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baybal2
I have doubt it being anything modern. Chinese city planning of rectangular
grids of increasing order is very old. Some of oldest historical cities are
built exactly like that

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katakuchi
Doesn't this happen with all major cities after an increase of wealth, living
standard and industrialization? People sit in their living rooms with all of
their (unnecesarilly) bought stuff watching Netflix instead of investing time,
money and effort in neighbourhood commerce, families and local communities. We
become much more individualistic when we see money can get us all our
immediate needs.

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m3kw9
I’m pretty sure within a super block you still have cars inside, is just the
roads are not as fast as the block roads leading to others.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
No, they don’t. They have underground garages for cars of course, but inside
is just tall apartment buildings and a huge courtyard. For example this is the
place I used to live:

UHN International Village

[https://goo.gl/maps/gJq8kLHckHBygWXK7](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).

~~~
kijin
One of the benefits of car-free superblocks is that outdoor spaces within the
block become much safer for pedestrians.

Where in a modern city would you find an area 400 meters across with zero
motor vehicle traffic? Maybe in a large park. Car-free superblocks bring that
park right to your doorstep. It's even better than a real park in the sense
that when you actually need a car, it's only an elevator ride away. It's an
absolutely fantastic proposition for parents of young children or people with
impaired mobility, especially in a country where drivers aren't known for
being gentle.

Superblock development has many other pros and cons, but I think the car-free
aspect is a very strong argument in favor of it.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Oh ya, I’m not really complaining about that part. Just that the traffic flow
is exactly broken up into huge arterials around huge blocks as the article
reported (which is accurate). I do prefer more urban apartment living if I
don’t have kids, meaning smaller apartment complexes that are more integrated
into a diverse urban environment around them (Beijing is a bad example for
that, but say an older stand alone apartment building in Shanghai Puxi).

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uneekname
Only tangentially related, but I really love Oscar Boyson's short documentary
The Future of Cities:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOOWk5yCMMs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOOWk5yCMMs)

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angarg12
Superblocks suck. So what is the solution? I would appreciate the article much
more if in addition to criticism to this model they proposed a better
alternative to the problem of housing tens of millions of people quickly.

