Last year, I was giving a talk about China's urbanization drive and new city building movement at a literary festival in Suzhou when a member of the audience asked a very astute question:
“What is China going to do with these cities once they are all built?”
“Tear them down and build them again,” I responded.
My remark came off as a quip and sparked a polite chuckle from the crowd, but it’s really happening.
China’s Central Urban Work Conference met for the first time in 37 years this past December because something needed to be done about the country’s cities. China’s cities have simply grow too large, too fast, and without quality planning. Following the recommendations of this conference, China’s State Council delivered a new set of urbanization guidelines on February 21st that will drastically shake up how the country’s cities appear and function.
Structured as a set of 30 guidelines spread over a seven chapter document, this new formula for urban design aims to remedy many of the woes that 20 years of virtually unchecked urbanization has wrought upon the country.
To really look at China’s urbanization boom is to see something akin to a rough draft. You see a country that constructed literally hundreds of new sub-cities, districts, and towns, as almost every city in the country increased in size many fold in hardly more than two decades. Over this time period, over 129 million new homes were built, upwards of 2,000km2 of rural land was being requisitioned for urban development annually, north of 64 million families were forcibly relocated, and an expansive new infrastructure grid -- which includes a 13,000 kilometer high-speed rail network, over 60,000 kilometers of new highways, and nearly a hundred new airports -- was spread over the country. The typical urban plan during this era was incredibly monotonous, usually consisting of giant Soviet-style superblocks that were separated by massive four- to eight-lane highways and studded with 500×500 square meter gated communities.
"What’s fascinating about these places is that China hasn’t opted to copy the latest and greatest in architecture or technology, which it easily could have," said Bianca Bosker, the author of Original Copies, a book about China's Western-style replica towns. "Instead, it replicated not just anachronistic architecture, but also outdated design principles the rest of the world has long soured on. These gated communities, mostly located outside the city center, exacerbate China’s urban sprawl. And ecologically speaking, they’re a total disaster: water heavy, land intensive, and deeply car dependent, they replicate some of the most problematic urban design practices."
Although almost as soon as the dust cleared on many of these developments this set of new guidelines has been unleashed to rework and rebuild them into a final draft that can be more environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable into the future.
We must keep in mind that these guidelines are not the limp recommendations of some academic think tank but come down from the top echelons of power in China and could therefore have a major impact. Over the past decade or so there has been a consciousness among many urban designers, government officials, and researchers in China that the country has been burying itself beneath an urbanization strategy that simply wasn't sustainable. To these ends there have been many large scale endeavors -- such as the building of eco-cities, low-carbon cities, and garden cities -- to test design ideas that could be scaled to help remedy the country’s urban condition. Now the central government has stepped in and collected together some of the main themes of these experiments and delivered them as a new road map to move forward upon.
“[These guidelines] match the envisioned shift from quantity to quality in most aspects of China’s planned development. They focus on improving existing cities and making the new ones more sophisticated,” said Joost van den Hoek, a Shanghai-based urbanist. “[They] acknowledge that, generally, China has more than enough buildings everywhere. Hence future urbanization is more about how to use and optimize what you already have rather than create vast new extensions.”
China’s new urbanization guidelines have become the focused of the international media for the fact that they ban “the chaotic propagation of grandiose, West-worshipping, weird architecture” as well as aim to phase out gated communities, but there’s much more to them than this. In short, this set of 30 guidelines aim to:
- Restrict what level of government and what departments can engage in urbanization initiatives.
- Create a denser street network, break up “superblocks,” and phase out gated communities.
- Enforce urban growth boundaries to restrict cities from endlessly expanding.
- Increase the prevalence of mixed-use neighborhoods.
- Preserve historical buildings and enhance “city character.”
- Expand the public transportation network.
- Increase public green space.
- Improve architectural quality and construction methods.
- Create cities that are less resource intensive, have more energy-efficient buildings, and better process waste water and re-use more solid waste. This includes the proliferation of sponge cities.
In summarizing these guidelines, Jiaotong-Liverpool architecture professor Austin Williams quipped that, “it is as if Chinese officials have caught up on their reading of 30 years-worth of Western urban think-tank brochures.” A perhaps appropriate comparison, as these guidelines were heavily influenced by the urban design solutions that have been deployed successfully in places like Portland, Stockholm, New York, London, and Copenhagen.
“You could say the Chinese policy makers have turned their eyes to European principles of urbanism — open cities, embrace local characteristics, improve the existing urban area, listen to inhabitants, and focus on quality of life — and left their former blueprinted inspirations, from Russia’s communist planning to America's neoliberalism, at the scrapyard of history,” van den Hoek said.
The view in an area of Shanghai that's mostly made up of gated communities. Image: Wade Shepard.
Of the 30 guidelines that are a part of this new urbanization decree, the one that has struck a chord with the Chinese public the strongest is the one which bans any more gated communities from being built and proposes the opening up of the ones that already exist. The guidelines posit gated communities as urban design bottlenecks, saying they increase traffic congestion as well as contribute to social tensions by exacerbating spatial class divisions, and that doing away with them will help “promote development of neighborhoods that are open and convenient, appropriately scaled, comprehensive, neighborly and harmonious.”
Although China’s cities haven't become proverbial spreadsheets of edge-to-edge gated communities solely because residential construction land tends to be sold to developers in 500x500 meter plots -- and throwing up one housing complex per plot is faster, easier, and increases the profit margin -- but because the Chinese home buyer demands them. China is a country where people have grown very accustomed to living in gated communities, and many prefer them because of their perceived security, lack of traffic, and calmer, quieter environments. In a very real sense, gated communities are an escape from the pernicious elements of China's cities; they are places where children can play freely without fear of being run over, where there are no shops blasting advertisements from loud speakers, and where there are no street vendors clogging up the walkways. Gated communities are a way of keeping "the city" at bay, and the proposal to tear down the gates has provoked a large reaction on Chinese social media.
“The best community is always those with the best walls built around them and the most guards walking around,” said Cody Chao, a medical student from Suzhou. “By saying ‘best’ I mean ‘best-selling.’"
When I asked Grace Diao, a resident of Jiangsu province who lives in a gated community, what she thought of her government’s new guidelines, she responded, “Honestly, I don't like it. I think it's stupid. I don't want to be surrounded by stores day and night. I think it's unnecessary to keep tearing down things and building new ones. It's a waste of time, money, resources, and energy.”
Although not all gated communities in China are the same, and China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development recently issued a statement saying that they would not take a “one-size-fits-all approach” in regards to opening them up, according to China Daily. Xiaoqu, little area or community, is the Mandarin name for a gated community, but some are so large as to be complete cities in their own right.
“Many new gated communities around Shanghai are huge,” van den Hoek explained. “What’s the use of putting walls around an area where tens of thousands of people are living and making it accessible by only four gates that are kilometers apart? However, many smaller and older communities in and around the downtowns are simply too small or too specific to provide any broader benefit if opened up.”
According to these guidelines, one of the main reasons for opening gated communities isn’t just to create tighter communities and remove middle class isolationism — as has been celebrated in the Western media — but primarily to create more road space and better transportation routes, Jiaotong-Liverpool University architecture professor Austin Williams pointed out. It’s pragmatism in practice, a seeing of society in a technical manner, which is perhaps the opposite of a “human-centric” approach to urbanization.
Min Xin Jiayuan, and un-gated public housing compound in Chongqing. Image: Wade Shepard.
Quelling the controversy a little, what is clear is that very large, high-density open communities — such as the 30,000+ person Mínxīn Jiāyuán in Chongqing or even Beijing’s Silo City — can flourish in China. There have been many pilot districts, neighborhoods, and sub-cities built over the past decade in China that show that gates are not a requirement for safe, quiet, and tight-knit urban neighborhoods. The key determinant in how China's transition from gated to open communities will transpire depends on execution, which can vary greatly from project to project, city to city across the country.
Which brings us to a vital point in terms of the feasibility of China’s new urbanization guidelines. How exactly will they be implemented, monitored, and, perhaps most importantly, who is going to pay for it?
“Many of the proposed guidelines cost money rather than produce money,” van den Hoek pointed out.
What made China’s rampant phase of urbanization really work was that it was a movement through which large numbers of people, companies, and institutions from an array of different sectors could profit. Local governments were able to fill their coffers from the land sales and tax revenue derived from new urbanization initiatives. Developers were able to make loads of cash through building new urban areas and selling real estate. While the construction, steel, glass, and cement industries -- and their tens of millions of employees -- were kept in motion. Even private residents could get in on the action by investing in the property market. There was a reason why urbanization related activities amounted to over 20% of China’s GDP during the rampant new city building phase -- it made money.
But by the auspices of these new guidelines not only will urban expansion be stunted — meaning not as much land for sale and construction — but the addition of new and improved urban systems, such as sponge city conversions, enhanced public transportation networks, and the reworking of superblocks, will be major financial drains on all levels of government at a time when the country's broader economy is enduring a slowdown.
Another point of concern is how these guidelines will be interpreted and implemented across various levels of government across China. Ultimately, there is little wrong with gated communities, wide roads, or even single-use districts in and of themselves, the problem was that China built them everywhere as part of a singular template for development. As these new guidelines must permeate down through the sediments of China’s governmental stratigraphy, how much of their original ideas will make it to the bottom, the local level? Will they become yet another set of key performance indicators for local officials to superficially chalk up as they fall over each other in pursuit of promotion? Will they become another rendition of “a thousand cities with the same face,” only this time with narrower streets and improved water reuse faculties?
“It seems that the government has started to reflect the problems of cities caused by poor historic planning. That's progress,” said Shiyu Qian, the editor of Masterplanning the Future magazine. “However, understanding existing problems is maybe even more important than raising new ideas and strategies because we could see the same thing happening again - ill-thought actions may come up with more problems than solutions.”
