China’s megacities are combining into mega regions, and they’re doing it wrong

[M II A II R II K]

China’s mega-cities are combining into mega-regions, and they’re doing it all wrong


May 5th, 2013

By Richard Macauley

Read More: http://qz.com/201012/chinas-mega-cities-are-combining-into-even-larger-mega-regions-and-theyre-doing-it-all-wrong

PDF Report: https://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/dl/2226_1558_Yang_WP13JY1.pdf?_ga=1.28617340.1720485004.1398971078


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The city center of Chongqing boasts a mere 9 million people, but dozens of satellite districts such as Fuling (population 1 million) and Wanzhou (1.6 million) are each major cities in their own right. In total, Chongqing covers an area the size of Austria, and it’s about to become part of a mega-region that is even larger, part of move in China to create the biggest urban municipalities on Earth.

- China isn’t alone in the development of mega-regions—greater Tokyo and the Washington, DC-Boston corridor also have similarly huge populations and geographies—but China’s ongoing urbanization and rapid growth is making it something of a laboratory for urban planning on a massive scale. The theoretical appeal of ever-larger municipal areas is that they will create efficiencies in the delivery of services like transport and sanitation, while knitting together a thriving urban ecosystem.

- The trouble is that China’s mega-cities and mega-regions aren’t being built with an eye toward maximizing the advantages and minimizing the downsides of creating these massive metropolises. Most importantly, the mega-regions are being built around a small number of city centers, many of which are surrounded by concentric circles of commuters and bedroom communities that makes traffic hellish and pollution even worse.

- This is a problem because it ultimately means everyone will want to work in close proximity to the city centers, which causes sky-high property prices and transportation headaches. Size doesn’t always have to be a negative, though. --- “Mega-cities are a necessary step in the development of urban areas,” Eric Marcusson, a Chongqing-based urban planner at Aecom, told Quartz. “A city is just an urban area with one center, but to increase growth and productivity cities eventually need to encompass more, complimentary centers.”

- Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that China is following the advice of urban planners like Marcusson. Take Beijing, a city of around 20 million residents with just one main center for commerce and productivity. It is surrounded by concentric ring roads that create heavy traffic, and even its very good subway system is hugely overcrowded. Nevertheless, the Chinese government seems determined to double-down on Beijing, combining it with the city of Tianjin and parts of Hebei province into one huge megalopolis.

- But as Quartz has reported, While Hebei isn’t likely to attract workers away from Beijing, the other cities in the proposed “Jing-Jin-Ji” region are mostly suburbs, with no real urban centers of their own—precisely the opposite to what the specialists advise.

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Chongqing, for example, will be part of the even larger Chuanyu mega-region, which also includes the major city of Chengdu and 13 cities from Sichuan province. The Capital Economic Zone encompasses Beijing and Tianjin; the Pearl River Delta region includes Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong; and the Yangtze River Delta region is centered around Shanghai.


http://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/china-s-mega-regions-area-000-sq-km-population-million-_chartbuilder.png?w=640&h=363

[Wizened Variations]

A central emphasis, IMO, has been developing huge subway and intercity train systems, combined with a vast freeway system between cities. China has had to deal with change at a supersonic rate, and, has looked world wide and picked what politicians and planners have compromised upon. The result has been a unique mix of huge steel rail subway, commuter, and, intercity rail services, freeways, and, airports, all of which are designed for vast growth estimates when constructed in response to migration to the cites due to the change in agriculture brought about by the wide usage of affordable oil.

Changes are occurring far too quickly for implementing a slower growth model, such as the Tokyo or Osaka scheme, where existing neighborhoods were surrounded without destroying too much of their existing texture. Instead, cities are both growing in area and density far faster than their urban public transport and road network can keep up with.

The best analogue I can think of, is the growth in Seoul, over the last 30 years.

Despite this key difference, however, China has put the Tokyo urban scheme under the microscope, and, used the Tokyo model more than any other.