For Release July 16, 2009
Citiwire.net
China: 1.3 billion people, 60-plus cities with more than 1 million people, three with over 10 million. Yet we really don’t have a grip on what’s happening in China’s cities, or the competitive dimensions of Chinese national urban policy. The question’s especially timing right now as we shape our first-in-decades national urban policy, including the avowed focus on metropolitan areas that President Obama, chief White House urban affairs officers Adolfo Carrion and Derek Douglas and other top officials underscored at a White House Urban Policy Roundtable last week.
A few authors have focused on Chinese cities. Tom Campanella’s brilliant The Concrete Dragon, China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means to the World (2008) takes us to places one wouldn’t have imagined two decades ago. He tells us of the South China Mall that at 7 million square feet is bigger than the Pentagon. About Grand Epoch City, a 540 acre hotel, conference center, Buddhist Temple just outside of Beijing. And China’s 25,480 miles of national trunk highways–a project that has built more than 15,000 miles of interstate-like roads in just four years, including phenomenal engineering feats to increase vehicular mobility in cities–yet at great expense to the neighborhoods.
Views of last year’s Olympics let us see Beijing transformed. The historic core of Shanghai has seen 400 20-story-and-higher skyscrapers built since 1990. News accounts of civil unrest focus suddenly on Urumqi, a city of a million on the country’s western edge. Yet an I.M. Pei-designed museum in Suchow is emblematic of the culture–and investment wealth–of oversees Chinese “coming home.” Workers’ demonstrations in the Pearl River Delta cities of Shenzen and Dongguan remind us of China’s role in globalization. And the opening of the giant hydroelectric dam at Three Gorges evokes a vision of nearby Chongqing, one of China’s four autonomous municipalities, which I visited this month, a two and a half hour plane flight from Beijing.
Let’s pause at Chongqing for a moment because it represents urban policy at work in a smaller (by Chinese standards) city. With a population of 5 million in its core and about 30 million within its bounds, located at the confluence of the Yangzi and Jailing Rivers, it reminds us it was China’s national capital for a few years after the Japanese invaded in the 1930s. Chiang Kai Chek, Mao, and many other luminaries fled to its green hills. Today, it’s the commercial center for central China, specializing in manufacturing (iron, steel, motorcycles), shipbuilding, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and tobacco production. And it’s preparing for even more growth in its government-sponsored satellite city for 700,000 located on the other side of a mountain that their traffic engineers just pierced with a four-lane highway.
So what’s happening in this new urban place? Some of the usual things–modern space for offices and plants, housing, shopping centers and the like. But here is the key item: 11 universities will have campuses here. Two or three “science cities” will be built adjacent to the academic areas. Chonqing University has opened a new 3,000-acre campus (built, incidentally, in a year); it will have 50,000 students, many destined for advanced study in the city.
We know about the great economic disparities among and within China’s rural and urban populations. But China and its municipalities are clearly on target with their focus on knowledge production, building critical infrastructure, and developing industries to help the country grow its competitive edge.
So where are we in the United States with regard to urban policy?
In a nation overwhelmingly metropolitan in its population and economic foundations, we need the kind of focus that Brookings Institution Vice President Bruce Katz articulated at the White House’s recent Urban Policy Roundtable–the four interrelated challenges of advancing innovation, human capital, infrastructure, and quality of place. Taken seriously, it’s a formula that could leverage our cities far into the future. The White House Office of Urban Affairs is trying to define how it moves federal initiatives in that direction. At the roundtable, Secretaries Shaun Donovan (HUD), Ray LaHood (Transportation), Hilda Solis (Labor), and other high-ranking federal officials including Karen Mills (SBA), Lisa Jackson (EPA), Xavier Briggs (OMB) all pledged to support the inter-agency task force now being formed to direct federal mandates and funding towards collaborative, urban-focused policy.
But it won’t be easy: entrenched forces favor status-quo arrangements. Examples: the devastating evidence that federal stimulus funds for transportation infrastructure projects, apportioned out by state governments, are seriously shortchanging cities. And the reversals of states’ funding to education–California, for example, has just announced an $800 million cut in its support for its ten universities.
With China at our back, its national and local government investing seriously for an urban future, our margin of error is eroding rapidly.
Eugenie Birch is the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research and Education and Co-Director of the Penn Institute of Urban Research at the University of Pennsylvania. Her e-mail is elbirch@upenn.edu.
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3 Comments
You make very good points. But, I think there is more to learn from in China. China has metro regional govetrnance of the order genrally missing in the United States. They acted on the belief-as seems evident from their actionsthat Americans might talk about on websites like this, namely that:integrated units at local level create an integrated economy that is key to rapid economic transformation.
Whereas, there might be urban-rural divide (which is true here as well), citiwide Beijing ranked number one as the most egalitarian city on the planet according to a recent UN report. Taking into account the massive migration from the rural areas, of the order not seen in America in a long time, that means the integrated federated system of Beijing is working. That same report noted inequity in US cities rivals those of Arica! But, then U.S. cities lack the integrated federated framework in city cores, so one shouldn’t be surprised.
Where inequity has been reduced in the U.S. is in the bintegrated federated system that is the Twin Cities Metro. Mind you inequity remains;but, it has been reduced. Of course Twin Cities hasn’t mastered the economic improvement aspect that Beijing could give it lessons on. Meanwhile. Twin Cities can teach Beijing about sharpening the redistribution mechanism to reduce the rural-urban divide.
One should also keep in mind China has thousands of rich villages;so maybe it should also focus on developing more of those!
A friend just sent me a pessimistic email that begins with this hypothesis, ” A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the piblic treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependance, from dependence back again to bondage.” I would appreciate your comments on this theory. I myself am not that pessimistic, but I believe that we need some drastic measures to return our country to greatness. China has built it greatness by destroying its enviroment. I have been there from Shanghai to Lasha and have seen their rivers running green, with algie, or black with chemicals and with old coal power plants’ smoke oblirating the sun. They are trying to change by doing things like the three gorges dam, rebuilding their coal power industry with existing Syngas technology and building four Nuclear power plants per year; and projects to capture clean water from the south and west. I hope they succeed but I am afraid they are going to kill themselves. On the other hand we have the appathy that I have pointed out above. We need leadership from the government or better yet from private industry. How about being lead by the power and oil indusrties, to rebuild our energy systems? This is not going to be accomplished by putting all our eggs in the wind and solar power basket. We need to build 100-200 Nuclear Power plants within the next 50 years, 2-4 per year. To do that we need to rebuild our steel industry. We can do both of these without destroying our enviroment. I love your idea of city states with mass transit systems and high speed rail systems connecting them for commerce and travel. We have to have steel and power to build and run such a beautiful system. Some people feel that such an ambitious effort would require a public effort on the scale of WWII. I pearsonally believe that such an effort would allow us to fully employ our society from the poor to the unemployed craftsmen as well as build our skill pool of engineers and scientists. The spinoff industries like electric cars, and chemicals from oil for building materials that would allow us to quit destroying our forests would help provide employment. I believe that our country will wake up if we are provided with the leadership.
Dr. Robert Justice
Retired Chemical Engineer from Shell Oil Company
Kingwood, Texas
Interesting article and commentary. A couple personal thoughts:
In what city of the US would the government be allowed to demolish thousands of residencies to give way of a new urban environment i.e. high rises?
The cost of economic development in China is reflected in its negative impact on the environment i.e. air quality concerns for the Beijing Olympics.
To my knowledge relocation within China has to be government approved, thus rural people moving to the big cities looking for work is sanctioned by the government.
Regardless, there are significant lessons to learn from China due to its tremendous growth. One of the most significant differences I have found between the US and China is that China leaders understand the issues and are working hard in addressing quality of life and economic issues, short and long term – long term means long, 50 years plus. Similar long term thinking is something I have not observed in the US.