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. Read More