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Cities rise higher but life quality plummets
By Wang Yong |
February 16, 2011, Wednesday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
I used to seek solace in my hometown Yangzhou or other similarly serene cities whenever the frenzy of Shanghai got to me.
But there's no escape anymore. High-rise after high-rise, highway after highway are taking over my hometown, which used to be a low-rise oasis on the Grand Canal, a place for strolling and bicycling.
To be fair, my hometown Yangzhou, an ancient economic and cultural hub famous for the salt trade and classical gardens, has yet to reach the architectural heights of Shanghai and almost certainly never will.
But when I returned home early this month for the Spring Festival, I was dazed, if not dazzled, to see row upon row of identical high-rise apartments stretching to the horizon, and more and more cars crowding the roads that are continually being widened to accommodate the internal combustion engine.
Nature is being squeezed.
Yangzhou is far older than Shanghai, older by at least 2,000 years, but it's just as naive and clumsy as the old Paris of the East in rushing to embrace concrete forests and inhale auto emissions.
Yet Yangzhou does not represent the worst of the urban great leap forward. When I left Yangzhou for Shanghai on a fancy new bullet train - itself a byproduct of hasty urbanization - I was amazed to find that many other ancient cities along the line - Changzhou, Wuxi and Suzhou - are nearly as high as Shanghai.
As I traveled on, I considered that Suzhou's ancient gardens are now part of our world heritage, but will Suzhou's new skyscrapers ever be considered part of a cherished human legacy in a few hundred years?
Unique gardens
Of course not. Suzhou's ancient gardens are beautiful and unique but its skyscrapers are not. Shanghai, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore all abound with similar impersonal monstrosities.
New York is hopelessly high (and dry), but America still has (parts of) California, Oregon, Washington and the Rocky Mountain states that have not been urbanized to death.
Where will I retire in China if all Chinese cities, old or young, are a nightmare of skyscrapers that make city officials and developers so proud?
And skyscrapers are not just about ugly skylines - they consume and waste enormous amounts of energy.
Shanghai lags far behind my hometown and many other smaller cities in installing solar energy panels because Shanghai's roofs are often too high and installation too difficult.
There will come a day, though, when most Chinese cities talk the talk of going green but walk the walk of waste as they rival each other to become taller.
I often say to my friends that Americans are smarter, or at least more fortunate, than Chinese. Indeed, Americans have exported the idea of cars and high-rises and the ideology of urbanization to the rest of an impressionable world, but America itself retains much of its beautiful countryside.
In the end, the globalized race to the bottom of urbanization - initiated in the modern West - will certainly find some of its saddest victims in the densely populated (and growing) East, where the land-population relationship will have been stretched too thin.
In today's lead opinion article, the World Bank suggests Guangdong Province undertake research into how many farmers could be moved to cities to help close the wealth gap. It couldn't be more right - encroachment on farmland is reaching dangerous levels.
If all or most farmers moved to the cities, who would feed the urbanites?
I have no answer, but let's take note of what the Xinhua news agency reported yesterday: Shanghai now suffers an annual deficit of more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) in social security funds (mainly for the urban retired).
But there's no escape anymore. High-rise after high-rise, highway after highway are taking over my hometown, which used to be a low-rise oasis on the Grand Canal, a place for strolling and bicycling.
To be fair, my hometown Yangzhou, an ancient economic and cultural hub famous for the salt trade and classical gardens, has yet to reach the architectural heights of Shanghai and almost certainly never will.
But when I returned home early this month for the Spring Festival, I was dazed, if not dazzled, to see row upon row of identical high-rise apartments stretching to the horizon, and more and more cars crowding the roads that are continually being widened to accommodate the internal combustion engine.
Nature is being squeezed.
Yangzhou is far older than Shanghai, older by at least 2,000 years, but it's just as naive and clumsy as the old Paris of the East in rushing to embrace concrete forests and inhale auto emissions.
Yet Yangzhou does not represent the worst of the urban great leap forward. When I left Yangzhou for Shanghai on a fancy new bullet train - itself a byproduct of hasty urbanization - I was amazed to find that many other ancient cities along the line - Changzhou, Wuxi and Suzhou - are nearly as high as Shanghai.
As I traveled on, I considered that Suzhou's ancient gardens are now part of our world heritage, but will Suzhou's new skyscrapers ever be considered part of a cherished human legacy in a few hundred years?
Unique gardens
Of course not. Suzhou's ancient gardens are beautiful and unique but its skyscrapers are not. Shanghai, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore all abound with similar impersonal monstrosities.
New York is hopelessly high (and dry), but America still has (parts of) California, Oregon, Washington and the Rocky Mountain states that have not been urbanized to death.
Where will I retire in China if all Chinese cities, old or young, are a nightmare of skyscrapers that make city officials and developers so proud?
And skyscrapers are not just about ugly skylines - they consume and waste enormous amounts of energy.
Shanghai lags far behind my hometown and many other smaller cities in installing solar energy panels because Shanghai's roofs are often too high and installation too difficult.
There will come a day, though, when most Chinese cities talk the talk of going green but walk the walk of waste as they rival each other to become taller.
I often say to my friends that Americans are smarter, or at least more fortunate, than Chinese. Indeed, Americans have exported the idea of cars and high-rises and the ideology of urbanization to the rest of an impressionable world, but America itself retains much of its beautiful countryside.
In the end, the globalized race to the bottom of urbanization - initiated in the modern West - will certainly find some of its saddest victims in the densely populated (and growing) East, where the land-population relationship will have been stretched too thin.
In today's lead opinion article, the World Bank suggests Guangdong Province undertake research into how many farmers could be moved to cities to help close the wealth gap. It couldn't be more right - encroachment on farmland is reaching dangerous levels.
If all or most farmers moved to the cities, who would feed the urbanites?
I have no answer, but let's take note of what the Xinhua news agency reported yesterday: Shanghai now suffers an annual deficit of more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) in social security funds (mainly for the urban retired).
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