Dangerous Words in China's Flourishing Age of Urbanization

At the beginning of China's reform and opening up, the American urban planner Edmund·Bacon (Edmund N. Bacon, 1910—2005) received an invitation to visit from Peking University. At first, he was unwilling to go, because “Beijing had been destroyed.”

Bacon held deep feelings for Beijing. In the early 1930s, when he practiced at the Shanghai firm Murphy & Dana, he had surveyed Beijing. In 1976, in his book Urban Design, he praised it highly: “Perhaps the greatest single work of man on the face of the earth is Peking. This Chinese city, designed as the home of emperors and seeking to be a symbol of the center of the universe. The city is deeply steeped in ceremonial order and religious consciousness, things that no longer concern us now. Yet it is so outstanding in design that it offers a rich treasure house of ideas for our cities today.”

⟦NL> Beginning in the 1950s, Beijing's city walls and other important ancient buildings were demolished one after another. Bacon was deeply disappointed and almost unwilling to go see this city that he regarded as a miracle. Even so, that time, he still came, and he came again in 1989, and unexpectedly felt that Beijing was still very good. “After 50 years, when the oil is used up, Beijing can still function, while American cities cannot.” Bacon said, “The courtyard house puts open space inside, while America puts open space outside. Beijing's way is very good.”

Back in the United States, Bacon prepared to hold an academic conference to discuss the urban form several decades later. He invited the Beijing side to attend and suggested that it would be best to make a video positively introducing Beijing's experience, but this did not happen as he wished.

Bacon believed that old Beijing's foundations were still there and that the city's fabric remained compact, so public transportation could be used to keep the city running. American cities, by contrast, were too dispersed, public transportation could not get off the ground, and overreliance on cars made them very fragile. But at that time, relevant people in Beijing's planning department could not understand what Bacon meant. Everyone had always felt that high density was not a good thing and had always emphasized the need to decentralize urban functions. Making a video also seemed troublesome to them, so they did not send anyone to attend Bacon's conference.

Today, Beijing has built five ring roads, its population has exceeded 20 million, and motor vehicles exceed 5 million. Cars, expressways, and large shopping malls have driven urban expansion and defined citizens' lifestyles. This is exactly the situation Bacon worried about. In the United States, the “automobile city” has caused too many problems, even draining the country's energy, diplomatic, and defense policies to exhaustion. Yet Chinese politicians and planners pay relatively little attention to these problems—in this round of rapid urbanization in China, the car has become the dominant rule-maker.

China's dependence on foreign oil has risen rapidly, surging from 32% at the beginning of this century to the current 57%, higher than the international warning line of 50%, making energy security a top priority. It was also at this time that China's navy was equipped with its first aircraft carrier.

Urban Decline in an Era of Prosperity

Reading the book Shrinking Cities, the story of Bacon and Beijing kept emerging in my mind. In this book, I saw that today, when oil has not yet run out, some cities on this planet are already very difficult to operate.

The population of Detroit, America's “Motor City,” fell sharply from more than 2 million at its peak in the early 1950s to 950,000 now, losing more than 1 million people in 50 years, and this happened in a peaceful period of economic growth. Rome's population fell from more than 1 million to 50,000—also a decrease of more than 1 million—but only after going through the long and turbulent historical process from the 3rd century AD to the 15th century.

“The rapid success of the private car led to the equally rapid decline of public transportation.” Shrinking Cities tells the story of Detroit: “The use of a second family car—the station wagon used by housewives for shopping and taking children to recreational activities—meant that fathers could drive their own cars to work in the city. As a result, buses became increasingly unprofitable. The further spread of the metropolitan area—accompanied by low-density suburbs scattered around the large city—further accelerated this trend. By the 1950s, the central city had been ‘abandoned’ by the wealthy as a residential area.”

In downtown Detroit, for the first time in history, skyscrapers originally planned to stand for hundreds of years became abandoned objects. Halloween tourists came here to burn houses for fun, giving rise to a distorted form of tourism. Over the past 50 years, Detroit has destroyed or burned more than 200,000 abandoned homes, becoming a veritable “arson capital of the nation.” In this high-crime city, human nature changed, and a series of walled defensive fortifications were built to block pedestrian traffic, because people walking on the streets were regarded as a threat. The city's system has already been established: once you want to enter, you must drive.

Today, when humanity possesses unprecedented technological capacity, the largest object they have created—the city, has suddenly become fragile. Manchester was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and also the center of the world cotton goods trade—the largest trading city to develop from the Industrial Revolution. But in the 1970s, the “container revolution” brought it down. At that time, only ports that could handle huge container ships and provide storage space for large amounts of container transport could survive. But Manchester was not such a port. Over the past more than half a century, the city's population has decreased by about 40%.

After social change occurred in the Soviet Union, it split into 15 sovereign nation-states, and the originally interdependent division-of-labor system suddenly disintegrated. In Russia, shrinking cities soared from 7 to 93 in a short period. Because of political system change, the rest of the former Eastern Bloc countries also faced the same predicament, with urban populations shrinking across the board. Before this, no political change had ever had such an impact on population development.

“With the arrival of the 21st century, many countries shifted from a century-long stage of population growth to a long-term stage of population decline. This phenomenon is unprecedented. It was not caused by negative external factors such as war, infectious disease, or famine; on the contrary, it occurred in an era of unprecedented prosperity and peace.” Shrinking Cities writes, “About 1/6 of the world's large cities (with more than 100,000 residents) have become shrinking cities. At this point, continued urban shrinkage has become almost a problem peculiar to industrialized countries: 70% of shrinking cities are located in industrial countries, most of them in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Along with London and Paris, supercities such as New York and Tokyo have also fallen into a crisis of continuous shrinkage.”

Reading the above text, Chinese readers may find it somewhat hard to relate to, because this country's urbanization rate has only just exceeded 50% and is in a period of rapid growth. At this time, talking about urban shrinkage seems far off topic. However, the three categories of causes of urban shrinkage identified by the researchers participating in the Shrinking Cities project—deindustrialization, suburbanization, and transformation—have all already lain latent in China's cities in their internal factors, and it is very hard to guarantee that similar situations will not occur in China in the near future, after this round of the urbanization cycle ends.