The dangerous words of the prosperous Times of China's urbanization

At the beginning of China's reform and opening up, Edmund N. Bacon Bacon, an American urban planner, received an invitation from Peking University to visit. At first, he was reluctant to go because "Beijing has been destroyed."

Bacon has a deep affection for Beijing. In the early 1930s, when he was practicing at Murphy & Dana in Shanghai, he visited Beijing. In 1976, he praised in his book Urban Design: "perhaps the greatest individual project on the surface of the earth is Beijing." This Chinese city is designed as an imperial house and tries to become a symbol of the center of the universe. The city is deeply immersed in etiquette and religious consciousness, which has nothing to do with us now. However, it is so outstanding in design that it provides a rich treasure of ideas for our city today. "

Since the 1950s, Beijing's walls and other important ancient buildings have been demolished one after another. Bacon was so disappointed that he hardly wanted to see the city he regarded as a miracle. In spite of this, at that time, he still came, and in 1989 he came again, and unexpectedly thought that Beijing was still very good. "50 years later, after running out of oil, Beijing can still operate, while American cities can't." Bacon said, "the courtyard house is the open space inside, the United States is the open space on the outside, Beijing's way is very good."

Back in the United States, Bacon is going to hold an academic conference to discuss the shape of the city decades from now. He invited Beijing to attend the meeting and suggested that it would be better to make a video to introduce Beijing's experience, but failed to do so.

Bacon believes that the foundation of old Beijing is still there, the texture of the city is still tight, so that the city can be maintained through public transport, while American cities are too loose to build public transport and rely too much on cars, which is very fragile. But at that time, the relevant people in the planning department in Beijing could not understand what Bacon meant. People always thought that high density was not a good thing. They always stressed the function of evacuating the city, and it was troublesome for them to make a video, so no one was sent to attend the bacon meeting.

Today, Beijing has built five rings with a population of more than 20 million and more than 5 million motor vehicles. Cars, expressways and shopping malls have led to the expansion of the city and defined the lifestyle of citizens, which is exactly what Bacon fears. In the United States, the "auto city" has caused so many problems that it has exhausted the country's energy, foreign and defense policies. But Chinese politicians and planners pay less attention to these issues-cars dominate the rules in this round of China's rapid urbanization.

China's dependence on oil has risen rapidly, from 32 per cent at the beginning of this century to 57 per cent at present, above the 50 per cent international warning line, and energy security has become a top priority. It was at this time that the Chinese navy assembled its first aircraft carrier.

The decline of cities in prosperous times

Reading the shrinking City (Shrinking Cities), I keep thinking of the story of Bacon and Beijing. In this book, I see that today, when the oil has not been exhausted, some cities on this planet have become very difficult to operate.

The population of Detroit, the "automobile capital" of the United States, has plummeted from more than 2 million at its peak in the early 1950s to 950000 now, losing more than 1 million in 50 years, which is unexpectedly in a peaceful period of economic growth. Rome's population fell from more than 1 million to 50, 000-- also by more than 1 million-- a long and chaotic historical process from the 3rd century to the 15th century.

"the rapid success of private cars has led to the equally rapid decline of public transport." The shrinking City tells the story of Detroit. "the use of the family's second car-the station wagon used by housewives to shop and take their children to entertainment-means that fathers can drive their own cars to work in the city. As a result, buses become more and more unprofitable. The further spread of metropolitan areas-accompanied by low-density suburbs scattered around big cities-has further accelerated this trend. By the 1950s, the central urban area as a residential area had been 'abandoned' by the rich. "

In downtown Detroit, for the first time in history, skyscrapers that were supposed to stand for hundreds of years have become abandoned. Halloween tourists come here to burn down houses, giving birth to a perverted tourism industry. In the past 50 years, Detroit has destroyed or burned down more than 200,000 abandoned homes, making it a veritable "national arson capital". In this high crime city, human nature has changed, and a series of fenced fortifications have been built to stop pedestrian traffic because people walking on the streets are seen as a threat. The system in this city has been set up, and once you want to enter, you have to drive.

Today, when human beings have unprecedented technological capabilities, the largest object they have created, the city, has suddenly become fragile. Manchester is the hometown of the industrial revolution and the trading center of cotton products in the world-the largest trading city developed from the industrial revolution. But in the 1970s, the "container revolution" knocked it down. At that time, only those ports that could handle large container ships and provide storage space for a large number of container transport could survive. But Manchester is not such a port. The population of the city has decreased by about 40% in the past half a century.

After the social change, the Soviet Union was divided into 15 sovereign nation-states, and the interdependent division of labor system suddenly disintegrated. In Russia, the number of shrinking cities has soared from seven to 93 in a short time. As a result of the change in the political system, the rest of the former Eastern European bloc countries face the same dilemma, with an across-the-board contraction of the urban population. Before that, no political change had had such an impact on population development.

With the advent of the 21st century, many countries have shifted from a century-long stage of population growth to a long-term stage of population decline. This phenomenon is unprecedented. It is not caused by negative external causes such as war, infectious disease or famine; on the contrary, it takes place in an unprecedented era of peace. " "shrinking cities" wrote, "there are about 1 big cities around the world (with more than 100000 residents) becoming shrinking cities. At this point, the continued contraction of cities has almost become a problem endemic to industrialized countries: 70% of shrinking cities are in industrial countries, most of them in the United States, Britain and Germany. Along with London and Paris, supercities such as New York and Tokyo are also in a shrinking crisis. "

Reading the above text, Chinese readers may not get used to it, because the country's urbanization rate is just over 50% and is in a period of rapid growth, when talking about urban shrinkage seems to be too far from the point. However, the three classifications made by the researchers involved in the "shrinking cities" project on the causes of urban contraction-deindustrialization, suburbanization and transformation-are latent in Chinese cities, and it is difficult to guarantee that in the near future, after the end of this round of urbanization cycle, a similar situation will not happen in China.