"There are several defects in China's urban development," said Professor Chen Weibang, deputy director of the Sci-tech Committee under the Ministry of Construction. He was speaking at a forum on the development of small and medium-size cities held on April 17 in Yongchuan, Chongqing Municipality. Present at the forum were more than 100 leaders from 30-plus small and medium cities in China.
Many cities ignore their own conditions, but blindly expand purely for the sake of expansion. This trend, said Chen, stems from the city leaders' mistaken belief that the bigger their cities are, the better for their development. Some conduct no investigations at all into the appropriateness of new construction projects.
"Many cities are blindly putting in wide roads, plazas, parklands, skyscrapers and central business districts (CBDs). Nearly 40 cities are buildings CBDs now. Cities like Xiangfan, in central China's Hubei Province, might not even understand what a CBD is, but they still build one."
Chen went on to point out that development zones and all kinds of science and technology parks are now occupying huge amounts of land. Luxurious golf courses have appeared in many cities.
Many of the problems associated with illegal land use are obvious. A number of cities' layouts are haphazard and disorderly because of the many illegal structures that have been erected. More than a few builders show complete disregard for the surrounding area in their selection of designs.
A number of irreplaceable historical and cultural sites have been destroyed by the encroachment of new construction. Some cities that were once famed for their historical sites have now been rebuilt as commercial cities, losing their own identities. There are even places, said Chen, that are demolishing the real antiques in order to build fake ones.
In some places, he noted, the construction of tourism facilities has destroyed the original attractions. For example, more than 100 hotels were built in Zhangjiajie City, Hunan Province, which is famous for its national forest and which UNESCO placed on its list of world natural heritage sites in 1992. When UNESCO discovered the hotels scattered all over the place, it threatened to delete Zhangjiajie from the list. The central government ordered the local government to demolish some of the hotels. In the end, more than 200 million yuan (US$24 million) was wasted. In spite of all this, the local government went ahead and stuck a 171-meter-tall steel-girder sightseeing elevator onto the side of a mountain.
Sculptures have become a popular form of city decoration, and several places have installed sculpture streets or parks. However, very few of these sculptures add any value to the view: many are more like rubbish than art, said Chen. He was gratified to learn that Beijing had decided to demolish its sculpture street in Changping District and that Chongqing Municipality was going to remove some of its city sculptures.
Landscaping is another issue. Some cities ignore indigenous species of trees and plants, blindly importing others. The survival rate of replanted trees in some large cities is only 30 to 40 percent. Nanning City, the capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, spent 60,000 yuan (US$7,244) to buy a type of tree from Australia even though the region is rich in its own tree resources.
Small towns often try to make themselves look like big cities, placing broad plazas and parks next to farmland.
These defects in urban planning and construction are in some ways a reflection of an immature market economy. However, the main problem lies squarely with city planners who ignore the lessons learned by their forerunners around the world.
(China.org.cn by Wu Nanlan April 30, 2004)
