City planners and cultural conservationists in Beijing are urging the capital city to reconsider current downtown development strategies and practices that feature widening roads and concentrated shopping facilities.

In a public appeal to the Beijing municipal government and the city's People's Congress, conservationists say if the current massive urban development is not stopped immediately, traditional houses and lanes in the 2,000-year-old city may soon disappear.

The appeal was launched on Sunday. By Monday, more than 100 leading designers, artists, archaeologists, historians, cultural conservationists and journalists signed their names to the petition.

The appeal was also submitted to the 10-day 28th Session of the World Heritage Committee, which was to wrap up today in Suzhou.

Hua Xinmin, a leading Beijing cultural conservationist, said the city has done a great deal to try to protect its old urban areas in recent years.

Last year, Beijing's Party Secretary Liu Qi said that in principle, the old city area -- located within the current Second Ring Road -- should not be demolished and all new developments should go outside the Second Ring Road.

Beijing also published a list of a dozen of cultural and historical relics and listed 27 traditional residential zones as protected area.

But many old buildings and streets are still endangered when roads have been widened in several downtown areas and two business hubs were constructed in Wangfujing and Financial Street.

"The road widening projects didn't solve traffic jams and turned out instead to have helped destroy hundreds of old courtyards and ruined the 800-year-old planning proportion of Beijing," said Chen Zhihua, a renowned architectural and urban planning professor with Tsinghua University.

The traffic jams are caused by too many modern high-rises having been built in traditional downtown areas, Chen added.

The construction of business hubs in central downtown areas can only bring more traffic problems and cause greater pressures on planners to build new roads at the cost of old buildings, Chen told China Daily on Sunday.

So far, comment from the Beijing municipal government on its arguement and support of road widening projects has not been forthcoming as officials were not reached.

Development in Beijing and other Chinese cities has used questionable financing practices which rely heavily on real estate developers to offer capital for public facilities construction. In exchange, development and management rights for properties along these new public roads are then offered to the developers.

Liu Zhihua, a senior researcher with the China Institute of Cultural Relics, said real estate developers prioritize economic interests ahead of cultural conservation.

People often complain that heights of new buildings in old downtown surpass the controlled level and new construction is not always harmonious with styles in protected historical zones.

(China Daily July 7, 2004)