The Financial Times published a commentary on January 27, titled "The sky-high cost of China's sprawling cities," that heaps considerable criticism on the way Chinese cities expand.

Simon Rabinovitch, the author, wrote, "Much of the country's economic growth has been driven by the building of its cities, But ... there is a real risk that China will languish as a country 'with pockets of extreme wealth and an educated middle class, but whose cities teem with enormous slums and suppurate with entrenched social divisions'."

The fatal flaw of China's urbanization, he says, is a rush to "gobble up ever more of the countryside." As building blocks crop up on appropriated farmland, cities grow in size but provision of public transport linking outlying communities with the downtown hasn't caught up. Private cars become the transport of choice for many and a major contributor to haze.

A breakdown of airborne pollutants reveals that normally 80 percent of Shanghai's emissions come from vehicle exhaust, industry and construction. The rest is blown in from neighboring provinces. But this winter the amount of external pollutants has doubled, according to Zhang Quan, the city's environmental chief.

As the sputtering economy gets a boost in the form of resumed industrial projects, suspended previously due to environmental impact, and as more cities aspire to the sleekness of metropolises like Shanghai, they end up caught in a spreading pollution loop, from which none can insulate itself.

Colossal mistake

The dirty air is not just a herald of coming disasters, but also a reminder of a colossal mistake in urban planning.

As Rabinovitch observed, in China mixed-use neighborhoods are few, but they are the trend. Li Kexin, an expert on low-carbon development, argued that the cure for urban diseases is to integrate cities' multiple functions and restrict human activity to a certain area.

The recent official slogan of building a "beautiful China" is realistic only if it conforms to the right model of urbanization, one that favors "compact, smart cities" over reckless urban sprawl, Li told Xinhua in an interview in December.

While the foul air appears to be knocking some sense into politicians, reflection has to go beyond environmental cleanup, curbs on car growth, and closing polluting factories. Any public discussion of what ails our cities is superficial without a mention of the urbanization strategy that got us here.

Rabinovitch ended his piece on a note of pessimism, saying, "China still has time to shift its policies to create happier, more productive cities. But the window is beginning to close."

It often happens that as wounds heal, lessons are quickly forgotten.

Hopefully, this time the pain should be sufficiently intense and lasting to dispel numbness and apathy.