Shanghai World Expo's slogan: "Better City, Better Life." A reality check shows the slogan has given us at best a remote dream. In reality, big cities have made our life worse.

Take Beijing. Housing prices are more and more expensive, walking is more and more difficult, there is more and more garbage and water is becoming scarcer by the day. This is despite Beijing's efforts to build more houses, broaden the roads and clean up the environment. All these efforts cannot satisfy the city's appetite for becoming bigger and bigger.

Urbanization may be irreversible, but urbanization does not mean ever bigger cities. In the past 40 years, Beijing and Shanghai have both quadrupled their populations, while New York has not seen much change.

Beijing should just be China's political and cultural center, but it has stretched itself to embrace all kinds of industries and financial services. There're is almost no industry in the American capital of Washington, DC, no skyscrapers, no headquarters of multinational companies. But it's a perfect capital.