Who will save China’s cities? (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series, Monica Qing revealed how poorly planned roads are contributing to the disintegration of China’s cities. In this blog entry, she explores the reason these mistakes are made—and how to keep them from happening in the future.

On a recent trip to Beijing to supervise the production of an architectural model, I learned the hard way about daily life in the city. In order to carry out my job there, I needed to get from my centrally located hotel to the modelmaking studio twice a day. Because there was no subway located near the hotel, on the first day I decided to try the local bus. Placed between a busy service road and a four-lane main road, as is typical in China, the bus stop exposed me and the other waiting passengers to dangerous vehicles, noise, and dust—and this was before we had to fight our way onto the crowded buses and battle traffic to reach our destinations. With urban roads so similar to highways, it has made it very difficult to make public transport human-friendly.

The next day I tried a taxi, but because of the nearby urban highway, taxis were unwilling to battle regional traffic to seek city fares, and queues outside my hotel for those that were available were impenetrable. Finally, my only option was to get the model company to pick me up by car every day—a solution that naturally made me question how local Chinese in Beijing avoid the daily frustrations of trying to get around their city.

[pullquote]“The width of urban streets in China is equivalent to that of highways in Britain.”[/pullquote]

The unfortunate truth is they don’t. They are forced to accept the reality that highways are killing the urban experience. They don’t have any choice but to start and end their days with danger, noise, pollution and the inevitable soul-crushing that comes with living in an environment plagued by urban blight. Even more worrying to me is that more and more Chinese cities are cropping up in the same condition every day.

It is happening as I write this: My generation is defining how Chinese people will live in the next few centuries yet all around us, deformed Chinese cities are being born at a staggering speed and scale.

The problems begin and end with outdated planning. Twenty new cities are born in China every year, yet planning principles established in 1959 from ex-soviet systems have not been updated since then. These problematic regulations, coupled with the development speed, mean that the principles are not challenged and mistakes are duplicated everywhere. This is a real disaster.

Chinese planning schools perpetuate this disaster, by continuing to teach engineering-oriented and command economy-based theory. According to the textbooks of 1959, roads should be designed according to highway standards. Students are still being taught lessons like this today. For example, many learn that the radius of a road junction has to accommodate a truck turning easily at fast speed without being visually blocked by corner buildings. The huge roads and massive junctions that result from this thinking prevent pedestrians from safely crossing the street—certainty not appropriate for an urban environment.

Chinese students are also taught to master the method for planning a road network based on the traditional hierarchical theory. Although a principle that says the more important the road, the wider it is and the fewer junctions it has might sound logical, in a city, it’s not. Imagine if our beloved Regent Street, certainly an “important road”, was 60 meters wide with minimal connections to Soho. The average high street in the UK is no more than 25 meters, while the width of main streets in most Chinese cities is 40 to 60 meters. In other words, the width of urban streets in China is equivalent to those of highways in Britain.

[pullquote]”The problematic planning regulations, coupled with China’s development speed means that the principles are not challenged and mistakes are duplicated everywhere.”[/pullquote]

Another major failing of the Chinese planning system relates to building setbacks. In many countries, the distance a building is set back from the street is motivated by right of light. In China, building setbacks again depend on how important the roads are. Typically, a building by a main road will be set back 10-30 meters from the pavement, but as new Chinese cities are growing along urban highways, the distance from building to building can go up to 100 meters, certainly no way to encourage an appealing pedestrian environment.

Enormous road with huge junctions and high speed traffic makes these roads too dangerous to cross. As a result, the highway agencies set up fences to prevent pedestrians from crossing, thereby removing any walkability from the urban experience.

These outdated regulations are killing the chance for vibrant cities in China—and they are caught in a vicious cycle that shows no signs of slowing. Once armed with misinformation, the graduates of planning schools in China go on to be planning authorities and pass the torch to new planners. They work alongside traffic specialists who have no interest in humanity and are merely there to tick boxes on outdated regulations. If this cycle doesn’t stop, good design will continue to be killed in the application process.

My recent work in Russia has further convinced me China’s dated planning system has contributed significantly to the problems of other cities. Russia has been practicing the same planning system for half a century and as a result, Beijing and Moscow feature the same urban experience and problems.

To save our cities, there must be a radical reform to our planning system. But where do we begin?

In the third part of her series, Monica Qing reveals why Chinese society accepts the false planning system. She does this by digging deeper into the social ideology that drives the formation of gated communities.

Images (top to bottom):cdn.benzinga.com; Business Insider; xinhuanet.net; Dolboeb Anton Nossik