Megacities: China's urban challenge - BBC News. Image caption. Shanghai now has twice as many skyscrapers as New York. To write about urbanisation in China is to traffic in superlatives. Three decades of sustained economic growth, concentrated along the booming coast, has lured millions from the impoverished Chinese countryside. This paper analyzes the processes and characteristics of urbanization in Shanghai, focusing on the population and land use and land cover (LULC) change, and its. This article on China’s urbanization examines the main drivers behind China’s urban transformation, its impact on the society and how the impact is unevenly. China’s extraordinary economic boom has gone hand-in-hand with urbanization. In 1950 13% of people in China lived in cities. By 2010, the urban share of. This great migration - unprecedented in human history - has put 4. Chinese cities over the one million mark since 1. It is estimated that another 3. Chinese will become urban by 2. China's urban numbers to a cool billion. Accommodating all these people has meant building on a scale the world has never seen before. China's 'New Urbanization' Needs to Be Inclusive and Sustainable. Highlight text to share via Facebook and Twitter. Urban population (% of total) United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects. Urbanisation Where China’s future will happen For the world’s sake, and its own, China needs to change the way it builds and runs its cities. The scale and pace of China's urbanization continues at an unprecedented rate. If current trends hold, China's urban population will hit the one billion mark by 2030. In the first 2. 0 years of China's economic revolution, begun under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1. China built some 6. In Shanghai there were no skyscrapers in 1. New York. Nationwide, China's construction industry employs a workforce of about 3. Nearly half the world's steel and cement is devoured there, and much of the world's heavy construction equipment has relocated to the People's Republic. Tower cranes, for example, have become the ubiquitous symbol of urban China.'Spreading pancake'But China's urban revolution has also destroyed as much as it has built. Image caption. Qianmen Street in one of Beijing's oldest neighbourhoods is now a tourist attraction. In its head- long rush to be rich and modern, China has deprived itself - and the world - of a priceless heritage. Beijing, once among the world's great urban treasures, is fast becoming just another node of globalised consumerism; full of absurdly sanitised reconstitutions of its lost past, unaffordable to working people, lacerated by eight- lane highways. Urban development in China has also displaced more people than any nation in peacetime. In Shanghai alone, redevelopment projects in the 1. United States. Because China's cities are growing outward as well as upward, urbanisation has also consumed a staggering amount of rural countryside. Between 1. 98. 5 and 1. Shanghai's footprint grew from 9. Chinese suburban development is much more concentrated than in the US. Large detached homes owned by single- families - the American standard - are relatively rare. Image caption. China's domestic automobile market now exceeds America's. The basic unit of Chinese suburbia - with its mid- rise apartment towers, community centre and shared public spaces - is half way between a Maoist . China's domestic car market now exceeds America's, and the largest car showrooms in the world today are not in Los Angeles or Houston but the People's Republic. Accommodating the steady flow of new cars - Beijing and Shanghai average 1,0. American interstate system as Earth's most extensive human artefact. And with cars and highways have come all the standard spaces of suburban consumerism - drive- through restaurants and big- box shopping malls, budget chain motels, and even that vanished icon of middle America, the drive- in cinema. Saving the world. None of this bodes well for planet Earth. How ironic that, just as the West has begun to get its environmental house in order - finally taking serious action to reduce its carbon footprint, combat global warming, and end its oil addiction - here come the millions of China, wanting the very lifestyle and material amenities that have put us on the verge of environmental collapse. Image caption. China has invested billions of dollars in the clean energy industry in recent years. If China were to match, per capita, car ownership in the US (which is falling, incidentally), it would mean more than one billion cars. The planet, in a word, would be fried. And this takes no account of India, which will soon overtake China as the world's most populous nation. Experts such as Paul Gilding have come up with a measure for our total global footprint in terms of our impact on the environment and resources. In his book The Great Disruption he concludes that our economy is operating at about 1. That is not just unsustainable, it is a catastrophe. And yet, who are we to say to China: . Even as it sprawls, China is building more public transit than all other nations combined, and is well ahead of the US in developing sustainable building technologies and clean- energy alternatives such as solar, wind, and biomass. According to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, China invested $3. We may have taught China to drive, eat, and buy its way to ruin; China may yet show us how to save the world. Thomas J Campanella is author of The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. He is currently a Fellow in residence at the American Academy in Rome. Preparing for China's urban billion. By pursuing a more concentrated urbanization path guided by action to boost urban productivity, China's local and national policy leaders would minimize the pressures and maximize the economic benefits of urban expansion. If current trends hold, China's urban population will hit the one billion mark by 2. In 2. 0 years, China's cities will have added 3. United States today. By 2. 02. 5, China will have 2. Europe today—and 2. For companies in China and around the world, the scale of China’s urbanization promises substantial new markets and investment opportunities. Video. A video presentation of the findings of MGI research on China’s urbanization brings to life the opportunities and challenges of China's urban growth. Of the slightly more than 3. China will add to its urban population by 2. This growth will imply major pressure points for many cities including the challenge of managing these expanding populations, securing sufficient public funding for the provision of social services, and dealing with demand and supply pressures on land, energy, water, and the environment. The research examines these issues and the policy choices that China's leaders could make at national and local levels that can alter the shape of urbanization significantly. MGI finds that an urgent shift in focus from solely driving GDP growth to an agenda of boosting urban productivity, achieving the same or better economic results with fewer resources, is not only an opportunity but a necessity. By moving in this direction, China would cut its public spending requirement by 2. GDP or 1. 5 trillion renminbi a year, reduce SO2 and NOx emissions by upward of 3. GDP in 2. 02. 5 mainly through reduced consumption of natural resources. The analysis suggests that China should tailor policies that would shift urbanization toward a more concentrated shape of urbanization. This pattern of urbanization could produce 1. Concentrated urbanization would also have the advantage of clustering the most skilled workers in urban centers that would be engines of economic growth, enabling China to move more rapidly to higher- value- added activities. The two- part report offers a rich urban productivity agenda for China's city leaders and examines what national policies are needed for China to move to a path of more concentrated urban growth. It also offers detailed city case studies and explores the implications of China’s urbanization for key aspects of China’s economy including labor and skills, construction, infrastructure, transport, arable land, energy, water, pollution, and funding.
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