Famously Rampant Urbanization
This last summer, I had the pleasure of being hosted as a Visiting
International Professor by the Research
Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences in Beijing. This center is part of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, and is the home of the State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology. My goal in spending three months in China was
to learn about its form, magnitude, and rate of urbanization. The speed and
novelty of urban growth in China are exceptional. Although some countries have faster annual percent
rates of conversion of population from rural to urban, none has a greater
absolute number of participants in the process.
Nor do other countries rival China in the extent of the creation of new
cities virtually from scratch across broad regions. It is a perfect place to help put our work in
Baltimore in a larger perspective. In
addition, researchers in China are excited and very well prepared to share
their new knowledge about urbanization with the rest of the world.
China has for thousands of years been a largely agricultural
Chinese urbanization is more than simply the growth of
established cities, however. The idea of
urban agglomerations, more recently conceptually deepened in terms of urban
megaregions, was one that originated to capture the extraordinary spatial scope
of urban change in China and elsewhere in Asia.
There are 23 planned megaregions or urban agglomerations in China (Fang 2011).
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| Twenty-three existing and planned urban megaregions in China (Fang 2011) |
Urban megaregions require understanding urban change in an
inclusive way, as something that embraces old city cores, new neighborhoods, novel
extensions within large urban administrative units, the engulfing of ancient
villages by dense and often high-rise urban fabric, the replacement of
agricultural villages by mixed industrial settlements, the demolition of
villages and their replacement by superblocks of gated high-rise condos or apartment
buildings, and even some modest development of villas, or what we in the U.S. would
call single-family houses with yards.
The richness of the kinds of change and the spatial mosaics
produced are novel and not well researched at this time. Chinese urban ecologists recognize a pressing
need to understand the environmental implications of this long list of
transformations.
Shifting Policy Landscape
Coming from the United States, I had the impression that
China’s strong central government would make urban policy easy to understand,
and would also make rational urban plans the norm. What I learned however, was the existence of
a complex, multi-level and multi-sector process of urban change. In addition, I learned of a fluid policy
landscape. For example, until late July
of this year, urban residents had to be registered. This excluded many people who wished to
migrate from the countryside from full participation in urban life and its amenities. Children of unregistered residents were not
permitted to attend public schools. Furthermore, unregistered rural migrants
were often crowded into less-than ideal rental units.
In July 2014 the central government announcemed that this policy, labeled hukou,
would apply differently depending on the size cities. Although the intent is to more evenly spread
urbanization across the spectrum of cities, there may well be an pulse in migration
to cities as a result. The social and
ecological consequences will be not only interesting, but very likely potent.
The revision of the hukou policy is situated within a larger
trajectory of policy evolution in China.
The previous central government policy prioritized industrial development. The term “development” is used all over the
world and is the stuff of headlines and political slogans. However, it strikes me that most uses in the
public discourse in China and elsewhere are rather vague and loaded. In the past, given the evidence on the ground
(and in the heavy, polluted air!) development in China suggested an industrial
pathway, and China’s prowess as a maker for the world has been rightly
recognized as a result. But the term
development, again based on my personal observations of the culture of
consumption that has saturated the big cities with global brands, automobiles
with foreign name plates, familiar fast food restaurants, and multi-story
shopping malls, also implies a growing emphasis on the provision and
acquisition of luxury goods. The
urbanization policy now driving demographic and spatial change in cities,
suburbs, with its implications for villages and rural life, shifts emphasis to
domestic consumption as a driver for development.
Of course industrially based economic activities and
infrastructure will continue to be built and operated in China. But the new emphasis on urbanization intertwines
with a new national policy on the environment.
How these two strands will be reconciled and whether there are the
desired environmental – and human well being – outcomes, remains to be
seen.
Chinese urban ecologists are concerned to be part of the
dialogue, and many ecological leaders are well placed to help urban planners
and municipal authorities to improve the ecological processes and services
within their jurisdictions. I did,
however, see evidence of some shortfalls in linking ecological and urbanization
processes.
Shortcomings in Contemporary Urbanization
One problem is the sheer speed of urban development. An interesting and salubrious institution in
many large Chinese cities is the city planning museum or planning exhibition
hall. I visited three of these: Beijing,
Tianjin, and Shanghai. In some cases, a
glance at the current iteration of the city regional plan was jarring in its
dissonance with the facts on the ground.
Much of the greenspace promised by the current plan for Beijing had
already disappeared under roads and buildings.
An aspect of the plan that was clearly successful was the protection of
the mountain districts in the extensive megacity administrative boundaries of
Beijing. These lands were well preserved under the rubric of protecting the air
and watersheds on which the city depends, although as a plant ecologist I was
interested to know how much impact the transplantation of large, mature trees
from the forests into new city and urban developments affected the source
stands.
Tianjin’s urban plan seemed to have clearer bioecological
content, and establishing boundaries to protect sensitive forests, lakes,
seacoast, and rivers was a part of the plan.
Lands were set aside for parks for urban residents as well, and
restoration of wetlands formerly devoted to agriculture in the city boundaries
was called for. The ecological rationale
for such conservation and restoration was well laid out in Tianjin’s exhibition
hall.
Another issue is the predominance of an economically driven
real estate industry, a social institution not unknown in the capitalist west,
of course. My naïve view of the
communitarian nature of the Chinese state did not prepare me for the news about
the power and efficiency of the private real estate juggernaut in China.
The final shortcoming was the nature of many eco-cities. As an ecologist and an urbanist who thinks that
sustainability is a reasonable strategy for visualizing multi-dimensional
improvements in urban social-ecological systems, I had high hopes for the
eco-city idea. However, eco-city
developments seem to emphasize a rather narrow suite of strategies, such as engineering
efficiencies, multimodal transportation and density, improved onsite stormwater
management structures, supplementation of energy sources with renewables, such as wind. They also have generous street tree plantings
and green courtyards in the high-rise residential blocks. However, the eco-city developments, which
were conspicuous in the impressive city models in the planning exhibitions, and
evident on the ground in many places, had significant lapses in my view. I highlight several below.
The rich diversity of commercial opportunities scattered
throughout the older urban neighborhoods and even in larger villages, were
relegated to centralized shopping malls in the eco-cities. Three was little to invite residents to
interact on the street, and although the individual residential clusters apparently
provide recreational amenities behinds their gates, the life on the street
seemed depauperate. This seems to
violate one of the tenets of functional urbanism, and was a great
disappointment to see so often.
Altogether, the utility of the sustainability concept, which calls for
the joint attention to ecological integrity, social functionality and equity,
and economic vitality, seems to be poorly realized in much of the urban growth
that I saw in China.
Visualizing Urbanization: Opportunities for Enhancement
China also offers insights into the visualization of urban
change, a problem that is widely shared.
The process of land conversion and of remaking existing cities is so
striking that it is frequently and compellingly represented by a few
contrasting colors on GIS maps. Derived
from aerial imagery, such maps represent core urban zones in red, agricultural
areas in yellow, and forest and grassland in shades of green. Because the shifts over five or ten years are
so great, such color contrasts over time tell a powerful story.
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| Change of land covers in Beijing from 1984 through 2010. Red is developed urban land. Copyright Prof. Weiqi Zhou. Do not duplicate without permission. |
But such coarse classification of urban lands – red blob
mapping -- neglects much of the subtlety of urban form. This is due to both the frequent use of
coarse spatial resolutions on the order of 10s of meters, as well as to the
fact that these classifications are blind to the rich array of ways in which
people actually use different patches.
And here I do not mean use in the sense of simple zones like commercial,
industrial, or transportation areas. Nor
does even recognizing the height of buildings reveal key social and ecological
relationships that different spatially recognized patches might possess. There is a great opportunity in China to
break down the land covers within urban and urbanizing areas into more specific
categories, while recognizing the three dimensional structures of patches. This approach is one that was pioneered in
Baltimore, and I look forward to exploring it with Prof. Weiqi Zhou and other colleagues in China. The detailed spatial heterogeneity of city
regions is a key dimension along which ecological and social understanding have
been demonstrated to advance.
This sort of theoretical perspective on cities also matches
very well with the concerns and practices of urban designers, including
architects, landscape architects, planners, as well as sociologists concerned
with the patchiness of human institutions and social arrangements. Once more subtle land cover maps are
available for Chinese urban regions, the opportunity will arise to understand
the social structures, norms and policies, governance arrangements, and of
course, the bioecological patterns and processes that exist in those heterogeneous
structural mosaics. The power of fine
scale, highly conceptually resolved land classifications in Chinese cities and
their rampantly changing urban regions has hardly been tapped.
The Reach of Urbanization
The impact of urbanization in China – or anywhere for that
matter -- is not something that is confined to cities and their expanding
fringes. Rather, the growth of cities in
China touches even distant villages and rural areas. Indeed, the national urbanization policies
mentioned earlier in this essay guarantee that the link between urban and rural
changes will be strong.
One thing that I explored with Prof Weiqi Zhou and members
of his laboratory, was how the continuum of urbanity can be used to advance the
understanding of the regional nature of China’s urbanization.
The continuum of urbanity identifies four dimensions along
which the structures and processes of urban change play out: Livelihood, lifestyle,
spatial connections including local, regional, and global, and the social and
biophysical nature of specific places. The continuum of urbanity is a conceptual ordering of
the shift between urban and rural influences and processes (Boone et al. 2014). It is not necessarily a literal transect on
the ground, but rather the idea applies to various scales and can be used to
understand the effects of urbanization at local, regional, and global spatial
scales.
The four components of the continuum of urbanity examine 1)
how people support themselves and whether and how they participate in formal and
informal economies, 2) the nature and expression of their social identities and
the implications of social identity for consumption and symbolic decisions, 3)
the spatial scope of influences and material connections, including
long-distance linkages or tele-connections, and finally 4) the interaction of
the other three dimensions with the biological, physical, cultural, and social
environments of specific places. Such
specificity of place can apply to very local or to broader areas. In describing the interaction with place, it
is important that sometimes features of the bio-geo-cultural environment act as
constraints on the other three dimensions of the continuum of urbanity, and
sometimes the environment is in fact changed by the processes represented by
the other dimensions.
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| Urban district rising on recently converted agricultural land between Beijing and Tianjin. |
It is clear that the continuum of urbanity plays out in China in many ways. The connections
between cities and villages are diverse and impactful. Some villages are swallowed up into expanding
cities, with consequent changes in livelihood and lifestyle. Some villages continue to exist, but become
sites of industrial production as factories excluded from polluted cities
relocate to rural areas, while some are converted to tourist economies, for
example. In other cases, villages are
bought out and the land converted to high-rise, gated apartment blocks with the
associated transportation infrastructure.
And the continuum of urbanity does not stop at China’s
borders. As the official policies to
generate a more urban, domestic consumer-based society move forward, a rising
middle class demands more meat, for example, which alters land use and
livelihoods as far away as Australia and the Americas. Pig farming, migration of fruit bats to
cities, and shifts in bat-borne disease risk are outcomes of the continuum of
urbanity that spans from China to Australia.
The continuum of urbanity represents a useful way to
organize research on the extensive effects of urban development in China. It can focus on fine scale heterogeneity
within cities, as called for above, or it can expose the continental and global
effects of urbanization. The mutual
relationships of urban regions linked in a global system are eliciting greater
attention in the world of economics, and ecology will change at both ends of any
urban teleconnections.
An Urban Ecological Future
The changes in China’s urban realm, and its megaregional,
continental, and global reach are vast research frontiers. To summarize what I learned in China:
1. There is great need for describing, modeling, and working
with spatial heterogeneity at refined conceptual resolutions and at various spatial
grains.
2. Social phenomena and dynamics need to be better connected
with ecological and physical data and representations of urban change.
3. The connections between both former and persistent-but-altered
rural zones and villages with cities are an open research task.
4. Addressing the shortcomings of some “eco-city”
approaches, and applying sustainability as a linked set of social,
environmental, and economic goals are important challenges.
The richness, speed, and nature of Chinese urbanization are
a useful intellectual foil to the specific history and trajectory of urban
change in Baltimore. China defines at
least one extreme of the conceptual space that all urban social-ecological
research and application occupy.
Opportunities for comparison and for collaboration are great.
Acknowledgments.
My trip to China was supported by an International Visiting
Bibliography
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