China’s mega-cities are combining into mega-regions, and they’re doing it all wrong - Quartz

China’s mega-cities are combining into mega-regions, and they’re doing it all wrong - Quartz

China isn’t alone in the development of mega-regions—greater
Tokyo and the Washington, DC-Boston corridor also have similarly huge
populations and geographies—but China’s ongoing urbanization and rapid
growth is making it something of a laboratory for urban planning on a
massive scale. The theoretical appeal of ever-larger municipal areas is
that they will create efficiencies in the delivery of services like
transport and sanitation, while knitting together a thriving urban
ecosystem.

The trouble is that China’s mega-cities and
mega-regions aren’t being built with an eye toward maximizing the
advantages and minimizing the downsides of creating these massive
metropolises. Most importantly, the mega-regions are being built around a
small number of city centers, many of which are surrounded by
concentric circles of commuters and bedroom communities that makes
traffic hellish and pollution even worse.

“Among the 10 developed and emerging mega-regions
in China, only a limited number have exhibited a significant level of
polycentricity,” concluded a report by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
(pdf), a US think tank. “Around half of the 10 mega-regions are either
dominated by a single major center, or by a limited number of major
centers which are located closely to one another.”

This is a problem because it ultimately means
everyone will want to work in close proximity to the city centers, which
causes sky-high property prices and transportation headaches. Size
doesn’t always have to be a negative, though.

“Mega-cities are a necessary step in the
development of urban areas,” Eric Marcuson, a Chongqing-based urban
planner at Aecom, told Quartz. “A city is just an urban area with one
center, but to increase growth and productivity cities eventually need
to encompass more, complimentary centers.”

Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that China is
following the advice of urban planners like Marcuson. Take Beijing, a
city of around 20 million residents with just one main center for
commerce and productivity. It is surrounded by concentric ring roads
that create heavy traffic, and even its very good subway system is
hugely overcrowded. Nevertheless, the Chinese government seems
determined to double-down on Beijing, combining it with the city of
Tianjin and parts of Hebei province into one huge megalopolis. But as Quartz has reported,
While Hebei isn’t likely to attract workers away from Beijing, the
other cities in the proposed “Jing-Jin-Ji” region are mostly suburbs,
with no real urban centers of their own—precisely the opposite to what
the specialists advise.