Posted Mar 27, 2014, 5:06 PM
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Hyper-Urbanization: China Plans for 100 Million New City Residents by 2020
China Releases Plan to Incorporate Farmers Into Cities
MARCH 17, 2014
By IAN JOHNSON
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/wo...in-cities.html
Quote:
China has announced a sweeping plan to manage the flow of rural residents into cities, promising to promote urbanization but also to solve some of the drastic side effects of this great uprooting. The plan — the country’s first attempt at broadly coordinating one of the greatest migrations in history — foresees 100 million more people moving to China’s cities by 2020, while providing better access to schools and hospitals for 100 million former farmers already living in cities but currently denied many basic services.
- The plan floated last year by the government’s powerful planning commission called for 70 percent of the country’s nearly 1.4 billion population to be living in cities by 2025. The current plan aims for 60 percent by 2020. It also emphasizes what has been a relatively new phenomenon over the past decade: the state’s role in deciding who should move from rural land and where they should live. The need for urbanization, the plan asserts, is part of a broader move to shift China’s structure away from growth based on exports and investment, and toward domestic demand.
- Many economists believe that urbanites consume more than farmers, who tend to be more self-sufficient. But the plan also sees urbanization as part of China’s future. It states that “urbanization is modernization” and “urbanization is an inevitable requirement for promoting social progress,” noting that every developed country is urbanized and industrialized.
- The plan strongly emphasizes the improvement of quality of life for new city residents through increased government spending. It also calls for improvement in the quality of building construction, which has sometimes been criticized by new residents. --- “I think it’s good because it touches on problems created by urbanization in the past,” said Yi Peng, the director of the Urbanization Research Center of the International Finance Forum, a Chinese think tank. “Public services have been lacking and urbanization has not been rational.”
- Currently, nearly 54 percent of Chinese live in cities, but only 36 percent are registered as urban residents. That disparity — representing about 250 million people — are former farmers living in cities but not permitted to register as city dwellers. That means they cannot send their children to local schools, use hospitals at subsidized rates or enjoy other benefits of city life. --- The plan calls for integrating 100 million of these second-class citizens, so that by 2020, 60 percent of Chinese should be living in cities, with 45 percent enjoying full urban status, the plan states. --- To make this possible, the government is promising huge infrastructure spending. Every city that exceeds 200,000 in population is to be linked by rail and expressways, while every city exceeding 500,000 is to have high-speed rail service.
- Many urban planners say China’s urbanization plan can only succeed when two related reforms are carried out. One is tax reform, which would either raise money for the central government to pay for urbanization, or give local governments more rights to raise money to pay for the new schools, hospitals, roads and housing that the plan’s goals would require. Currently, local governments have limited rights to levy taxes. --- Another is reforming farmers’ land rights. Land is owned by the government, with only usage rights available to be bought or sold. Giving farmers more rights over their land would make it harder for bureaucrats to confiscate rural land.
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Why China's Cities Need to Get Denser, Not Bigger
Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/pol...t-bigger/8716/
Quote:
If the city of Guangzhou, the capital of one of China’s wealthiest provinces, had the same density as Seoul, it could accommodate another 4 million more people on top of its current 15 million. That’s according to a new report by the World Bank that calls on China’s urban planners increase the density of its cities instead expanding its existing urban centers, or constructing entirely new ones.
- Denser cities could save China about $1.4 trillion in infrastructure spending, or the equivalent of 15 percent of last year’s GDP, the report says. And denser urban planning should help conserve the shrinking amount of land that China has to feed its population, which has lowered the country’s self sufficiency. --- If higher density makes so much sense, why haven’t Chinese cities embraced it already? One major reason is that local governments are highly dependent on selling undeveloped land to developers. Redeveloping existing cities to make them more dense wouldn’t result in any local government revenue.
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