The recent development of China’s cities provides lessons
for densification that is being promoted for American cities. The trick, of
course, is improvement without losing the beneficial qualities of the past.
Clear-cutting neighborhoods for new development loses the rich texture of a
city with historic neighborhoods. Just as a tree plantation cannot replicate a forest,
ecological diversity is hard to design and must be allowed to grow.
Nevertheless, China’s determination to densify their cities has required and
received governmental commitment to build mass-transit systems and improve
roads, to upgrade water and sewer systems, and to provide electrical power.
What has been lost are the bicycles and the civic scale this kind of
transport supports.
Another consequence is the pollution of the air and waterways.
China has rich deposits of coal, unfortunately the soft bituminous kind that
burns producing more carbon dioxide pollution. A vast majority of China’s power
is supplied by coal fuel, both at the local and industrial scale. Mostly
unregulated, coal mining is unsafe and many injuries occur. Air quality is
reported on daily weather reports on a scale from excellent to severely
polluted with all fifteen major cities identified with ambiguous color coding
that shows a moderately polluted to worse range, along with a website that is
inaccessible outside the country. In cities the smog is constant and many wear masks almost as a
fashion accessory. Many more develop a “Beijing cough” after a few days in the city,
and the countryside provides little relief.
China's climate includes seasonal monsoons. Attempts
to control coastal flooding has prompted channelizing the three primary rivers
of which the Three Gorges Dam has been successful in this regard, but like all
civil engineering projects, they require a commitment for maintenance. Pressure
to industrialize, especially in nearby villages with cheap labor, have allowed
manufacturing practices that pollute. Given lax inspections
and the lack of judicial recourse, violations occur. For instance, the Shanghai Daily reported on 18 April 2013
that villagers east of Zhejiang province in Lanxi City have protested that an
aluminum factory has caused excessive pollution and fluoride poisoning
resulting in a cancer cluster, but the government response was that “waste
discharges meet national environmental standards.”
The economic drivers that have produced the recent “modernization”
have occurred on the back of the Chinese people to the detriment of the environment.
John Bryan Starr in Understanding China (2010,
page 214) notes that sixteen million areas of arable land has become desert due
to deforestation since 1949 with more lost to converting farmland for
development and its supporting infrastructure. Given the limited amount of land
suitable for farming and the growing population, it is alarming to think of the
ecological and social consequences of China’s recent development. One landscape
architecture firm, Turenscape in Beijing, is responding with public projects
that clean polluted water in un-channelized waterfront parks with plants
including productive crops. The health of the Chinese people and the global impact
of failing to responsibly manage natural resources will be the true evidence of
progress in this ancient, fascinating and important country.
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