> The new urbanisation guidelines encourage mixed-use development and recommend that all residents should have improved access to a diverse range of public and commercial amenities – schools, supermarkets, retirement centers, hospitals, parks, and cultural centers – within range of where they live. There is a special emphasis on green space: the guidelines decree that all city dwellers should have access to public parks, gardens, and other open areas.<p>If they can pull this off – awesome.
>The new guidelines also emphasise the need for a diverse mix of public transportation options, including light rail, buses, and subways.<p>Not surprising at all, but I didn't know what they mentioned next:<p>>Although China [...] is working to build over 7,000km of new subway lines in cities across the country by 2020<p>As somebody living in the U.S. this has me absolutely floored. I'm feeling some extreme transit envy.
A few interesting claims by Yukon Huang, former World Bank director of China:<p>In the last few years, CPC aims to equalize urbanization growth and have set internal migration to limit tier1 cities growth.<p>However in reality, major Chinese cities are less dense than comparable tier1 cities elsewhere. Major urban centres density in particular have decreased 20% in the last 10 years. I believe this accounts for the substantial number of shadow migrants. Minor Chinese cities are much more dense than comparable cities elsewhere.<p>Apparently traffic planning is done by the military in major cities, there's a conspicuous absence of one way streets and other planning blunders leading to congestion. I'm not sure if it's blunders or prioritization different goals, after all regardless of who plans, there are competent traffic engineers working at the highest level. China's airspace is also largely planned by the military and constrained to extremely narrow flight corridors leading to all sorts of inefficiencies and widespread delay. Hence popularity of high speed rail. Regardless there's still a lot of urban optimizations to be made. He is one of the few that thinks large Chinese cities should be larger.<p>It would be interesting to see how China implements these new urban policies with constraints of existing urban development. Wonder if they'll run into the same development woes as other large cities. On the other hand Chinese superblocks are sufficiently large and dense that they should easily sustain mix-use revitalization. Selfishly just waiting for some movement on arcologies.
>The new urbanisation guidelines encourage mixed-use development and recommend that all residents should have improved access to a diverse range of public and commercial amenities – schools, supermarkets, retirement centers, hospitals, parks, and cultural centers – within range of where they live. There is a special emphasis on green space: the guidelines decree that all city dwellers should have access to public parks, gardens, and other open areas.<p>This portrays the city as only a residential entity with residential amenities. Where are the productive uses of land, such as factories, refineries, shipyards, office buildings, warehouses, food markets, etc. that are needed for a thriving economy. "Mixed use" should account for placing places of employment in proximity to residential areas so that transportation costs and time consumed by commuting are reduced.<p>Or are cities to be exclusively centers of consumption?