Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years • Hacker News Board

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#21

Post by mytailorisrich » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 12:23 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #17

mytailorisrich wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A perfect dense city looks like Brooklyn, Harlem or Paris, not like Pudong. That's your opinion. These places are short of green spaces.

Nothing remotely like Pudong or Puxi in Shanghai. I’m very fortunate to live within walking distance of two small parks in Changning and that is way better than most of Puxi. If you want to see a good example of urban planning look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and there’s plenty of the first two. Whatever a perfect city looks like it does not look like Pudong or any of the res…

> If you want to see a good example of urban planning look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and there’s plenty of the first two.

I'm not disagreeing with that. This is very far from the examples you cited, and more in line with large buildings surrounded by parks that I mentioned. In fact Singapore has drawn on Le Corbusier's idea of "Unité d'habitation" (which I mentioned in another comment)...

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#22

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 1:17 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #21

barry-cotter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing remotely like Pudong or Puxi in Shanghai. I’m very fortunate to live within walking distance of two small parks in Changning and that is way better than most of Puxi. If you want to see a good example of urban planning look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and there’s plenty of the first two. Whatever a perfect city looks like it does not look like Pudong or any of the res…

> If you want to see a good example of urban planning look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and there’s plenty of the first two. I'm not disagreeing with that. This is very far from the examples you cited, and more in line with large buildings surrounded by parks that I mentioned. In fact Singapore has drawn on Le Corbusier's idea of "Unité d'habitation" (which I mentioned in anot…

Dense urban areas with mixed residential, commercial and retail spaces all within walking distance of each other are the antithesis of Le Corbusier’s vision of a perfect city. He would have been appalled by Singapore, if possibly less appalled than by Paris which he would have liked to raze to the ground and rebuild.

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#23

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #13

barry-cotter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever about other parts of China I do not believe there are 10 year old developments in Shanghai with brand new apartments unless you mean people who are holding unfinished concrete shells as investments and there are some of those in central, lived in developments. Getting any place within ten minutes taxi ride of a metro occupied is easy. Might be hard to sell it but you can rent it easy.

It is exactly what it is. 400m2+ apartments overloaded with styrofoam barocco decorations, appliances, furniture, ready for people to move in, just sitting there and rotting. I saw photos myself: plastic parts yellowing, styrofoam curlies cracking, organic materials getting mouldy here and there, and centimetre thick layer of dust on everything. When they were put on the market 10 years ago, they were sold at such un…

I find this difficult to believe. Chinese apartments are not sold furnished like you describe. They’re sold as bare concrete shells. Apartments like you describe are overwhelmingly rented, not sold. Usually when people buy a pre-owned apartment they strip it down to the concrete and redo everything.

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#24

Post by mytailorisrich » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #22

mytailorisrich wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to see a good example of urban planning look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and there’s plenty of the first two. I'm not disagreeing with that. This is very far from the examples you cited, and more in line with large buildings surrounded by parks that I mentioned. In fact Singapore has drawn on Le Corbusier's idea of "Unité d'habitation" (which I mentioned in anot…

Dense urban areas with mixed residential, commercial and retail spaces all within walking distance of each other are the antithesis of Le Corbusier’s vision of a perfect city. He would have been appalled by Singapore, if possibly less appalled than by Paris which he would have liked to raze to the ground and rebuild.

Please, and for the last time, look at "unité d'habitation" and how it has inspired many developments in Singapore.

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#25

Post by SECProto » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 2:30 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #19

barry-cotter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese residential city blocks aren’t any denser than American ones, they do have more green space though. Paris is one of the densest cities in the world and it doesn’t really get taller than eight stories high.

> Paris is one of the densest cities in the world and it doesn’t really get taller than eight stories high. For the record, it is 24th in the world: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d... And there are other French cities above it: Levallois-Perret is 8th at 26,432/km^2.

Levallois-Perret is a commune bordering on central Paris, and a comparable size to a single arrondissement (subdivision within Paris proper). For example, the 11th arrondissement [1] is 50% larger and 100% denser than Levallois-Perret. But it doesn't count because it isn't it's own separate administrative area.

All this to say: the closer you look, the harder it is to rank places by population density. The comment point was that high population density can be reaching without high rises.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/11th_arrondissement_of_Paris

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#26

Post by mantap » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #22

mytailorisrich wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to see a good example of urban planning look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and there’s plenty of the first two. I'm not disagreeing with that. This is very far from the examples you cited, and more in line with large buildings surrounded by parks that I mentioned. In fact Singapore has drawn on Le Corbusier's idea of "Unité d'habitation" (which I mentioned in anot…

Dense urban areas with mixed residential, commercial and retail spaces all within walking distance of each other are the antithesis of Le Corbusier’s vision of a perfect city. He would have been appalled by Singapore, if possibly less appalled than by Paris which he would have liked to raze to the ground and rebuild.

Singapore is only dense in the vertical dimension, it's not dense in the horizontal dimensions.

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#27

Post by logicchains » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #17

mytailorisrich wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A perfect dense city looks like Brooklyn, Harlem or Paris, not like Pudong. That's your opinion. These places are short of green spaces.

Nothing remotely like Pudong or Puxi in Shanghai. I’m very fortunate to live within walking distance of two small parks in Changning and that is way better than most of Puxi. If you want to see a good example of urban planning look at Singapore. Everything appears to be a park, road, tree or building and there’s plenty of the first two. Whatever a perfect city looks like it does not look like Pudong or any of the res…

>and everything set up for cars.

I've lived in Shanghai and currently live in Singapore, and Singapore seems waay more car-centric, more like an American city than anything I've seen in China. Really wide roads almost everywhere, mandatory car parking in office buildings, scarce crossings, some incredibly pedestrian-unfriendly intersections. As an example, there are + intersections where only 3/4 of the possible crossings are supported, so as a pedestrian you may have to wait for three sets of traffic lights just to cross from one side of the road to the other (e.g. first down, then across, then back up again, like 🠓🠒🠑). The cars also seem to drive way faster than Shanghai, maybe because there's less congestion (it's a wonderful city to be a driver). It also has pedestrian crossing lights that only activate upon a button press, so if you're even a moment late you have to wait until the next set of red lights (whereas in Shanghai the pedestrian light is always enabled).

The most egregious example of this is the crossing in Raffles Place from Pekin street over Telok Ayer to the indoor hawker centre. Or more accurately, the lack of a crossing, so that every lunchtime and rush hour masses of people have to scuttle nervously across the road as angry drivers zoom by.

Compared to the other cities I've lived (Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai), Singapore is by far the most stressful to be a pedestrian for me.

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#28

Post by dirtyid » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

A few interesting claims by Yukon Huang, former World Bank director of China:

In the last few years, CPC aims to equalize urbanization growth and have set internal migration to limit tier1 cities growth.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#29

Post by Kapura » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

>The new guidelines also emphasise the need for a diverse mix of public transportation options, including light rail, buses, and subways.

Not surprising at all, but I didn't know what they mentioned next:

>Although China [...] is working to build over 7,000km of new subway lines in cities across the country by 2020

As somebody living in the U.S. this has me absolutely floored. I'm feeling some extreme transit envy.

Re: Recommendations from the first meeting of China’s urban policy unit in 38 years

#30

Post by baybal2 » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 4:13 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #23

baybal2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is exactly what it is. 400m2+ apartments overloaded with styrofoam barocco decorations, appliances, furniture, ready for people to move in, just sitting there and rotting. I saw photos myself: plastic parts yellowing, styrofoam curlies cracking, organic materials getting mouldy here and there, and centimetre thick layer of dust on everything. When they were put on the market 10 years ago, they were sold at such un…

I find this difficult to believe. Chinese apartments are not sold furnished like you describe. They’re sold as bare concrete shells. Apartments like you describe are overwhelmingly rented, not sold. Usually when people buy a pre-owned apartment they strip it down to the concrete and redo everything.

The market for 400m2+ apartments stands apart even among excesses of Chinese real estate market. Such were sold ready to live even 10 years ago.