Many American people told me that when they first came to Beijing, they were totally surprised by the new appearance of the city. Lofty skyscrapers are in every corner of the city, well-established traffic system provides people with a convenient travel style. All of these are the symbol of our achievements of modernization. Frankly speaking, we did progress a lot in the past few years in city construction, at least from the appearance, it is so. But as someone who lived and studied there for 5 years, I experienced both the advantage and disadvantage that the city brings to me, and I know deeply that the cost of the development is huge. Maybe these problems hasn’t broken out at a large scale, but they did exist in our life and did influence us no matter whether you aware or not. Many places gradually lose their dynamic; historical buildings disappear in a fast speed; traffic problems seem to be something that never can be solved. Why do these problems come from? In the following part, I am trying to use city planning perspective, seeking for the three main reasons for the problems of Beijing.
Since the 1990’s, the construction and beautify of the city has never stopped in Beijing. Wide streets traverse the city from East to West, along which curtain-wall skyscrapers abound. The functional partition of the city is clearly defined, and the geometry center of the city natural becomes a place that possesses huge commercial potential value. In such circumstance, the old city districts are considered to be a “cancer”, which takes up the best position of the city though, maintains the original architectural and life style, and need to be removed as soon as possible. As a result, the old district of Beijing, which was 62.5 square kilometers, occupying 5.76 percent of the whole area of Beijing, is now less than 15 square kilometers, including the garden and lake. Indigenous population was moved to the edge of the city, living in modern high-rise buildings. Traditional narrow alley disappeared, instead of that, wide high-speed viaduct were built. The traditional Chinese courtyards disappeared, tons of landmark public buildings were under-built. The city did become more beautiful, but at the same time, the problems are emerging gradually.
First, it doesn’t solve the poverty problems at all, on the contrary, it comes out totally like what Jane Jacob mentioned in her book, “move slum to another place”, and the situation become even worse in China. One district should have more than one function, which induces division and cooperation of labor. When poor people move to the suburb area of the city, the community is comprised wholly by them, they don’t have the diverse environment as Jacob mentioned, therefore lose massive job opportunities. This thing becomes more severe in small retail stores. Moving to suburb area in which there is less population mean that they will lose a great number of costume resources. In addition, they has built close relationship with their customs in original place, so when they move to another place, it takes them fairly long time to adapt themselves to the new environment and rebuild such relationship. They poverty of one area will contribute to the shortage of Financial revenue, and therefore the government has no money to improve the education and medical care of these place. The poor become poorer, thus start a vicious circle.
Secondly, although huge shopping malls replace the pedlar, large city square replaces the previous activity playground, the vitality of these area are less dynamic than it was. The reason for these are manifold. The old commercial center usually contains both residential function and commercial function. Such multi-function space provides the district with more requirements. As a result, we can find that in this area, even after working time, the night life is still plentiful, the streets are still vigourous. But the new commercial place is quite different. After 10 o’clock, the store are closed, and the place become empty. In addition, the new road system keeps pedestrian away from the building. The main streets in Beijing are about 120 meters wide. It takes a sprinter 11 seconds to run across the street, and 1 minute for ordinary people. Such dimension is designed for motor vehicles rather than a walking people. The connection between the buildings and people are weakened, along which the attraction the district are declined.
In my opinion, the city planning of China today is much similar to American in 1950s, during which the problems of the city was regarded as objective problem, rather than a social problem. They believed if they pulled down the buildings, the social problem would be solved naturally. But the fact is, social problems become more and more. In the death and live of American Great Cities, Jacob pointed out a wistful myth, “if only we had enough money to spend----the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars----we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday’s and day-before-yesterday’s suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traffic problem.”
“But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering place than others. Commercial centers that are lackluster imitations of standardized sub-urban chain-store shopping. ”
Then she draws her conclusion: This is not the rebuilding of the cities, this is the sacking of the cities.
In Beijing, vast area of demolishing old districts would contribute to a more significant problem, which is, the destruction of historical heritage. In recent days, there is a highly debated issue in China called “cultural aggression”. It is said we had absorbed so much western products into our country that they almost overweigh our local culture. But what I want to say is, the reason for that statement doesn’t lie in “we accept too much other’s culture,” actually it lie in “we give up to much ourselves culture.” Let’s take Paris as an example. Many landmarks located in the old area of Paris are designed by foreign architects. For example, the extension of the Louvre project was designed by Ieoh Ming Pei, the Obelisk in Harmony Square came from Egypt, the Grande Arche in La Defense was designed by Johann Otto von Spreckelsen, who is a Danish Architect. But these buildings fit very well in Paris old city context. There is no argument about “culture aggression” in Paris as that in China. The reason for that, to some degree, lies in the completely-reserved old city. Paris is still Paris. The Egyptian Obelisk and Danish Arche are just the decoration, which make Paris more beautiful and diverse. But however, Beijing is different. The ancient buildings were pushed down, which brought away its cultural connotation. As a result of this, foreign culture can easily overweigh the local culture, be considered to be an invader. It seems that even a CCTV or Bird nest can define what the city is. But the same thing won’t happen in Paris.
Many people would say that these buildings in old district are out-of-date, the low-density of it doesn’t meet the needs of the growing population, and the wood structure won’t stay long. So there is no need to conserve them. But as far as I know, the traditional residential buildings are an advisable option at this time. Let’s take Chinese traditional courtyard as an example. In 1949, the population per square kilometer in Beijing was 20,000. This is an incredible number, because the number in New York City today is only 8000. But even in such high-density environment, every courtyard has trees, yards, and sunshine. The courtyards are built one next to another, they make full use of the space. That’s why it contains such a large number of people while still can provide sunlight to their residence. In addition, there are orders in these traditional streets and blocks, which provide best living environment to the residence, while prevent the community from being disturbed by external population. The allies, serving as the main traffic system inside the community, are private and quite, belong to the residence. There is not much retail space in it. The allies connect to the main streets, which are hustle and bustle, belonging to the city. This situation is just like Jacob’s ideal city mode. People living there know each other; the streets are safe for children to play in it; the dimension of the street allows people to keep an eye on strangers. From these aspects, the old buildings are valuable in contemporary society.
Many foreign countries have the same scale as Beijing, such as New York City and Tokyo. There are even more cars in these city than in Beijing, and therefor may face more severe traffic pressure. But however, the widest avenue in New York City is less than half the width of Changan Road in Beijing. Compared to any of these cities, the infrastructure investment of Beijing is nothing less than any of them. But the traffic problem might be the worst in the world.
Where does the problem come from?
Before we look insight into this question, let’s clear up another one: What kind of city do we want to build Beijing into? One traffic system gives response to one city form. For example, if people rely mainly on the private cars as the transportation, the city should be a low density and large scale one, like Los Angeles; if you want to build a high-density city, the main transportation should be the public transport system, like New York City, in which, there are most developed subway system underground while, there are highest density skyscraper up-grade.
The situation of Beijing is a little bit like New York. The dimension of streets in old districts is similar as the traffic network in Manhattan. It should have chosen public transportation as its main way of going. Unfortunately, it didn’t do so. In fact, it uses the LA’s approach to solve New York’s problem. The consequence of that is obvious: wide roads attract more cars, but the scale of the city isn’t large enough to digest such massive cars. As a result, traffic jam is inevitable.
On the other hand, Beijing has only one city center, which is located in the old district. There are three mainly functions in these area, commercial, political, and CBD. Most of people live in suburb area, and work in central area. This imposes too much pressure to the traffic system. In rush-hour, thousands of people living all around the city swarm to the center, which induce extensive traffic paralysis. If the city center doesn’t move outward, the problem will exist all the time.
Here I want to talk about a road system, which is not only used in Beijing, but also popular in other big cities in China. It’s a closed loop road called “Ring Road”. The emergence of Ring Road is a wired production in China. Originally, such roads built in western countries are mainly aiming to prevent the disturbance of cross-border traffic and local traffic. Because if the highways go through the center part of the city, they would badly influence the internal traffic. But in China, the function of such ring road has changed. It becomes the main road serving for the internal city, and has nothing to with cross-border traffic any longer.
What does this transition mean to us? From the perspective of internal traffic of the city, a civilian might think that there is nothing wrong to build such a circular road going around the city. However, the city planner doesn’t think so. Such ring road definitely can improve the road traffic capacity in certain directions, but will it improve the road traffic efficiency as a whole?
The answer is negative. No doubt this model is suitable for long distance highway travel, but most of time the ring road is going around the city center, in which there are numerous short trips. These crosses largely decrease the efficiency of the highway, because drivers have to slow down in these intersections and thus cause traffic jam in rush hours. What make it worse is that once the traffic jam takes place, unlike the road network in Manhattan, there is no way for you to turn around to find another way.
Even if we forget the efficiency reduction caused by the road-crosses, there is a fatal factor that we cannot ignore, which is that such wide road would seriously stimulate their desires to go out. People who pin one’s hope on ring road seem to have forgotten the basic principle: improving the partial traffic capacity will encourage people to use their private cars, resulting in more traffic flow. In other words, the wider this road was repaired to be, the more people tend to choose it as the main way to go; and once the number of people are beyond the road capacity, the road become even worse. According to the research of 7 areas of California last century, when road capacity is increased by 1%, it will generate at least 0.9% of the traffic; if you were in Beijing, the ratio will strongly increase, as car ownership in Beijing is increasing in an incredible speed.
Washington DC is a little bit like Beijing. It was planned to build three ring roads, but only after one ring road was finished, the center of the city came to big problems. Because the external traffic flow were attracted into the internal place of the city. Then Washington began to change the strategy into developing subway system, and set up a completed public transportation system, but the ground level traffic problems weren’t get released. Because the road is so wide that it attracts massive traffic.
In 1958, the success of La Defense set a good example on how to balance the development of city and conservation of old buildings. The project opened up a new district for the new buildings, thus saved a lot of money that is supposed to spend on city removal. La Defense has become the largest CBD in Europe now, and it is a great achievement. China did have a similar city planning in 1950s’, which proposed that the new city should be built next to the old city. But unfortunately, for many reasons, this proposition finally failed to come true, and China go further and further down the wrong path.
In one word, what’s the reason that causes the problems in Beijing? Firstly, it is history reason. We didn’t choose the right way to make a harmonious relationship between old city and new ones. Secondly, Massive removal of old districts induces the shortage of diversity, thus cause a lot of problems. Thirdly, culture lost decreases our personality. Finally, the traffic problems make the city even worse.