Re:Building China: Rise of the Superblock
by barry-cotter on Sunday April 28, 2019 @11:47PM
(#19775691)
This does not jibe with my experience in Beijing. I’ve lived in Shanghai for seven years and visited Beijing for maybe two weeks but I’ve spent more time in traffic jams in Beijing.
Land leases are a red herring when it comes to superblocks too. There’s no reason why local governments couldn’t make money with smaller, more walkable blocks like you see in Manhattan or in central Paris. You need internal roads within parcels of superblocks to roughly the same extent you need them between smaller blocks. The government could have leased out the same area to the same developers and have had them build smaller blocks.
My personal bugbear when it comes to Chinese urban planning is the dearth of green space. Pudong was the countryside 30 years ago and now it’s built up. If you compare it to Singapore the latter comes off incomparably better. The four or eight lane highways in between blocks in Pudong are just awful, car centric, an avoidable mistake.
Land leases are a red herring when it comes to superblocks too. There’s no reason why local governments couldn’t make money with smaller, more walkable blocks like you see in Manhattan or in central Paris. You need internal roads within parcels of superblocks to roughly the same extent you need them between smaller blocks. The government could have leased out the same area to the same developers and have had them build smaller blocks.
My personal bugbear when it comes to Chinese urban planning is the dearth of green space. Pudong was the countryside 30 years ago and now it’s built up. If you compare it to Singapore the latter comes off incomparably better. The four or eight lane highways in between blocks in Pudong are just awful, car centric, an avoidable mistake.