A European Ghost Town In China?

Recent articles from CNN to the India Times have reported on ghost town cities popping up all over China built in the image of western counterparts. Places like Thames Town outside of Shanghai have been built in the replication of western style cities. Thames town

Thames Town - Complete with British Guards

looks straight out of the United Kingdom (although reports say it was built on an Austrian design aesthetic) complete with churches, town squares and those iconic red telephone booths. An even more interesting point is that Thames town is practically disserted. Most news from China on the real estate market contains statements on how robust and healthy the housing market is, and how Chinese cities are growing at enormous speeds. Areas of Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong have real estate prices that rival those of the Western World; so this would appear true. But is China’s real estate bubble about to burst?

Photo credit: Flickr user triplefivechina

Photo credit: Flickr user triplefivechina

Reports and experts state that the Chinese housing market could be over-valued by a whopping  70%, and that millions of new homes go under used and deserted. However I think that this is an overstatement. There are a number of different political and economic mechanisms that are working within China that require the Chinese government to making such an aggressive move towards “oversupplying housing”. The first and most prominent trend today is the massive amount of migration occurring within the nation. Within the next 20 years it is estimated that an additional 200-250 Chinese workers will move to the City from rural areas in search of jobs. This means that China will have to have to create a large amount of cities and housing in an extremely short amount of time. The second trend is an additional 100 million Chinese workers are expected to escalate the capitalistic ladder out of poverty and into middleclass-dom during this time– leaving existing cities with a large amount of demand for better accommodations. The third and most unique factor is how the Chinese government enforces its living and residential permit system known as Hukou (pronounced like who-cow). The Hukou system is a regulatory system that designates where a person/household may reside by geographic area. For instance a farmer from the country side would have to obtain a Hukou city permit in order to legally move into a city to find work. Think of it as a quota immigration system in between two countries, western and eastern China and that will give you some idea of how it works. In an attempt to control migration the Hukou system (while possibly ineffective – just like other quota systems) could be used to steer workers into these smaller newer cities being built and take some of the mass migration pressures away from the larger cities that are overcrowded.

Thames Town Video

Regardless of the current conditions the government has committed itself to creating 20 cities a year for the next 20 years. The strong intervention approach with the housing market and urban growth that the Chinese government has taken is unlike anything the world has ever seen. It will be fascinating to see how it will play out.

-Adam

On Informality

Taguig City, Manila, Philippines

I must apologize for my recent absence from posting. Luckily, it is due only to good things. As others have mentioned, the past month or so has been consumed with graduating from NYU Wagner’s Master of Urban Planning program, and for me, has also included accepting and preparing for a job in Cape Town, South Africa with Shack/Slum Dwellers International, a dynamic, innovative organization that is doing amazing work worldwide. Should make for some wonderful blogging, too! In the meantime, I came across this quote on The Polis Blog recently and thought I’d share it here:

“The splintering of urbanism does not take place at the fissure between formality and informality but rather, in fractal fashion, within the informalized production of space. Informal urbanization is as much the purview of wealthy urbanites as it is of slum dwellers. These forms of urban informality – from Delhi’s farmhouses to Kolkata’s new towns to Mumbai’s shopping malls – are no more legal than the metonymic slum. But they are expressions of class power and can therefore command infrastructure, services and legitimacy. Most importantly, they come to be designated as ‘formal’ by the state while other forms of informality remain criminalized.”

Ananya Roy, from “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011.

I am excited to explore these concepts further in my new job, and look forward to sharing thoughts on formality/informality in cities worldwide with you all soon!

- Ariana

Urbanization News June 3

This week’s featured story is the semiannual occurrence of Manhattanhenge, when the setting sun aligns with the east-west streets of the Manhattan’s grid.

This photo is by Michael Tapp, from Tuesday May 31.  If you missed this week’s “Manhattan Solstice” you can catch it again Tuesday July 12 at 8:25pm EDT.  Enjoy more photos from Gothamist.

Living in the Endless City Book Launch On Monday June 6 the London School of Economics Urban Age Group will hold and event marking the launch of their new book Living in the Endless City.  This book follows up on the work of The Endless City. 

Marking the launch of a new book on Mumbai, São Paulo and İstanbul – the outcome of the Urban Age research programme at LSE – the event will explore how social and environmental equity are determined by the spatial and political organisation of some of the world’s most complex cities. Find the full event details at LSE Cities.

Cities alter storm intensity We already know that cities are hotter than rural areas due to the urban heat effect, but a new report shows how cities also change the intensity of storms: 

Urban areas have “a strong climatological influence on regional thunderstorms,” scientists conclude in the May Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climate… As storms approached the city, their structure changed in 71 percent of daytime storms and 42 percent of nighttime ones. Many storms broke or skirted the urban area… The scientists suspect the changes trace to urban areas’ tall buildings, pollution and heat-island effect. Read more from Janet Raloff at Science News

Hello Kitty Theme Park Planned in China A new theme park may not seem like immediate news for urbanist but it will certainly be interesting to see how the rural Chinese town of Anji develops along side this new park.

Sanrio Corporation, the Japanese company that created the popular mouthless cat in 1974, has announced that it will build a Hello Kitty theme park in the rural town of Anji, several hours’ drive from the major cities of Hangzhou and Shanghai. Working with a Chinese construction company, Sanrio plans to open the park, which will include rides and a hotel, by 2014.  Read more from the New York Times.

Upcoming Urbanization Events

In case you have not noticed urbanization has become trendy.  This is especially noticeable as spring conferences focusing on urban issues keep appearing.  Check out a few highlights happening around New York City this week:

Latino Urbanism: A Conversation with Professor Clara Irazábal  May 6, 2011 at NYU Wagner 3:30pm-5:30pm

Join NYU Wagner students for a conversation with Urban and International Planning Professor Clara Irazábal of Columbia University, about ethnic placemaking, how the next population majorities will shape the urban fabric in the US, and the role of politics of culture in urban planning.  Prof. Irazábal will also share examples from Latin America and the Caribbean. RSVP here.

Festival of Ideas for the New City Ongoing May 4-8, 2011 across New York City.

“Festival of Ideas for the New City is a major new collaborative initiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations working together to harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore ideas that will shape it. The Festival will include a three-day slate of symposia; an innovative StreetFest along the Bowery; and over eighty independent projects and public events.”  Explore more on their website.

Conference: The Art of Citizenship in African Cities May 6-7, 2011
The World and Africa Series Committee on Global Thought / Institute for African Studies at Columbia University

“The conference focuses on the art of citizenship—or the specific imaginaries and creative solidarities through which urban Africans understand, order, and stake claims around the rights, rewards, and spaces of the city.” Find more information here.

Visualizing 590 Cities

We know that we are increasingly urbanizing but visualizing this phenomenon is difficult, that is why Bestiario‘s “590 Cities” presents such a sticking image of urban population changes. Visualizing.org describes this amazing stacked flow chart,

…that manages to pack all of those details into a single digital square. The visualization depicts the world’s 590 most populous cities, sorted column by column according to their population size between 1950 and 2010, with projections for 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2050. By rolling over the lines you can highlight individual cities’ growth trends.

Click on the images to see the full screen interactive visualizations of 590, read more about it on visualizing.org.

- Melissa

Urbanization News April 22

This weeks top story: Moody’s downgrades China’s property sector from ‘stable’ to ‘negative.’  “The move comes as China tightens up lending and raises interest rates in a bid to tame inflation, which is sitting around five percent. ‘The government’s priorities of maintaining social stability — by controlling inflation and containing any emerging property bubble — will continue to heavily influence the direction of the property market,’ Moody’s said in a report released Thursday.”

Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum to Present “Design with the Other 90%: Cities” at the United Nations  “…the second in a series of themed exhibitions by Cooper-Hewitt that demonstrate how design can address the world’s most critical issues, opens Oct. 15 at the United Nations and runs through Jan. 9, 2012. The exhibition will explore design solutions to the challenges created by rapid urban growth in informal settlements, commonly referred to as slums.“  Read more from PR Newswire.

Istanbul could be split in two “The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former Istanbul mayor, has announced what he described as a “wild project” to split the city into European and Asian sides to make it easier to govern. ‘We will build two new cities in Istanbul due to high population,’ Erdogan said, announcing his party’s manifesto for June elections. ‘One on the European side and one on the Anatolian side.’ Istanbul’s official population is soon expected to reach 17 million, with thousands more unregistered people living in the city.” Read more from the Guardian.

Tel Aviv’s Skyline in 2025 “Perhaps in light of this recent history, the new city master plan makes a concerted effort to regulate the controversial topic of tall building construction – defining for the first time where new skyscrapers will be allowed, and where existing skylines will be preserved. At the same time, the plan would grant an official (and likely irreversible) stamp of approval for new skyscrapers in certain sensitive and controversial areas, in some cases ignoring the vociferous opposition of neighborhood groups.” Read more from Sustainable City Blog.

China’s Ghost Cities: A Documentary

An estimated 65 Million apartments sit empty in Chinese cities while millions of China’s urban residents live in overcrowded, rented apartments.  The scale of  China’s housing overstock is like nothing ever seen before.

Many stories and reports have emerged in the past few weeks about China’s scary housing bubble after Moody’s downgraded China’s property sector from ‘stable’ to ‘negative.’  Although it is difficult to understand the scale of how empty parts of urban China really are without traveling there, I found this Australian documentary by Dateline to be particularly illuminating.  It provides an accurate idea of the scale of this massive development overstock by walking through a few ghost cities, malls and highrises. Boing Boing describes it below:

It’s symptomatic of the growing divide between China’s rich and poor, which has left many Chinese without adequate housing. Unlike the US bubble, the Chinese property bubble isn’t founded on cheap credit, which makes the analyst hosting the show believe that it won’t burst in the same way as American one.

For more about China’s housing bubble read this discussion between leading researchers and economist from the New York Times: China’s Scary Housing Bubble. The future of urban development in China is both exciting and scary as there is potential for truly innovative cities to develop, however the housing bubble also will have global ramifications if the government of China can not find a way to slow unnecessary growth soon.

- Melissa

City Index (Part 2)

In City Index (Part 1) two leading city liveablity indexes were compared, revealing that they measure liveability according to expatriates and not the local residents.  This measurement tool of course is problematic and led me to search for other ways to compare cities.

If liveablity, as defined by the Economist and Mercer, is the not the best measure, what other factors should we use to more holistically compare cities?

The Philips Livable Cities think tank, has identified three important ingredients for a liveable city: Reliance, Inclusiveness and Authenticity (click on the image to above view the larger infographic).  Although they have not used their ingredients yet to compare cities their website provides a series of interesting blogs and research articles on liveability.

Knight Frank and Citi Private Bank’s Global Cities Index combines economic activity, political power, quality of life and knowledge and influence to rank cities.  The objective of this index since its creation in 2008:

has been to assess key markets across the world in terms of their provision of investment opportunities and their influence on global business leaders and the political elite.

and the goal of their measurement:

to create the most rounded assessment of the locations that matter to the global tribe of footloose wealthy and influential High Net Worth Individuals…

Of course “high net worth individuals” do not take into account the majority of urban residents, but if these cities are attracting the powerful, wealthy, mobile populations they are probably also providing jobs for migrants that are less well off.  Overall this survey shows an “ongoing West-to-East shift” in economic might and political power.  Although it is important to note that the west dominated quality of life in this survey like previous indexes.  Interesting enough this report also projects the leading cities in ten years.  The results: the increasing importance of Asian cities.  (Read the entire report in the 2011 Wealth Report.)

Another reputable source for measuring cities does not ranks cities, but it does highlight measurements that try to understand the physical structure of cities,  culture and economic lives of all of their residents. The Endless City, a book by the London School of Economics Urban Age Project, “details an authoritative survey of cities now and the prospects for our urban future.”  The book is filled with data comparing six cities: New York, London, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Berlin.  The cities are compared based on:

• Size – population
• Density – average density people/km2
• Housing – average rent per month in US$
• Income – GDP per capita in $US
• Wealth – working time required in minutes to buy 1 kg of bread
• Travel – average cost of public transport ticket in US$
• Crime – murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants
• Energy – kWh per capita per year
• Water – liters per capita per day
• Age – average age

The point of this book though is less about comparing cities and more about emphasizing the global natural of cities today.  As Kees Boermaa quotes Saskia Sassen in a book review “the global city is no isolated, stand alone phenomenon, ‘global cities are just nodes in global networks.’”

Perhaps then an ideal tool for measuring cities should not rank and compare them at all, but instead study the global nature of cities.  As our cities become increasing connected they somehow also develop into authentically separate places.  And for those of us that are blessed enough to choose which of these great cities we would like to live isn’t it important for us to live in a place that is both unique and connected to the rest of this urbanizing world?

- Melissa

Reimagining the Mother City: ‘Counter Currents’ in Cape Town

Edgar Pieterse, director of the African Center for Cities and editor of Counter Currents presents in this recent volume on Cape Town, South Africa “a radical project of optimism, bringing into collision the work of architects, planners, scholars, poets and sculptors to explore new possibilities for the city’s self-image.”

In Miranda Iossifidis’ insightful review of the book on Global Urbanist, she discusses Pieterse’s hopes that this volume can provide an opportunity for Capetonians to reflect on and experiment with solutions to some of the city’s serious challenges, ranging from memory and social justice to changing cultural values and the ever changing, often disturbing, realities of the Mother City in the years during and since apartheid. However, Pieterse asserts that Cape Town “can save itself” through “shifting public ideas and discourses about the kind of Cape Town we should be imagining and nurturing.”

Iossifidis concludes that the book manages to portray a rich, dynamic and hopeful picture of Cape Town as it is and its way forward into the 21st Century:

“This city–the ‘Cape of Storms and the Cape of Good Hope at the same time’–is a uniquely complex case study from the perspective of local thinkers and practitioners presented in a well-designed and richly illustrated manner. Perpetually probing for glimpses of possible alternatives, the book avoids stagnation through an innovative multidisciplinary approach, combining poetry, photo-essays, and policy analysis alongside practical and theoretical essays, creating a rhythm of careful optimism.”

I look forward to reading it myself soon!

- Ariana K. MacPherson

City Index (Part 1)

This is the first of a two part series on how cities are measured and ranked.

Urbanist by definition study cities, and by nature many of us also love living in cities. When it comes to measuring and comparing how “liveable” our dear cities are there is still no consensus about the best method.

According to the Oxford American Dictionary liveable means, “an environment fit to live in.”  This definition of course is very subjective and leads me to ask can we really comparable all cities fairly as liveable?

The Economist’s Liveability Ranking and Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey are two of the leading guides for ranking cities based on liveability.  Mercer measures liveability by examining: “… 39 key quality-of-life issues. They include political stability, currency-exchange regulations, political and media censorship, school quality, housing, the environment and public safety.” The Economist uses similar standards within these five categories – Stability, Healthcare, Culture & Environment, Education, and Infrastructure.  So which cities are the most (and least) liveable according to these sources?

The Economist’s Most Liveable Cities 2011:

1. Vancouver, Canada
2. Melbourne, Australia
3. Vienna, Austria
4. Toronto, Canada
5. Calgary, Canada

The Economist’s least liveable city: Harare, Zimbabwe

Mercer’s 2010 Most Liveable Cities:

1. Vienna, Austria
2. Zurich, Switzerland
3. Geneva, Switzerland
4. Vancouver, Canada (tied 4th)
5. Auckland, New Zealand (tied 4th)

Mercer’s least liveable city: Baghdad

After examining public safety, political stability, pollution and “tolerable” climate it is not surprising that the top cities are in Australia, Canada and Europe. It is surprising though that these cities tend to be mid-sized, low-density, and rather rich.  Are these measurement tools then somehow inherently biased against megalopolises in poor countries?

Editor of the Economist report John Copestake notes that the mid-sized, low-density cities “tend to score well by having all the cultural and infrastructural benefits on offer with fewer problems related to crime or congestion.” Perhaps the bigger question though is not are these biased towards less dense cities, but who are these indicators targeted towards?  Here in lies one of the major pitfalls in these liveability measurements.

According to Tao Rugkhapan “how the indicators are chosen reveals the report’s pre-selected audience.” The audience for both Mercer and the Economist is the same: multinational companies looking to relocate employees on international assignments.  In short these surveys are ranking cities by how liveable they are for expatriates and not the local residents.  Perhaps the loaded word “liveable” then is not the best choice for ranking something as complex as a city.  Tao points out that this is an especially poor word choice when the rankings do not leave any room for “how liveability is locally perceived.”

Another pitfall of these indexes is in how they have been interoperated. Recently “best” has been used interchangeability with “liveable” in press reports. Of course being the most liveable does not make a city the best in the world.  In fact many people may not even want to live in these most liveable cities. For instance, Matt Kiebus, of Death and Taxes, believes “liveable” is not necessary a positive description, “No one wants to brag about residing in a ‘liveable’ city—it sounds mediocre, it conveys the impression that [they're] settling.”

Even Brent Toderian, the Director of City Planning in Vancouver, admits that one of his city’s biggest challenges is getting rid of its “no-fun city” stigma. He also raises the point that there is not much that planners and local policy makers can do through policy to make their city more interesting besides encouraging  “the creativity and passions of its citizens, and then try to stay out of the way.”

Obviously these two liveability surveys do not take a holistic approach to measure which cities are the best places to live according to both locals and expats. A ranking of the best cities to live in should involve a broader perspective than the current surveys.  Perhaps it should also compare cites based on their political power, ability to attract knowledgeable residents, sustainability, entertainment or recreational options, economic success, and importance within the global marketplace. In the end though liveability will always be a subjective measurement.

So how do you think we should determine the most livable cities?

- Melissa

Part two of “City Index” will look at alternative methods for measuring and ranking cities beyond liveability indexes.