Re: The Department of Urban Affairs
Reply #54 –
Pretty much. I basically agree, mind you, but she didn't put much substance behind it except, "I like that" or "I don't like that", which was somewhat disappointing. However it did show some differences between Northern Chinese and European cities, though it was an interesting role reversal to pick a European case for the planned city. All Chinese cities are planned, even when receiving huge organic growth. The land law exacerbates this. It is more complicated than this, but two main models are smallholder property and leased land. The former tend to be rural and the latter urban (an important distinction in China).
Smallholder land has less legal protection than leased land. In principle you could build your own house there, but in practice it is the village that does it, and they tend to go for a readymade model, usually one or a couple templates, it gives more money to the village. Leased land is leased for (now usually) 50 years for commercial or commercial-residential lots and 70 years for residential, and are auctioned off by the city to the bidding developers. Each developer build the houses in their style, same for all houses in the lot, except for a few developers, bless'em, that design variety, planned variety. It's all very Sim City. I am living, on leased land, on the other side of the street of a city block which fairly recently was a village, with a lively village market, surrounded by store fronts and 8-10 lane streets.
The interesting thing is what happens next, which is kind of the gist of her talk. In Europe planned cities remain planned, for a while anyway, less so in Chinese cities depending on how "European" they are, so to speak. Hong Kong has a strong 'stick with the plan' culture, Singapore more so, Shanghai considerably less but way more than most Chinese cities, including Beijing, which still, being the capital, is under more supervision than other Chinese cities, especially inland cities, where people do, and can get away, with most anything.