China 2.0: How Upgraded Cities Are Driving The Future Of China
Feb 23, 2016 @ 08:40 AM
“We are now coming to the new city center,” Charles Dou, a local businessman in Taizhou, Jiangsu once said when giving me a tour of his rapidly expanding, tier three city four years ago.
“What do you mean the new city center?” I asked, holding the concept that “city center” is a designation that generally remains fixed and immutable.
“The city center used to be by the
Pozijie (an older shopping center in the historic core), but then it was moved here last year when Wanda opened,” he answered matter-of-factly, as though describing an occurrence that happened daily.
In 2011,
Wanda Plaza, a chain of shopping mall/ residential living combos, opened up a location in the south of Taizhou, and since then the wheels of development began turning full speed in that sector of the city. Suddenly, an area that up until that point was all meandering alleys of traditional style, dilapidated grey brick and terracotta-roof houses became the place where everyone wanted to be. Dozens of new high rises were erected, radiating out from the new shopping mall like waves, and a modest array of new middle class F&B operations and relatively
classy establishments like Starbucks moved in. Within the span of a year or two, a mini-migration began emanating from the ancient, moat-encircled, 2,000 year old city center to the now trendy area by the Wanda Plaza.
This is a pattern has been replicated throughout China.
Over the past 15 years China’s cities have been busily at work doubling down on their urban cores by constructing completely new sub-cities, districts, and towns in what was once their hinterlands. Shanghai has Pudong, Zhengzhou has Zhengdong, Guangzhou has Zhujiang, Tianjin has Binhai, Chengdu has Tianfu, Suzhou has the Suzhou Industrial Park, Kunming has Chenggong, and Lanzhou has
Lanzhou New Area. While the historic cores of China’s big cities tend to maintain some degree of central status — especially in the famous tier one metropolises of the east where the core is still prime commercial and residential territory — new “town centers” have been popping up around their peripheries at an incredible rate. Most of these new centers were built from scratch, being nothing but expanses of farmland liberally sprinkled with small villages before the bulldozers arrive to wipe them off the map, literally.
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An outline of the original area of Zhengdong New District superimposed over San Francisco. Image: Warner Brown/Google/MapFrappe.
Now, every major city in China has at least one “new and improved” version of itself sitting by its side — and some are surrounded by them. These new areas tend to be massive, often being the same size or even larger than the original urban core. Dantu, a new area of Zhenjiang, commands 748 sq km. Chenggong, Kunming’s flagship new district, is 461 sq km. Tianjin’s Binhai is a collassal 2,270 sq km. While Chengdu’s Tianfu and Suzhou’s SIP come in at 1,578 sq km and 288 sq km respectively. Over the past fifteen years the size of Shanghai has increased nearly sevenfold. Even the relatively minor Changzhou in Jiangsu province recently received approval from the central government to absorb another 1,872 sq km of surrounding farm land, which is larger than London, and this is in addition to its Wujin new district, which is nearly the size of Los Angeles.
To be fair, while these incredibly huge new areas are classified as being urban, that doesn’t mean they’re fully city-like — at least not yet anyway. In China, the term “city” is an administrative designation, and basically just means that a certain area is under the jurisdiction of a municipal level government. (To provide an accurate view, the maps in this story that show some of China’s new districts superimposed over Western cities only show only the built-up or actively developing parts of these newly urbanized areas).
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A render of Xi’an’s Chan-Ba new area. This is all being built from scratch.
These new areas are often provisioned with all the amenities and necessities that a 21st century Chinese city demands, and are in every way a “city 2.0” type of upgrade project. Rather than completely demolishing and reworking the often outdated or under-planned designs of the historic core, the idea is to start over from scratch on a completely blank canvas of land nearby. These new areas tend to have wide roadways that are designed to accommodation masses of personal automobiles, lavish parks and monuments, a premium stock of luxury and middle class housing, high-quality office space, gargantuan new headquarters for the local government, and are well-connected to the new logistical and transportation grid of the country. These new urban expanses are often attempt to engineer-out many of the pitfalls of the cities they are meant to improve upon — they are places for middle and upper class residents who tire of the crowds, pollution, and unsuitable urban designs of the old city to escape to.
Likewise, China’s well-positioned and/or heavily invested-in new areas are often poised to out-compete the historic cores they are built next to. Ideally, once the initial stages of development are completed on a large scale new town a gravitational pull will begin drawing in the trendiest retail outlets, companies looking to upgrade their office space, the best schools and medical facilities, and posh residents looking to live by the newest and best shopping mall. In a very real sense, these place really can become new city centers.
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The built-up part of Kunming’s Chenggong new district superimposed over London. Image: Warner Brown/Google/MapFrappe.
This model for development has created an old city/ new city dichotomy across China, which is perhaps no better exemplified than in Zhengzhou. With the intention of building a “national central city,” the party leaders of Henan Province and Zhengzhou, its capital, sought to expand and modernize their city. What they did was almost incomprehensible outside of the context of China: they added on a 150 square kilometer new district (larger than San Francisco) which effectively doubled the city’s size. They called it Zhengdong New Area, and developed it in six distinct parts: an extravagant CBD, a logistics zone that includes a high-speed rail station, a giant residential area, a university town, a science park, and two high-tech industrial parks. The new district provided over 3 million sq meters of new office space, 400,000 housing units to live or invest in, dozens of shopping malls, golf courses, European-style neighborhoods, and just about anything else China’s middle and upper classes could desire.
Although many international media sources
erroneously claimed it to be a “ghost town” during its initial stages of development, Zhengdong is now vying to become the new heart of the city and is already the financial capital of Henan province. Fifteen major banks, including HSBC, have their regional headquarters there, which process 70 percent of deposits and 60 percent of all loans in the province. Fifteen universities are also in operation, bringing in 240,000 students and staff. According to a May 2014 “On The Ground” report by
Standard Chartered Bank, occupancy in the new area more than doubled since 2012, rising to more than 60 percent. Foxconn has a 120,000+ worker factory there. Zhengdong has also since expanded to 260 sq kilometers and there are plans in the works to extend it out to 500 sq kilometers by 2020, as Zhengzhou quickly merges with Kaifeng into one of China’s 10 proposed mega-regions.
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Zhengdong over New York City. Image: Warner Brown/Google/MapFrappe.
Why this is significant is because these new areas are the places in China where the new business opportunities are arising and where large amounts of money is flowing into. It’s not just about developing a new area full of land and real estate that can be sold but about creating a new gravitational pull to get people, businesses, and public institutions to come in and take advantage of what’s being offered. The municipal, and in some cases central, governments of China are often instrumental in triggering this transition, and
will ship in new universities, state owned enterprises, banks, and give incentives (tax breaks, free rent) to private companies to move in.
Chengdu’s Tianfu New Area is now producing
one out of every five desktop computers and two out of three iPads in the world, while Tianjin’s
Binhai New Area now has 57 Fortune Global 500 companies and
Suzhou’s SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park) has 91. Once the ball is rolling on a new district market forces tend to take over, as
one time backwaters become new city centers — into the places that will tell the future of China.
