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Subject: Re: China Resources

Author: Mark Tirpak

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] Date Posted: 14:36:50 09/28/06 Thu In reply to: Mark Tirpak 's message, "China Resources" on 14:04:17 09/28/06 Thu http://www.statesman.com/search/content/auto/epaper/editions/wednesday/news_3417cacfb1db318800d2.html Worries rise in towering Asian mega-cities Experts are concerned that Asian cities are developing in a way that will make them as dependent on cars as American cities. By Craig Simons INTERNATIONAL STAFF Wednesday, November 9, 2005 CHONGQING, China -- A decade ago, this city of 11 million people in the center of China was a dirty Yangtze River port suffering from decades of neglect. Today, visitors are awed by a sprawling downtown complete with a skyscraper modeled after the Empire State Building and enough fluorescent advertising to compete with Shanghai's historic Bund as the country's most distinctive skyline. Such glittering urban icons are marking the robust economic progress of cities across China and the rest of Asia. But these mega-cities also are beset by myriad urban ills as a result of the region's booming growth. Many experts worry that Asian cities are developing in a pell-mell, car-dependent way that mirrors the growth of American metropolises in the 20th century, with potentially dire consequences for the environment and the supply of natural resources. Asia's urban growth is being driven by the world's largest-ever rural-to-urban migration as farmers move to cities to seek better-paying jobs or are forced off their land by new development. According to the World Bank, more than 500 million Asians will move from rural areas to cities by 2020. India will add 175 million new urban residents by 2030 while Indonesia will gain 72 million. In China, where the urban migration is happening most rapidly, the number of people living in cities will double during the next two decades. Cities will add more people "than has happened since the beginning of Chinese history," said Maryvonne Plessis-Fraissard, director of the World Bank's urban development and transportation office. Nearly 60 percent of China's 1.3 billion people live and work in the countryside, where the average annual income is $317, about 10 percent of Beijing's officially reported $2,900. Younger Chinese are able to find factory jobs churning out products ranging from jeans to motorcycles, and are generally able to save $50 to $100 a month. Other rural migrants are being driven off their land as infrastructure projects and development zones devour cropland. According to China's State Statistics Bureau, arable land shrank by two percent in 2003, the latest available figures. To a lesser degree, the same forces are affecting other Asian cities. Calcutta, a city of 4.6 million people in northeastern India, has nearly doubled in size over the past decade. To deal with a population that is "growing daily," officials are building several large "satellite cities" around the downtown area, said Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya. Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, has grown from 6 million residents in 1995 to 10 million today, despite a central government policy "to spread urban growth out all around the country," said Pongsak Semson, the city's deputy permanent secretary. The United States has nine cities with a population of more than 1 million people; there are 49 American metropolitan areas, including Austin, with at least 1 million people, according to the 2000 Census. China has 171 cities with more than 1 million people, and there are 279 Chinese cities with between 500,000 and 1 million people, according to Chinese government statistics. By some measures, the region around the Yangtze River delta, with more than 80 million people, is the world's most heavily populated urban zone. In cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, hundreds of high-rise residential and office buildings are springing up in dizzying assortments of glass and steel. Beijing's growth is also being spurred by its preparations to host the 2008 Olympics: Officials are spending more than $20 billion to build and renovate 32 competition venues and a slew of related facilities. For Americans, one of the most obvious impacts of the building boom has been a spike in commodity prices. China was the world's top consumer of concrete and steel last year and is the world's second-largest consumer of oil, after the United States. As Asian cities grow, demand for natural resources such as oil will rise, said William Hudnut, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C. That will put pressure on consumers: Many experts estimate that roughly half of the world's supply of oil has already been consumed. "We're at a crisis point," Hudnut said. "We're going to run out of oil, perhaps in the next century." To mitigate the problem of finding alternative energy sources, Hudnut and other experts urged Asian mayors gathered in Chongqing last month for the fifth Asia Pacific Cities Summit to adopt energy conservation plans by investing in public transportation and by creating multiuse neighborhoods in which residents work, live and shop in one area -- two strategies rarely employed by American officials during the first half of the 20th century. Since 1950, as Americans moved to the suburbs, per capita land use in the United States has increased twice as fast as population growth. "Asia should not make the mistakes we made in becoming car-dependent," Hudnut said. But Asian cities seem to be following America's model. Chinese own 23 million cars, a number that Douglas Webster, a professor of East Asian urbanization at Arizona State University, said has been "doubling every five years." In January, China's Communications Ministry announced that it would spend $250 billion to pave 53,000 miles of intercity highways and urban ring roads within 30 years: China's total highway mileage is expected to overtake the American interstate system, currently the world's largest, around 2020. In Calcutta, car ownership has doubled over the past 10 years, and recent regulation changes that allow Indian banks to finance car loans have generated "tremendous growth in car purchases," Bhattacharyya said. Because China produces most of its electricity by burning coal, and because enforcement of environmental regulations is poor, it is already the world's second largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States, said Gan Lin, a climate scientist at the World Wildlife Fund's China office. The smartest strategy for Asian mayors, Webster said, is to avoid becoming like Atlanta, which he called "the epitome of the car city." csimons@coxnews.com [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]