Just as the beautiful Finnish summer begins, I'm off to the heat of China. I'm starting to wish I had left in January and come back to spend the summer here.
But China has it's own charms, and it's time to explore while I have the time and the opportunity.
I'll try to report back on Saturday, but in the meantime use this as an open thread.
3 comments:
Enjoy your trip, Ami. I hadn't realized you were leaving so soon.
I used to work with someone who grew up in Beijing. He went back for a visit about 10 years ago and told about some of the oddities of China's planning processes. For instance, the city edges went from high-rise apartment buildings to open space with no intervening development. Also, China was trying to increase car ownership by about 10% annually, but hadn't begun to take steps on where to park these vehicles once they came into the cities (or, for that matter, overnight when their owners were at home in those high-rises). The first attempt at grade-separating the "ring roads" of Beijing to move traffic more rapidly around the city were so poorly designed (from a traffic engineering standpoint) that there were large traffic jams at every interchange.
I'm curious if you've had similar experiences with China - i.e. seen situations where overly centralized planning has created large-scale illogical situations (at least from a Western viewpoint) - and also whether you notice much change between your previous visit and this one.
Indy: Greetings from Helsinki airport!
I think my previous trip was to short to really discover the quirks of China. I was only there for a couple of weeks.
On my previous trip we came overland via the Trans-Manchurian train. One thing that struck me as we entered Beijing was a vast sea of construction cranes working on apartment buildings. That's something that would be difficult to imagine in the West, since no construction company is going to build fifty apartment buildings right next to each other at the same time. Not a very organic way to grow a city, for sure. Hard to say if it's a bad thing or not, but definately different.
On the same theme, some streets in the downtown were lined with impressive looking modern buildings, while just around the corner were neighbourhoods of little shacks and roadside stalls selling food and other things. Every now and then you would come accross an area that was being torn down en mass, presumably to be replaced with those big new buildings. Don't know what happened to the people who lived there previously.
... Ami.
Your description of apartment construction sounds like what my colleague reported, Ami. Government policy was to build apartment blocks to house workers for new industries simultaneously with the industrial (or office) sites, and then require all of the workers to live in that housing. This created some economies of scale which aided transit use (since everyone from apartment block A worked at industrial site Z, etc.) but caused problems when couples didn't work at the same location. Also, by the early 1990's the entrepreneurial class was beginning to emerge, and they didn't want to be bound by traditional central planning restrictions (and had the money to buy special treatment). My colleague indicated that changes in the rigidity of planning wrt home choice were beginning, but couldn't predict how fast change would occur or what might eventually result.
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