An unimaginable transformation
Recently I was invited to join a panel judging the results of an international design competition for a new urban centre in Hangzhou. Travelling to China is always fascinating, but having not been for a few years, it was possible to recognise some major changes and new trends since I last visited.
To give some context, Hangzhou is a modern, dynamic city close to Shanghai with a long history, a population of around 10 million people, a growth rate that has seen it double its population in twenty years, and with plans in place to double again. A consequence of this is that almost everything you see is new (or at least built in the last twenty years), with even historic areas often re-built in pseudo-traditional styles.
For most Westerners this represents change on an unimaginable scale, for the Chinese it is simply a necessary investment in their urban future. For example, while we endlessly prevaricate around a single high speed rail line in England and new underground lines in London take decades to plan (let alone build), in Hangzhou high speed rail now radiates out in all directions from the city while its 13 metro lines have all been built since 2012, with another 12 lines or line extensions planned for delivery in the next five years.
An austere urbanism
If the scale of the ambition and of the delivery is truly mind-blowing, there are downsides. One side-effect of this rapid growth are critical shortages of housing and its prohibitive cost for many (problems we are all too familiar with here at home with a fraction of the growth rate). Given the current slowdown in the Chinese development industry this may take some time to rectify.
Another downside has been the building of a city in which everyday spaces and living environments can all too often feel austere. Hangzhou is not unique in this as four trends characterise much contemporary Chinese urbanism:
- First, the inhuman scale of street spaces. Despite its truly impressive local and national rail systems, Chinese cities have been planned around the car at a scale that emulates many American cities. A consequence is the interlacing of urban areas with elevated arterials while, down on the ground level, oversized multi-lane roads turn walking and cycling into a challenging experience. At the same time the acres of tarmac act to further heat often already overheating cities.
- Second, the inhuman scale of public spaces and buildings. Urban squares are not a traditional feature of Chinese cities which have instead been structured around streets and private courtyards. In recent decades Chinese cities have been building new business, civic and retail centres, often accompanied by an over-scaled formality, including overly large new public spaces that are too often uncomfortable to use (given local climatic factors), lack purpose, and which are therefore underutilised by residents who instead flock to the introspective air conditioned spaces of successive building complexes.
- Third, the regimented uniform nature of residential environments. The speed of construction that Chinese urbanism has supported, and the densities required, have turned large areas of Chinese cities into highly regimented environments in which identical utilitarian towers establish instant neighbourhoods without local differentiation, character or ground level quality.
- Fourth, the gating of urban areas. Traditionally Chinese cities have featured large areas of gated compounds connected by streets with a fine-grained network of paths and courtyards inside. As the scale of development has increased, gating has been retained as the norm, initially for reasons of control and more recently as a marketing feature of new neighbourhoods. As a result, getting around has become a fragmented and inconvenient experience for many pedestrians who need to navigate large impermeable urban blocks.
All this has created cities which, at their worst, can be stark, unliveable and unrelenting, not helped by a system of planning that relies on strict zoning and regulation without the discretion to negotiate better design quality. Thus, while land uses, quantum of development and height controls are strictly enforced, it is largely up to individual developers what they produce within those constraints, with the overriding emphasis for both public and private actors firmly fixed on achieving quantity over quality.
Signs of a more liveable future?
If all this seems rather bleak, in Hangzhou I saw clear signs of a change, and of a turn towards a more human-centred future for Chinese urbanism, built on a greater focus on place quality.
One very obvious change with a direct impact on the ground level experience of cities is the revolution China is seeing in the use of electric cars (far outstripping the West). In Hangzhou and Shanghai my crude assessment was that approaching half of the cars I saw were electric vehicles (easily identifiable by their green numberplates). While all cars are carbon emitters and undermine more active modes of travel, the huge benefits of a reduction in local vehicle pollution was noticeable. This left streets smelling and felling cleaner, despite being just as heavily trafficked as a few years ago.
The design competition that I was asked to judge another indicator of a new direction of travel. Design competitions are used regularly in China as a tool of urban design governance with a proven track record of focussing attention on design quality, thereby helping to overcome some of the short-comings of the planning system. Often these focus on individual buildings and can lead to a ‘beauty parade’ of more or less extraordinary architectural compositions. Likewise, master planning competitions have frequently delivered needlessly formalistic and representational projects. But the latest competition in Hangzhou portended something different.
Hangzhou already has two centres. First, a historical centre on the iconic West Lake and second, a new Central Business District, dating from 2007. A third is now proposed as a focus for the burgeoning tech sector in Hangzhou (which is home to the tech giant Alibaba). While the second centre is focussed on a monumental axis across which sit buildings that represent a sun and a moon (I am not sure why), the brief for the new centre was carefully put together, refined and promoted by one of my former students at UCL in a manner that deliberately attempted to move away from such extravagant gestures. Instead, it emphasised human scaled spaces and distinctive urban design to reflects its Chinese context.
Although not every submitted scheme took these messages to heart, the most successful schemes clearly did. The results, I hope, pave the way for a very different sort of place to be constructed if and when the project is realised, and perhaps an exemplar for elsewhere.
A final form of evidence was already apparent on the ground in the form of a minority of recent projects that have been taking on board the message that the comfort of humans should be at the forefront of our considerations. Examples include Renzo Piano’s Oōeli Complex, a development of 17 beautifully detailed buildings covering a Hangzhou superblock to define a mixed-use oasis from the surrounding roads and traffic.
A second was Vanke Liangzhu Bir Land, a new artistic commercial centre for the Liangzhu Cultural Village. Rather than building an inwardly focussed and air conditioned mall, the developer here attempted to learn from the scale and forms of traditional Chinese commercial streets to create a relaxed focus this huge new neighbourhood.
Chinese characteristics?
So what is urban design with Chinese characteristics? Is it the finely grained traditional streets and courtyard houses of the pre-Communist China; is it the over-scaled Modernist roads and regimented blocks of more recent times; or is it something new that combines new technologies, connecting public transport infrastructure to rival the best in the world and a more human place-based urbanism in which to live, work and play? The jury is still out, but Hangzhou showed some welcome signs of a more liveable and also sustainable way forward.
Matthew Carmona
Professor of Planning & Urban Design
The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL
Matthew Carmona 