Planners Outline Brave New Vision for Capital: Foreign companies invited to design cities of future

It seems Beijing's weary commuters cannot mention the word "traffic" without frowning.

More than 40 percent of residents now take at least an hour to get to work. Traffic speed on some major roads averages 12 kilometers per hour and 87 road junctions of the city are consistently congested, according to Caijing, the mass-circulation Chinese magazine.

On the road for hours every day, taxi drivers are in a unique position to comment on traffic conditions, and often previous city planners' singularity of focus-concentrating on a single city centre- attracts much of their ire. Whatever the reasons, sometimes it seems we are heading for gridlock in this 21st century metropolis.

And so now it is time for something completely different, say city planners, intent on replacing "one city centre" with a multipolar plan.

The "perfecting two axes, developing two belts and building multiple centres" plan, announced by  Mayor Wang Qishan in his work report to the Beijing Municipal People's Congress in February, promises to do much more than alleviate traffic conjestion.

"The new urban development strategy decides what kind of a city Beijing will become in the future," says Chen Gang, director of the Beijing Municipal Planning Commission. Full details will be announced over the coming months, but we already get the general idea.

Traditional Troubles

The Forbidden City as its core, Beijing sprawls out across second, third, fourth, fifth and even sixth ring roads, reaching out ever further. As the pancake spreads, the pressure on the centre grows heavier. Rapid urban growth has exposed the faults and failings of this old design. 

Downtown Beijing has the lion s share of what planners call "urban functions": commercial facilities, office buildings and public institutions including hospitals, government departments and schools.

The 62-square-kilometre city centre covers 6 percent of the city's land space, but generates 30 percent of the traffic. The area within the Third Ring Road generates 50 percent of all traffic.

Population density in the centre is also an issue. Right beside Tiananmen Square, Qianmen and Dashila areas cram 60,000 people into a single square kilometre.

Residential areas in the suburbs have been nicknamed "sleeping cities"-bedrooms only. Every day, Beijingers travel the jam-packed roads between suburban homes and downtown.

While traffic jams evidence the problems of over-concentration downtown, there are also less visible urban functions under strain-water supply, public security and housing space.

Between the second and fifth ring roads, development is also sometimes unbalanced. The south lags far behind the north and east. Outside the Fifth Ring Road, social and economic development is high in some locations, low in others.

Jam Packed

Exasperated by the traffic jams, difficult parking conditions and disruptive road expansions of today, your taxi driver will tell you that the seeds of the current situation were sewn long ago.

Today's development pattern can be traced back to the very first city blueprint at the founding of the New China, says Huang Yan, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Planning Commission.

There were two competing schools of thought in the 50s. Some Chinese and Soviet experts preferred the Moscow way of building on top of the foundations of the old city. Scholars represented by the architect planner Liang Sicheng, on the other hand, suggested building a new administrative centre in the western suburbs   somewhere between the western sections of the second and third ring roads  to provide breathing space for future city development and at the same time protect the old imperial city from modern construction.

They chose the Soviet model, your taxi driver ends this popular fable with a sigh. But less emotional analysts argue there were powerful financial and ideological reasons for the choice. Back then, the new government could not afford to build a new office area, especially at a time when the whole nation was living an extremely frugal life.

Additionally, the general mentality of the time was one that still venerated the imperial palace in its position of city centre, and with such weight of history it was hard conceive of any deviation from this tradition. From this point of view, Liang's plan placed the governmental centre in too obscure a position, and one can see the reasons for the rejection of his ideas.

When Beijing was revising its city development plan in 1979, the proposal for a second city centre resurfaced. Again, the idea was rejected. The plan for city construction that came out in 1993 was again based on the old city centre, fanning out in four directions.

This plan moved the downtown residential population out to new districts and satellite cities in the suburbs.

"The guidelines and principles of the 1993 scheme were basically correct,"says Chen. "But with rapid social and economic development in the past decade, many new problems have cropped up, which make it necessary to adjust the old version of planning."

In the 1993 plan, industrial evacuation and population evacuation seem separate. As people moved into satellite cities devoid of industry, industries relocated in areas devoid of human beings. Commuter traffic further intensified during morning and evening rush hours.

"After more than 10 years development, the central areas of Beijing are saturated," says Chen."There is no more space for new large scale construction. So we must seek development in the city s peripheral areas."

Residential-industrial mix

In the peripheral areas, Beijing is to construct new modern cities with populations of more than half-a-million people each. They must include "a good location, a sound industrial basis and a friendly environment. Planning will be open to public bidding to ensure success,"says Ding Xiangyang, director of the Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission.

Education, culture, hygiene and commerce industries will be encouraged to develop in these satellite cities."The new development strategy offers us precious development opportunities," says Xia Zhanyi, head of Shunyi district, one of the planned locations for a new city.

"What we are supposed to do now is to preserve the development space and arable land, and lose no time in laying down a development programme."

Xia says Shunyi will evolve into a "middle-sized" city featuring automobile, micro-electronics and modern logistics industries. More than 100,000 workers are expected to migrate here from downtown.

But Chen Gang says Beijing will not abandon but move to protect the old town centre, which houses most of the city's ancient cultural heritage. The environment, traffic and infrastructure will all get a makeover.

The city s southern districts will be particularly addressed, he promises.

Other measures include:

• Co-ordinating urban and rural area development  and promoting urbanization;
• Managing traffic;
• Strengthening ecological protection and construction and building national parks around the city.

Planning and design, especially the design of satellite cities, is open to public bidding, says Huang Yan of the city planning commission.

Seven organizations, including RTKL Associates of the United States and a Japanese architecture company, are in open competition for the Tongzhou city plan. In three months time, the best design will be chosen to blueprint the future development of that east Beijing district, according to reports from Beijings media sources.