Scary Chinese suburban development

McMansions overrunning China? Its true. Its like a virus spreading uncontrollably. It must be stopped, and you are just the modernist to do it.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/04/24/INGAACD3E01.DTL

I was just reading somewhere about how the Chinese have latched on to the worst ideas in American city planning from the last 50 years and are now revising their cities to conform to the sprawl model. Here are a few articles from Metropolis.

www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1117
www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1185

I had a student this semester write a paper on this new development in which they discussed how the government in China is trying to get people to stop walking and riding bicycles and instead use cars. The reason: pedestrians and bicycles impede the flow of traffic. Wow, just think about what doubling the number of cars on the road will do to the flow of traffic.

I can't quite figure that out. What does the economist say about it? If everybody in China wanted a car, building and maintaining all those cars, all the industry around it would put millions of people to work and obviously make money flow in the economy. And it will also screw up their environment. Does it make any sense?

Yeah and unfortunately they have far less stringent emissions standards than the US, and Europe. There's already a pretty serious pollution problem developing in Chinese cities. Still, I can't help thinking the quality of life is better for many Chinese people with the quasi-capitalism and emerging middle class (not to open a political can of worms!)

While I think it is a shame, I also believe it is a paradox that they have to face.

Cars and such is a technology that only now China is learning about. That industry is what is shared by most superpowers in the world. The economy that the car industry builds and requires is massive. There is a lot of benefit with the auto, but obviously a lot of negatives, which our nation so freely enjoys - abusing environment and being our general wasteful American self.

Shame they don't have real leadership that can learn from s city like Portland... or even a lot of European cities.

All I know is that I dream to be able to ride a bike to work... but then I do work in the auto industry and there is no chance in hell I'd want to live next to my factory.

I can't quite figure that out. What does the economist say about it? If everybody in China wanted a car, building and maintaining all those cars, all the industry around it would put millions of people to work and obviously make money flow in the economy. And it will also screw up their environment. Does it make any sense?

In the cost-benefit analysis that determines the efficient number of cars produced (and the efficient allocation of those produced cars among the population) the workers, capital (machines) and natural resources that go into producing, operating and maintaining the cars is ONLY a cost, not a benefit. The millions of people that will be put to work in the automobile industry, will have to stop doing whatever it is they are doing now, so there will be no net gain to the economy (in the same way that new diseases that require more people to work in the medical industry are not good for the economy). So city planning that minimizes the need for automobiles reduces the need for cars and is good for the economy. It is good for the economy in the global sense in that people not spending 10% of their income on their car can spend the money on something else. The benefit to automobile ownership can be measured by the value of services the car provides. If I can get almost everywhere I need to go by walking, bicycle or mass transit, then a car has relatively low value and I won't buy one. If I live in a suburb in Dallas, I have no alternative travel options and the benefit to having a car is huge.

Of course, if limiting the need for cars means that every family lives at the factory where Mom or Dad works in a 400 sqft apartment, then there is a excessive cost to planning that minimizes the need for cars. The market generally does a pretty good job of sorting all this out and getting the efficient outcome. However, city planning is not one of those markets. All sort of things conspire to distort the market outcome in land use. And you cannot really say that the free market is making these decisions in China.

I think I just created more questions than I answered, but it is a complicated issue. Anyway, I just turned in grades this morning, so 1) I just lost my captive audience and 2) I got plenty of time.

[quote:uncleho format=text/plain]
Shame they don't have real leadership that can learn from s city like Portland... or even a lot of European cities.[/quote]

You need to make a distinction and a clarification. Many of the European cities (take Rome, Paris, London, Berlin for example) have as much sprawl as any other large metropolis here in the US, the difference is that there is a clear distinction of city before the car and city after the car. The cities here in the US often have more sprawl due to the fact that many of our cities really grew after the development of the car (take Atlanta and Dallas as great examples).

There are also many who complain that Portland's growth ring restrictions cause many economic issues (high cost of living/ lack of affordable housing).

What is the shame is that for the last 50 plus years, the modern developed world has used the car based model (carchitecture/ sprawl) to build its cities and hasn't found a good balance between the need/desire for cars and the quality of the city itself. Then the real shame is that developing countries see our model as a sign of weath and prosperity that they want to imitate.

I know someone who works as a site supervisor at a homebuilder in Orange County - they crank out cookie cutter tract developments. The company has received regular delegations from China inspecting their developments and talking to staff. It's a bit like the this is how we do it QM classes that Toyota runs (and that other car manufacturers send their staff to) - although not as structured.

If the housing market slows down here in the next couple of years (bubble? what bubble?) then there are plenty of employees in development firms here who could get work in China. Yes the Chinese want to poach western employees to run tract housing projects in China - knowledge transfer is the name of the game.

For every Xin Tian Di development (in Shanghai) there will be 50 McMansion developments (or more).