As mentioned earlier, I am hoping to understand urban planning in China in the next few weeks before I start my actual education in Urban Planning. Even though I live in Toronto and will be studying Canadian Urban Planning, I feel I must ultimately understand the situation in both China (and eventually India) in order to truly help plan for a sustainable future.
Anyways, today I learned about Beijing’s need for water.
It was 41.8 degrees Celsius in Beijing today and pretty much the same temperature here in Toronto, Canada. The type of day that makes you inhale water like oxygen. It was appropriate than (or, rather, inappropriate) that I should find this story from June 28th about Beijing’s plans to import water from south of the country.
Here is an exert:
“The delay of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project is accelerating the water crisis in China’s capital, where 17.55 million people are overdrawing inadequate supplies, Tuesday’s China Daily quoted experts as saying.
The project was planned to transfer 1 billion cubic meters of water to the capital in 2010, but its completion has been postponed until 2014.
According to Beijing’s urban planning design (2004-2020), the city’s annual water demand will be 4 to 5 billion cubic meters by 2020. The water diversion project will transfer at least 1 billion cubic meters of water every year.
The project is very important to alleviating the capital’s water shortage, Wang Jianhua, a scientist with the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, was quoted by Beijing media as saying in May. The city’s current shortage has reached 400 million cubic meters, experts said.
The capital’s urban planning design recommended that the capital’s population be kept within 18 million. But it grew from nearly 17 million at the end of 2008 to at least 17.5 million a year later, Beijing government figures show.”
It will be interesting to follow Beijing’s water problems and how they plan on keeping the population of the city to within 18 million, especially considering the urbanizing trend of the population. This is a huge issue for Beijing’s planners to deal with and hopefully will lead to innovations in water management policy and technology.
