See this post from a couple of days ago for Part #1 of this interesting interview with a Shanghai Urban Planner.  It provides an interesting perspective on China’s current approach to urbanizing the country.

Here is the second part of the interview and the following are some of its best quotes:

The issue of reconstruction aside, China’s cities are also too big and there’s a real problem with urban sprawl. All the cities in the Yangtze River and Pearl River deltas are expanding outwards, and if you include industrial zones, villages and towns, plus all the highways and rail lines, human construction may have already reached an ecological limit. 

…There are underlying errors in the government’s understanding of cities. For example, there is a misconception that bigger cities are better cities. But it isn’t a question of size, it’s a question of comfort, efficiency, environmental quality, liveability and, in particular, suitability for different types of people to flourish.

The appearance of many European cities hasn’t changed for a century, but internal and underground facilities have been modernised in order to save energy, protect the environment and increase comfort. When Europeans design new areas, they do so on a human scale, as far as possible using pedestrianised zones, cutting down on car journeys, reducing energy use and making the city diverse and green. Although China also has slogans about putting people first, it doesn’t happen that way. 

The marker of liveability for a city is its human scale. The biggest issue for Chinese cities is the roads – they are too wide, and the density of the network is too low. In Shanghai’s Lujiazui [a major financial district], the roads are too big, the huge buildings leave people feeling alienated, the space is badly organised and living and travelling are extremely inconvenient.