What It Would Take To Build Greener, More Liveable Cities in China: A Lot

This Bystander likes a hypothesis that can spread its wings and take flight. That land-use reform and reform of local government finances are key to developing sustainable, efficient, livable, and competitive cities in China would be one such proposition.

It is not so fanciful an idea. The argument runs thus:

Low-carbon cities need compact urban form and smart spatial development. But related concerns linked to the rapid expansion of cities such as congestion, local pollution, and safety also increase when public transport becomes less competitive as a result of poor spatial growth. Rural agricultural land is over-consumed. Cities expand into areas with higher risks of disasters or higher ecological values. Contingent liabilities increase from off-budget borrowing linked to land expansion. And equity concerns arise over the compensation of rural land users on the urban periphery. Reforms in land-use planning, municipal financial frameworks, and changes in spatial development can address these concerns and promote low-carbon growth.

Its proponents, Axel Baeumler, Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez and Shomik Mehndiratta, are three of the authors of  Sustainable Low-Carbon City Development in China, a new book looking at the development of low-carbon cities in China. It is published by the World Bank and is a 500+-page miscellany of urban development projects the Bank has been involved with in China and elsewhere. We suspect it has been somewhat hurriedly assembled so that publication could happen early in China’s current five-year plan, which calls for both continued urbanization and a significant lowering of the country’s carbon intensity. Aimed at city officials, the book is a why and some starter ideas type of book. A second edition promised for a couple of years time is intended to be a more detailed how-to manual.

The first edition doesn’t break much if any new ground. Its value lies in pulling together so many disparate aspects of sustainable urban development that have to be connected for success. For example:

• Encouraging a cleaner and greener supply of electricity;
• Continuing the gains of industrial energy efficiency;
• Promoting residential energy efficiency and building district heating;
• Better land-use planning and compact city development;
• Supporting low-carbon transport–walking, cycling, and various forms of public transport;
• Reducing emissions from private vehicles;
• Tempering current rates of growth in waste generation, including water and wastewater;
• Preserving and reusing existing buildings;
• Promoting urban agriculture and forestry;
• Developing information and communication technologies, such as smart grids.

If coordinating all those isn’t challenge enough for city officials–and just think of how many ministries, administrations, agencies, departments and offices they cut across–there is also the perennial question of the country’s scale. China is set to add an estimated 350 million residents to its cities over the next 20 years–and that after three decades of unprecedented urbanization, modernization, and economic development. Some 13 million people move from the countryside to the city each year, putting sustained pressure on all forms of public services: energy, water, transport and waste.

At the same time, China has set itself ambitious goals to reduce the carbon and energy intensity of the economy and to transition to low-carbon growth. The current five-year plan, which runs to 2015, sets a target of creating of 45 million jobs in urban areas. It also contains, for the first time, an explicit target to reduce the carbon intensity per unit of China’s GDP. A 17% cut is the goal by the end of 2015, as a milestone on the road to a  40%–45% reduction by 2020.

China’s cities will have to lead the way if these goals are to achieved. They have a sufficiently high degree of autonomy, and, as the authors note, they are “politically, financially, and administratively organized to act quickly and to realize national policy goals”. The true secret to why China’s so-called state capitalism has delivered three decades of double digit economic growth is that its city officials’ career advancement (promotion to a more powerful level of connections) depends on delivering local economic growth. Collectively on a city basis they are given a fairly free hand by central government to create raw GDP growth regardless of the environmental and social cost (up to the point it threatens the Party’s legitimacy to rule). As a market-based incentive it is pretty red in tooth and claw. But it has worked.

If China is to achieve its twin goals of larger but greener cities, it will have to change the incentives dangled before city officials. That, in turn, means dismantling the underlying mechanism that now allows them to work so effectively–the link between land use, finance, and urban sprawl.

Local governments are overdependent on land development for revenue, and particularly on sales of collectively owned rural land to property developers. As a result many Chinese cities have more than doubled their built-up area in no more than 10 years. Changing how cities finance themselves needs to be rethought fundamentally. That means tax reform, better direct access to debt and capital markets for cities, and new ways to facilitate fiscal transfers from higher levels of government.

Bits of that, such as greater municipal bond issuance, are starting to happen. But a lot of stars will have to fall into alignment for it all to come together so the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. A lot of vested interests are challenged. They will have ample opportunity to frustrate the process. Not only will it require new sets of both administrative and market-based incentives to encourage the development of low-carbon cities, with the market-based ones becoming increasingly more important, it will also require an administrative culture that facilitates cooperation across what are now largely independent fiefdoms.

It will also require one more thing. Residents who want to live in more liveable, energy-efficient cities like, and are prepared to be active in creating them.

China Seeks Compensation For War-Damaged Libyan Projects

The hopes of Chinese civil engineering firms that they would be able to return to abandoned construction projects in Libya appear to have been dashed for now. Commerce minister Chen Deming says it is too dangerous to return, and that China is seeking compensation from the new government in Tripoli, particularly for housing projects worth more than $10 billion that were completed or close to completion but suffered heavy artillery damage during the fighting.

Before the civil war that overthrew the Gaddafi regime started in February, 2011, some 75 Chinese companies, including 13 large state owned enterprises, were working on $19 billion worth of projects, mainly in oil services, railways, housing construction and telecoms. Evacuating more than 35,000 Chinese nationals from these in March last year was a source of some pride in Beijing. (A similar, though more-low profile and pre-emptive evacuation of Chinese workers in Syria is now underway, with 100 or so being left in the country to secure Chinese engineering projects as far as they can, and so minimize the sort of damage suffered in Libya.)

Chen’s comments about Libya followed the visit of an inspection team from his ministry that arrived in Tripoli earlier this month to assess the extent of the damage, and the prospects for Chinese engineering companies to return. China has, though, resumed its oil imports from Libya, which were interrupted by the civil war. It is expected to ship 140,000 barrels a day from Libya this year.

Chinese Firm To Build World’s Third Largest Mosque

Chinese construction companies’ work in Libya may have dried up for now. And Beijing may be wrestling with its restive Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang. But, regardless, China State Construction Engineering Corp. (CSCEC), has signed a contract with Algeria to build the world’s third largest mosque.

It will be situated in Mohammadia in the eastern part of the capital, Algiers, sitting on a 20 hectare site overlooking the Mediterranean. Its minaret will be an imposing 300 meters high and the mosque will be able to accommodate 120,000 worshipers. The complex will comprise a dozen buildings including a research library, according to reports. Algeria’s Religious Affairs Minister Bouabdallah Ghlamallah says, “There will be nothing like it in the world–religiously, touristically and economically”.

The city already has three grand mosques, but the most recent was built in the 17th century. Once the new mosque is completed–the target date is August, 2015; at a cost of $1.3 billion–only the al-Haram mosque in Mecca, considered by Muslims to be the most holy place and which can accommodate up to 4 million pilgrims during the Hajj, and the al-Nabawi mosque in Medina, which houses the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad, both in Saudi Arabia, will be larger.

CSCEC, which is China’s largest international general contractor, knows Algeria well. It has been building there for 30 years and has built the country’s five largest hotels. It is also one of four Chinese construction companies the World Bank barred from bidding on projects it finances following an investigation into corruption in the Philippines. CECEC’s ban runs to 2015. However, its latest Algerian contract will do no harm to China’s standing in the Arab world.

Rooftop Innovation

When our attention was first directed to this picture on China Smack of an excavator demolishing a hotel in Taiyaun in Shanxi from the roof down we thought it a mere curiosity, or possibly even a fake. Yet after our man in a hard hat dismissed our initial suspicion that the image might be the result of some photoshopping, telling us that tearing down a hotel that way was feasible from a civil engineering point of view, we came across this post on WebUrbanist, giving several examples of the practice and linking to some TV video of this particular one.

On reflection, it all makes some sort of sense. Explosives are kept closely within the provenance of the military and police and the former hotel is cheek by jowl with other buildings so blowing it up to bring it down is out of the question. A crane can easily hoist an excavator fitted with a concrete breaker in place of its bucket to the roof. The no doubt shoddy construction would help the excavator operator make short work of knocking the building down, working his way down half a floor by half a floor. The debris goes down elevator shafts or over the side.

It is is probably the most cost effective way of demolishing a building, if not necessarily one of the safest in what is already a perilous undertaking. Health and safety laws are unlikely to be much of an impediment, though excavators are more stable and maneuverable in small spaces than might be imagined for such large pieces of machinery. Our man says it is no more difficult and dangerous for a skilled excavator operator (with a head for heights) to do the work at that level than it would be on the ground. It is just that the margin of error is smaller 12 stories up. Rather him than us.

In its peculiar way, this is another example of China’s frugal and process innovation: good enough results for a fraction of the cost.