As a report jointly prepared by the Department of Development Planning, NDRC and Cloud River Urban Research Institute, the China Integrated City Index 2016 provides an evaluation for the status of urban development in China from a brand-new perspective. It is a truly comprehensive and genuine evaluation of development. Any judgment of a city’s development merely based on her economic achievements is defective. No evaluation would amount to a comprehensive one if without the social and environmental indicators, regardless of how many economic indicators were used.
The philosophy and principles of spatial balance should be established for development. The purpose of spatial balance is to achieve the harmony among population (society), economy, resources and environment within a certain space unit. The establishment of such philosophy and principles is of great significance to the correct understanding and sound enhancement of coordinated regional development, as well as to the promotion of green urbanization and the harmonious development between human and nature. For example, spatial imbalance will take place when the ecological environment in some areas deteriorates as a result of the local resources and environment being overloaded with the size of the local population and the economic developments for raising living standards. If we blindly lay stress on the local realization of a well-off and modernized society, we will be unable to stop the economic development of such areas under the “right to development”, and hence will be unable to reverse the deterioration of the ecological environment from its source. When the ecological environment is destroyed, a large amount of funds will have to be spent in implementing batches of “ecological construction” projects, such as returning farmland to forests, returning grazing land to grassland, soil erosion control, sand source control, and rocky desertification control, among others. Another example is that some areas are already under excessively intense development, which has weakened the bearing capacity of their resources and environment. If no adjustments are made to any industrial structures that have gone beyond the bearing capacity of the resources and environment of these areas, nothing can stop any further consumption of energy and water resources, which will make it difficult to maintain control over the discharge of pollutants from the source. When water shortage and environmental deterioration affect people’s lives, one after another water delivery projects and pollution control projects will have to be implemented. In addition, some cities are already suffering from “urban diseases” due to the excessive urban functions, excessively intensive central urban area and unbalanced spatial structure. If we do not properly relieve these central urban areas from some urban functions, but indulge their ongoing development into and reinforcement as economic centers, industrial bases, trade logistics centers, transportation hubs, shipping centers, education centers, research and development bases, and medical centers, etc., we will be unable to stop people from swarming in and unable to stop the property price from rising every day, and will inevitably come across traffic congestion and frequent smog.
The China Integrated City Index 2016 provides an evaluation of urban development from the environmental, social and economic perspectives, and embodies the idea of spatial balance. That is why I say it is a truly comprehensive and genuine evaluation of development. Only in this way will the evaluation of urban development be scientific and conducive to guiding the development of cities in a more comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable manner.
Cities are the main carriers of economic development and social progress. The first 30 years have witnessed the influx of hundreds of millions of people into cities in China, and the same will happen again in the future. The biggest pressure the cities confront and their weakest point, both at present and in the future, should be the ecological environment. In urban development, the pursuit of bigger economic scale, more mileage of roads, taller buildings and more spacious homes, should not come at the cost of the shining stars, clear rivers and lakes, and the singing birds.
The urban development of China must adhere to the philosophy of ecological civilization, promote the green development, cyclic development and low-carbon development, and minimize the interference with and damage to the nature, with the economical and intensive utilization of resources including land, water and energy. A high level of attention should be paid to eco-safety and the ratio of green and ecological spaces such as forests, lakes and wetlands should be increased, while the water conservation capacity and environmental capacity are enhanced. And the quality of environment should be improved, with reduction in the total discharge of major pollutants, control over the intensity of development, and enhancement of the capability to withstand and mitigate natural disasters. The China Integrated City Index 2016 provides a number of implementable green indicators. All cities should check for their gaps from the indicators and find out the areas to work on for urban development. In this regard, the China Integrated City Index 2016 is not only an evaluation, but also points out the direction to move forward.
The three revolutions of science and technology and the three waves of urbanization have changed the global economic setup, with an emerging viewpoint that “the world is not flat.” Developed countries represented by the United States, the European Union and Japan dominate the world economy, while a large number of developing countries are in an affiliated position. Such “unflatness” is even more obvious within the country. The World Development Report 2009 by the World Bank describes the transformation of economic space using three characteristics, namely, density, distance and segmentation, and illustrates the development gap between city-based regions. The gap is shocking. The Tokyo Metropolitan Area is one of the areas covering the world’s largest “cities” with a population of 38 million, creating 32.3% of Japan’s GDP with 3.6% of the country’s land area. It accommodates 58.2% of the listed companies in Japan, 68.7% of her researchers and 60.6% of her patents. Large cities attract talents, technology and funds from all around the world, and expand rapidly, while other small and medium cities and regions are relatively underdeveloped, resulting in the gap between cities even greater than that between countries.
Viewed from this perspective, “China is not flat either.” On the southeast side of the “Hu Line (or Heihe-Tengchong Line)”, 43% of the country’s land holds 94% of her population, while on the northwest side, 57% of the country’s land holds only 6% of her population. This is the most basic feature of economic geography of China. Even in the southeast, the internal difference is significant, and the levels of economic development, construction and modernization between urban and rural areas and between cities differ largely. In 2016, Shanghai had a permanent resident population of 24.19 million, with per capita GDP of about 113,600 CNY; Hefei, 7.86 million, with per capita GDP of about 80,100 CNY; and Guiyang, 4.69 million, with per capita GDP of about 67,700 CNY. This is only a comparison between provincial capital cities and above. The difference in the level of development between prefecture-level cities and county-level cities in the eastern and western regions is even more disparate. Of course, the characterization by such a single indicator is not always convincing. The more common approach is to design a set of indicators that reflect the strength of urban development, integrating differences in multiple areas to more comprehensively reflect the gap. This is also a scientific basis for appropriate interventions in the “unflatness” of the economic geographical space, which can inspire people to explore the best combination of objective laws, current development status, future visions and public policies.
As a kind of such research, the Department of Development Planning, NDRC and Cloud River Urban Research Institute are committed to establishing a scientific and reasonable indicator system by drawing upon international experience in urban development and based on three major sectors, i.e., environment, society and economy, for the purpose of exploring and constructing a comprehensive indicator system for Chinese cities from such aspects as being environment-friendly, creation of better social life with culture and more sustainable industrial innovation. That is to use indicators to evaluate the level of urban development and use data to identify the path of urban development. Urban development is a dynamic and evolving process with complex contributing factors. The evaluation of such development involves complicated types and categories of indicators. Some indicators inter-relate and interplay, and some individual ones are difficult to quantify. There are many ways to address them, and our research is only one of the approaches.
In the future, such “unflatness” will become more complicated. Modern technologies such as informatization, big data, and artificial intelligence will have a deeper impact on the pattern of urban development. Central cities enjoy first-mover advantages and scale effects in the generation and application of modern technologies, with an increasingly obvious polarization trend. However, benefiting from the low space cost of information technology and the connectivity of modern infrastructure, small and medium cities find their development advantages growing and disadvantages diminishing. In particular, some emerging ways of space organizing, “anchor points” found in the global production network, and the characteristic towns explored by Zhejiang Province of China bring new opportunities to the original depressions, and some regions and cities have even surpassed the original developed areas by changing another path. It is both meaningful and interesting to have real-time tracking, accurate description, and dynamic reflection of these changes. This is also a new space for urban index research.
Moreover, in the future, the development of individual cities will gradually give way to city clusters, where information networks and transportation infrastructure will be interconnected, public services will be co-built and shared, development will be integrated between cities, and the “depressions” surrounding central cities will gradually be filled up and made even. The city cluster will develop increasingly as a whole, integrating “a group of cities” into “one city”, and the subject of evaluation should also be changed from city to city cluster. In any case, these changes will bring new topics to such research, because the theory is gray, and only the tree of life is evergreen.
Urbanization is one of the driving forces for the rapid development of the economy and society of China in the past forty years. Being essentially a structural reform issue, urbanization promotes the free flow and efficient allocation of elements by lifting restrictions on the flow of such elements among urban-rural areas and regions. It will remain an important driving force for the high-quality development of China in the future, since high-quality urbanization is conducive to further improving the efficiency of resources allocation. Therefore, there is still a big room in China for the unfinished reform of urbanization and improvement in the efficiency of resources allocation, and we need to continue our hard work on the exploration thereof from all aspects.
It was proposed in the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China held in 2017 that China has entered a stage of transition from high-speed growth to high-quality development. The realization of high-quality development requires the support from all aspects of development. Considering the allocation of various resources and elements is concentrated in the urbanized areas of China, improving the quality of urbanization and urban development is thus undoubtedly the most important area to support the high-quality development.
The reform and opening-up has brought China into the rapidest urbanization and development process in the world history. In just 40 years, the permanent residents of urban areas in China have reached 790 million, representing an urbanization rate of 57.4%, with an average annual increase of more than one percentage. Relevant studies even argue that China’s urbanization rate may have exceeded 60%, with ever expanding urban built-up areas reaching 100,000 square kilometers, to which built-up areas in the cities contribute about 50,000 square kilometers.
- Problems and Challenges
Urbanization has been in rapid progress with the accumulation of many issues that cannot be ignored. These issues, the existence of which has lowered the quality of urbanization and urban development in China, require a high-level attention and shall be tackled in a serious manner.
(1) A city’s failure of granting the residency permit to a large number of its permanent residents has resulted in a dual structure within the city. The current migration of rural population to different locations in China has relocated about 270 million people, and there are additional 80 million plus permanent residents moving between cities for employment purposes. These people, economically exploited as part of the labor force but in a discriminated position, unfairly treated for welfare benefits in our society, are not being treated as urban citizens. Their sacrifice and contributions have virtually pushed down the cost of urbanization and urban development in China. Their sufferings, sacrifice and helplessness are behind our glamorous and bright cities. These new migrants barely have any sense of belonging or ownership in the cities they reside in. They lead a wandering life for an extended period of time, and find it too difficult to have long-term and stable expectations and plans for their own lives and careers, and even more difficult to become a defender and builder of urban social order.
(2) There witnessed the disorderly expansion and inefficient use of urban space. In the process of urban development, an excessive number of oversized new towns and new districts as well as a variety of industrial parks are set up as part of the urban planning for many cities. Some of them, whose existing new districts and parks have yet to be fully developed, are keen to move on to build up newer and larger urban areas or parks, eventually making it difficult to improve the efficiency of utilizing urban land and space. Also as a product of such development, a good number of ghost cities and empty towns appear, piling up sizeable real estate inventories. The fact that “the urbanization of land outpaces that of the population” has, for the past decades, not only prevented China from improving, but has given rise to a continuous decline in, her efficiency or intensity of urban land utilization. This trend is clearly adverse to the effective protection of farmland. Land ownership and land finance, among others, should be factored into any earnest discussions and improvements.
(3) The rotten legacy from the construction of infrastructure networks is too extensive and in less than reasonable layout. Due to the oversized areas under urban planning, many cities have accordingly expanded their infrastructure network coverage, increasing the scale of infrastructure investment and the burden of government debts. The construction and operation of infrastructure is in an unsustainable financial position, with hidden great risks of both debts and finance. The problem of the unreasonable layout of infrastructure networks is also common. Some urban infrastructure networks fail to keep up with the population in density. Due to the high level of difficulty and cost of infrastructure construction, central urban areas with high population density may end up having low density of infrastructure; however, in areas with low population density, the infrastructure density is instead higher due to the lesser difficulty in construction. Therefore, the underutilization and supply shortage of infrastructure networks may exist at the same time, and a spatial mismatch exists between the supply and demand of infrastructure.
(4) The cities are not open and inclusive enough. Due to the difficulty of urban management and concerns about urban order, as cities continue to expand in size, there is a widespread situation among Chinese cities that the larger the city, the less in openness and inclusivity. Such practice of sacrificing urban openness and inclusivity in exchange for convenience in management and stability will in fact restrict the positive effects of urban economies of scale and scope on the economic growth and the improvement of efficiency of labor division, diminish the city’s innovative capability and entrepreneurial space, and further weaken the vitality and creativity of the city as an organic entity being formed by the aggregation of various elements. The governance philosophy of co-building, sharing, and co-governance has not been fully implemented in urban social governance.
(5) There is a lack of scientificity and forward-looking in urban planning. The defects in the philosophy, methodology and system of urban planning have resulted in China’s failure to provide the scientific and reasonable guidance and standardization on urban construction and development. Some urban plans cover oversized areas and population, but turn out falling short of expectation at the end of the planning period; some others, however, seek to manage undersized areas and population, but end up failing to accommodate the actual development before the close of the planning period. Difficulties lie in the alignment and coordination between the rigid constraints of planning and the flexibility of market-based economic development. Different plans related to urban development are not managed in a coordinated manner. Conflicts and even fights between plans are also common, affecting the authority of planning and the effectiveness of their implementation.
(6) The urban industrial structure tends to become outdated, with a rather slow process of transformation and upgrading. Some traditional industrial bases and resource-based cities are under the pressure of transformation and upgrading and also meet the challenge of weakening momentum of traditional industries, which further causes the loss of job opportunities and then the outflow of urban population. Some cities, especially old industry-based cities in the northern region, are thus facing the risk and pressure of recession.
- Directions and Measures
For the purpose of improving the quality of urbanization and urban development in China, we must take numerous measures from the perspective of system, policy and technology to fully address the above problems and challenges on a continuous basis.
(1) Accelerating the Urbanization of Rural Migrants. This is a further explicit requirement from the 19th National Congress of the CPC. All kinds of cities, whether they are supercities, megacities, large cities, or small and medium cities, should take measures to provide those rural migrants, who have already maintained stable employment in the city and are willing to transfer their household registration to the city, with an option to do so; and provide the same public services for those rural migrants who have been employed locally and those permanent residents employed in the city but without urban household registration, as for the local residents. Since this group of people who have already been employed locally make equal contributions to the local economy and taxation as local residents, and some even higher than the local residents. From the perspective of public finance, fairness and justice, there is no reason to implement discriminative welfare policies on them. In addition, since population migration mainly flows from economically underdeveloped and backward areas to economically developed areas, accelerating the urbanization of urban permanent residents will promote the spatial distribution of China’s economy and the spatial distribution of population to a better coordinated and more balanced state. This will help promote the coordinated development of regional and urban-rural areas in China, and will facilitate and support the implementation of the coordinated regional development strategy and the rural revitalization strategy proposed in the 19th National Congress of the CPC. When more rural residents move into the cities, they will be more immersed in the modern civilization of the cities and improve the conditions for their children’s education, which is conducive to the improvement of population quality and the modernization of the people.
(2) Strengthening the Industrial Support for Cities. A city will inevitably opt for the continuous strengthening of industrial support for urban development through industrial upgrade, which is an eternal topic for sustainable urban development. This does not mean the city government will have to invest more public resources to provide the direct support for industrial development. The government is mainly required to provide good basic conditions, including infrastructure conditions and human capital conditions, in order to build up a more open, inclusive and transparent business environment and industrial eco-environment conducive to industrial innovation and development, to maintain a reasonable cost setting for industrial development, and to facilitate independent investment and attraction of all kinds of talents for market entities. The urban leaders and planners of China generally have the will and power to choose the leading industries for their city, but they need to take into account each city’s own advantages and location characteristics, as well as the functional positioning of the megalopolis or metropolitan area where their city is located, to plan for their own industrial development options by industrial clustering, division of labor and collaboration, or by applying such philosophies as urban entanglement and industrial entanglement, in order to give better play to the effects of clustering and division of labor.
(3) Improving Urban Governance and Urban Management. From the perspective of urban origin, an urban society can be better characterized as a civil society. This means that urban governance should call for a broader involvement of residents. To do so, the openness and inclusivity of urban governance should be maintained, and this is also the core spirit of a modern city that fundamentally ensures the city is attractive. The most dynamic and innovative cities in the world are the most open and inclusive ones, and China is no exception. One of the important reasons why all kinds of innovative elements are more willing to cluster in Shenzhen is that Shenzhen is an immigrant city, more open and more inclusive than other cities in China. If urban governance is open and inclusive enough to attract more members of the commons, it can enhance the urban residents’ sense of ownership of the city, whereby the residents will truly call the city home, and participate in her construction and maintenance as well as the protection of her wellbeing in a constructive manner. China’s urban management needs more human care, rather than the authority and indifference of the government. Through advancing the in-depth integration of such technical means as the Internet, big data and artificial intelligence into urban management, we can still find big room to improve our urban governance and management, improve the efficiency of urban public services, and make our urban management and services smarter, more convenient and closer to the people. The construction of a smart city is also an important way to improve urban governance and management.
(4) Applying Scientific Methods to the Spatial Arrangements of Urbanization. According to the requirements of urban pattern where the coordinated development of large, medium and small cities and small towns is carried out as a cluster or group, we need to accelerate the reform of the philosophy, system and methodology of urban spatial planning and change any planning philosophy and methodology continued from the old planned system. In the meantime, we need to provide sound guidance for the planning of economic and industrial layout, transportation network layout, eco-space protection, humanities and social protection, as well as military readiness among others, which are required by the coordinated development of city clusters, cities and small towns. We also need to coordinate and promote the integration of multiple planning for relevant areas in order to enable the synergies between industrial cluster development, infrastructure network support, and city-town division. Finally, we need to make reasonable arrangements for the spatial layout and functional integration of urban industries, transportation, ecology, life, and public facilities, etc.; and also promote the aboveground-and-underground integrated planning, which coordinates the utilization of aboveground and underground spaces, in order to make better use of urban underground spaces and pave the way for the development of a compact city—this also helps reduce the waste of space resources as well as promote the improvement of urban eco-environment and sustainable development.
(5) Innovating the Financing Mechanisms for Urban Infrastructure. Urban infrastructure, especially urban rail transit networks, is often characterized by large one-off investments and long service life, and thus requires moderately advanced planning and construction. Debt financing is used to resolve funding issues for urban infrastructure, which can be done by intergeneration sharing, to allow sharing of the construction cost of urban infrastructure across generations. This method reflects fairness between generations and thus is a reasonable financing arrangement. At present, many cities in China are facing the financing problems and debt-paying risks for the construction of urban infrastructure, mainly for two reasons: First, the excessive scale of infrastructure construction causes an excessive scale of investment and debt; Second, there lacks an effective institutional security for investment and financing, where fiscal expenditures from the government are relatively insufficient. To address this challenge, we need to apply scientific and reasonable planning to solve the problems of inappropriately advanced urban infrastructure as well as oversizing and unreasonable layout. We also need to innovate the investment and financing mechanisms for urban infrastructure to provide better support for government assets and liabilities, to better revitalize government assets and income, and to better align the relationships between the cost and term of debt financing and the cash flows and income period of the project. In addition, it is necessary to increase the supply of long-term financing instruments and provide the protection of financing services for urban infrastructure at a reasonable cost and for a matching term.
(6) Paying More Attention to the Improvement of Urban Construction Quality. In less than 40 years, China has increased her urbanization rate by 40 percentage points, with all kinds of buildings erected in her cities like spring bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Such scale and experience of construction is unprecedented to any country in the world. It is conceivable that due to various factors such as technology, labor, funds, design and ideas, a variety of quality problems that have existed for urban buildings in the past will become increasingly obvious over time. At the high-quality development stage today, it is necessary for us to pay more attention to improving the quality of urban construction. Building design and construction standards must be revised and improved as soon as possible. We should accelerate the improvement of urban construction quality by benchmarking such criteria as extended building life and improved low-carbon energy-efficient standards. For example, an additional cost of 1,000 CNY per square meter is totally acceptable to the market and the consumers in many middle-and-high income areas, but the resulting benefits will last decades or even a hundred years with a multipurpose outcome, and thus it is absolutely worth the investment and the price.
- Significance of Integrated City Index
In summary, the quality of urbanization and urban development is a rather comprehensive concept that needs to be considered and evaluated from many aspects. Exactly based on the above considerations, we have worked with the Cloud River Urban Research Institute headed by Professor Zhou Muzhi of Tokyo Keizai University to conduct a research on the China Integrated City Index, which applies a consistent system of indicators for the evaluation of 297 Chinese cities at the prefecture level or above, to observe the overall and specific differences in the quality of urban development.
Of course, none of the evaluation methods using an indicator system is perfect. Even if the selection of the indicator system is flawless, the authenticity of the statistical data may not stand tests and there are always controversial points as well as places for improvement. Fortunately, this type of evaluation is only for reference rather than serving as an assessment standard, with no impact on bonus payments or job promotions, and allows us to improve while reviewing and discussing it. We may wish to continue such evaluation as a research and make gradual improvements. This will help the forming of a systematic observation and evaluation for the quality of urban development and will also enable us to obtain a complete set of historical records in time sequence about the quality observations on urban development.