Archive for ‘urban development’

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14/09/2013

Manmohan predicts more pressure on urban infrastructure

the Hindu: “Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday predicted a major pressure on infrastructure as at the present pace of urbanisation at least 60 crore Indians would be living in urban areas by 2033, while the population in slums would have increased to nearly 10.4 crores by 2017.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh handing over the key to a beneficiary after inaugurating a housing complex in Chandigarh on Saturday. Photo: Akhilesh Kumar

Dr. Singh was addressing a gathering after initiating the process of handing over possession to beneficiaries of the “Slum rehabilitation scheme of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM)” a housing project completed for 8000 families at a cost of about Rs. 2400 crore near Dhanas village on the outskirts of the city. He said that while Chandigarh was expected to become “slum-free” within the next few years, the Union government had planned to construct at least 15 lakh such houses and dwelling units, for which Rs. 41,000 crore had been earmarked.

That such projects were the cornerstones for India progress towards becoming into a developed Nation, Dr Singh said that the Union government had launched Rajiv Awas Yojana to resolve the problem of slums, while another scheme for the urban poor involved private sector investment which would help economically weaker and lower income group category people build their houses.

In his address, Governor of Punjab, Shivraj V. Patil in his capacity as Administrator of the Union Territory of Chandigarh detailed that 25,000 such dwellings had been planned for the city, in its endeavour to provide basic amenties to all its citizens.

He announced that in the next phase of such dwellings provision will be made for two rooms instead of the present one room. He thanked the Union Minister for Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Girija Vyas, who assured adequate financial support to construct the next phase of such housing projects.

Earlier, the Dr Singh handed over possession of the 267 sq ft dweeling units to 10 couples, while the Haryana Governor, Jagannath Pahadia, Punjab and Haryana Chief Ministers, Parkash Singh Badal and Bhupinder Singh Hooda, respectively looked on along with Mr Patil and Ms Vyas. The housing complex which shall accommodate slum dwellers from Colony No 5, also provides necessary social infrastructure, police post, dispensary, primary school, anganwari, play grounds and parks, along with proper water supply, electricity connections and sewerage. The beneficiaries would pay a monthly rent of Rs 800 for the next 20 years, after which ownership rights would be transferred if they established continued possession of the dwelling unit allotted to them.”

via Manmohan predicts more pressure on urban infrastructure – The Hindu.

see also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/07/30/china-urbanization-cost-could-top-106-billion-a-year-think-tank/

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30/07/2013

China urbanization cost could top $106 billion a year: think-tank

Reuters: “The cost of settling China’s rural workers into city life in the government’s urbanization drive could be about 650 billion yuan ($106 billion) a year, the equivalent of 5.5 percent of fiscal revenue last year, a government think-tank said on Tuesday.

A man rides an escalator near Shanghai Tower (R, under construction), Jin Mao Tower (C) and the Shanghai World Financial Center (L) at the Pudong financial district in Shanghai July 4, 2013. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The figure is based on the assumption that 25 million people a year settle in cities, with the government spending the money on making sure they enjoy the same benefits in healthcare, housing and schools that city residents have, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences(CASS) said.

“I think the biggest obstacle for turning rural migrant workers into urban citizens is the cost issue,” Wei Houkai, a researcher at CASS, told a news conference, adding that to achieve equality of treatment could take until 2025.

Millions of migrant workers from the countryside and smaller towns work in China’s big cities, often in low-paid manual work, but lack access to education, health and other services tied to the country’s strict household registration – or hukou – system.

China sees the urbanization drive as pushing domestic consumption, which it wants to make the main engine of growth for the economy, replacing exports and manufacturing and investment.

Rural migrant laborers only earned an average 2,049 yuan a month in 2011, or 59 percent of average urban workers’ salary, CASS added.

But they need to pay about 18,000 yuan annually per capita to be able to live in cities and another 100,000 yuan on average for housing, it said.”

via China urbanization cost could top $106 billion a year: think-tank | Reuters.

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19/06/2013

Wang Shu, China’s Champion of Slow Architecture

BusinessWeek: “The day after Chinese architect Wang Shu was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s equivalent of a Nobel, in May 2012, he returned to the old Beijing neighborhood where he grew up and found it in the process of being demolished. The hutong, with its maze of narrow streets and traditional courtyard houses, was being sacrificed to make room for a new philosophy center.

Wang’s design for the History Museum in Ningbo evokes an ancient fortress

While European cities that exploded with industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries are still sorting out the consequences of modernization, their boom times appear sedate compared with China’s last two decades. By 2030 the mainland will be home to 13 megacities—those with a population of 10 million or more—up from six today, estimates a McKinsey report. That breakneck urbanization is fast obliterating 5,000 years of architecture and culture. “Cities today have become far too large,” Wang says. “I’m really worried, because it’s happening too fast and we have already lost so much.””

via Wang Shu, China’s Champion of Slow Architecture – Businessweek.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/06/19/30-storey-building-built-in-15-days-time-lapse-by-chinas-broad-group/

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19/06/2013

Chinese Voice Anger and Nostalgia Over Urbanization

From NY Times: “Chinese Voice Anger and Nostalgia Over Urbanization

Chinese residents have turned to the microblogging site Weibo to express their feelings on the government’s efforts to drastically expand the urban population. While there are glimmers of hope about the prospects of city life and the opportunities afforded by compensation, the majority of the discussion focuses on resentment over perceived corruption and sadness over the loss of land, farm animals and a way of life. Here is a selection of recent posts presented in their original Chinese and translated into English.”
Weibo.com Logo

Weibo.com Logo (Photo credit: bfishadow)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/16/world/asia/weibo-voices-land-seizures.html?ref=asia&_r=0

Posted in China alert, Economics, Social & cultural, urban development | 1 Comment »

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07/06/2013

Premier Li Keqiang Wants More Chinese in the Cities

BusinessWeek: “Li Zuobing is adjusting well to urban life in Chongqing’s Yubei district, where he lives in a massive housing complex built to house former farmers. He enjoys his job as a supervisor in the community service office, his wife says she is delighted to have a kitchen with natural gas (rather than coal), and his daughter has opened a clothing store. It’s a great improvement on their life growing rice and corn on a small plot. “A few years ago, the idea I could ever live this well was unimaginable,” he says, as instructions on living a “civilized life” drone from loudspeakers on the grounds.

A woman waits for the bus at a junction along the main road in Dongling village, Anhui

Such success stories are essential for China’s future. As President Xi Jinping tries to bolster China’s international standing, the most daunting challenge at home is getting urbanization right, a task that falls to Premier Li Keqiang. Li is embarking on one of the most radical reconfigurations of Chinese society since the Mao era. His goal is to cut the rural population of 642 million roughly in half by nudging, urging, and sometimes forcing farmers and their families to settle in China’s cities.

Theoretically, this process will create a new, willing workforce to staff the cities’ service industries and factories. The ex-farmers’ incomes will rise, their children will get a better-quality education, and when they grow up they’ll land better jobs than their parents. The multiyear process will increase average income in China, where annual rural incomes of 7,917 yuan ($1,291) are less than one-third the income of city dwellers. “Urbanization will usher in a huge amount of consumption and investment demand, increase job opportunities, create wealth for farmers, and bring benefits to the people,” said Li in his first news conference after being named premier. This grand population shift comes as China’s three-decades-long export and investment-led boom starts to lose steam.

The 57-year-old Li is China’s first premier to have a doctorate in economics, earned at prestigious Peking University. He worked in the countryside during China’s Cultural Revolution and has made transforming farmers into city dwellers a career theme, including during his time as governor of Henan and Liaoning provinces. Li recently asked the World Bank to work with his administration in drafting sustainable urbanization proposals. (World Bank officials were unavailable to comment.)

Cities such as Chongqing have been experimenting with urbanization for years, and Li wants to speed up the process across all of China. Another benefit of this policy, Li says, is that it will be easier to launch large-scale agriculture as farmers move to the cities. Chinese farmers tend plots that average a little bit more than one acre in size: Farms are three times larger in South Korea and Taiwan, 30 times larger in Europe, and 300 times larger in the U.S., says Cai Jiming, director of the Political Economy Research Center. “With such a small scale, it is impossible for any one farmer to become wealthy.”

It won’t be easy to get the economic payoff China’s leaders are counting on. One obstacle is China’s hukou, or household registration policy, which designates all citizens as officially either rural or urban, depending on what family they are born into and regardless of where they reside. Hukou prevents some 230 million migrant workers who already live in China’s cities from enjoying the health care, education, pensions, and access to lower-cost housing available to those with urban hukou. “None of them enjoy the rights of full urban residents. That makes their consumption ability much lower,” Cai says.

Another obstacle: Under the constitution, all rural land is owned collectively, a legacy of when agriculture was produced by people’s communes. That means farmers have no right to rent or directly sell their leased land, allowing them to set up life in the city.

Li hopes his policy will stop local governments from continuing their forcible takeovers of rural land. Local officials provide limited compensation to the farmers, then sell the long-term leases to factory owners and real estate developers. The authorities usually sell the seized land for 18 times what they paid the farmers, estimates Li Ping, senior attorney at the Beijing office of Landesa, a Seattle-based nonprofit that focuses on land-rights issues. “Local governments have an incentive to push this distorted urbanization, to grab all that profit,” says Landesa’s Li.”

via Premier Li Keqiang Wants More Chinese in the Cities – Businessweek.

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23/05/2013

* China urbanization plan hits roadblock over spending fears – sources

Reuters: “China’s plan to spend $6.5 trillion on urbanization to bolster the economy is running into snags, sources close to the government said, as top leaders fear another spending binge could push up local debt levels and inflate a property bubble.

A general view of newly built houses at Dadun village of Lingshui ethnic Li Autonomous County, Hainan province, in this January 18, 2013 file photo. REUTERS-Stringer-Files

Premier Li Keqiang has rejected an urbanization proposal drafted by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), seeking changes to put more emphasis on economic reform, according to the sources, who are familiar with the matter.

Many local authorities have already lobbied to get funding for projects, ringing alarm bells among top leaders in Beijing.

State-owned China Development Bank recently pledged to lend 150 billion yuan ($24.47 billion) to southeastern Fujian province to support its urbanization and channel 30 billion yuan into urban projects in central Anhui province, according to Chinese media.

“The urbanization plan could be delayed. Top leaders have seen potential risks if the program cannot be kept on the right path,” said an economist at a top think-tank which advises the cabinet.

“The leadership aims to jumpstart reforms, but local governments see this in a different perspective – they view this as the last opportunity to boost investment,” said the economist who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

China plans to spend some 40 trillion yuan ($6.5 trillion) to bring 400 million people to its cities over the next decade as leaders such as Li try to sustain economic growth that slowed to a 13-year low of 7.8 percent in 2012.

Li, the driving force behind urbanization, has turned more cautious following warnings from leading academics over the risks, said the think-tank sources who are involved in the policy discussions.

The NDRC is racing against the clock to amend the long-term plan in a bid to publish it by the end of June.”

via Exclusive :China urbanization plan hits roadblock over spending fears – sources | Reuters.

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09/05/2013

* China’s Vision for a ‘New’ Urbanization

WSJ: “China watchers are all abuzz about urbanization, which is supposed to be a focus of reform. But what does the term mean? After all, China has been urbanizing for 30 years, which has meant building roads, subways, ports — and relying more and more on infrastructure spending, which seems to have less and less payoff these days.

The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s state planning agency, is due to produce a report later this year laying out a path for a new kind of urbanization.

Li Tie, director general of the NDRC’s China Center for Urban Development, said the report involves a “new model of city development,” which would include three main parts:

First, there would be a focus on “low carbon” development — meaning trying to assure Chinese cities ease their horrendous pollution.

Second, would be reform of the household registration, or hukou, system. For smaller cities the system would be “totally liberalized,” Mr. Li said. He didn’t lay out his thoughts fully, but seemed to suggest that all residents would enjoy the same rights and benefits regardless of where they were born. For larger cities, migrants would get “resident cards” which assured them “improved treatment” and access to social services.

Third, China would look to increase “clustering” in big cities. Mr. Li didn’t explain what he meant by that, but in urban planning speak, clustering usually means trying to develop industries or specialties in a city or group of cities. That’s a way to build on the intellectual frisson of urban life, where new ideas can spawn new industries.

Those proposals address some of the most vexing problems with life in China’s cities: pollution, widening social inequality and lack of innovation. They also suggest that China’s leaders are committed to making urbanization into something more than another building spree. But changes would be costly and could require China’s central government to take a much more active role in overseeing—and paying for—urban growth than it has in the past. Whether China’s new leaders are ready to take such steps will become clear over the next year or two.”

via China’s Vision for a ‘New’ Urbanization – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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02/04/2013

Surely not. Robbing from its own people?

Posted in China alert, Economics, Illegal practices, land grab, Politics, urban development | Leave a Comment »

07/03/2013

* China faces social, financial risks in urbanization push

See also today’s reblog from China Daily Mail about the property bubble.

Reuters: “China’s urbanization drive could fuel social unrest over land disputes and pose financial risks if money is thrown around recklessly, a senior communist party official and a leading economist said on Thursday.

Wang Baiqiang prepares to go to work at a shoe factory in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province February 18, 2013. REUTERS-Carlos Barria

Shifting people from the countryside to cities is a policy priority for China’s new leaders as they seek to sustain economic growth that last year slowed to a 13-year low of 7.8 percent. The government hopes 60 percent of China’s population of almost 1.4 billion will be urban residents by 2020.

The urban population jumped to above 700 million from less than 200 million in the previous three decades, but that explosion has triggered sometimes violent clashes over expropriation of farmland for development as well as water shortages, pollution and other problems.

“These are severe challenges as we are trying to sustain the urbanization process,” said Chen Xiwen, head of the Office of Central Rural Work Leading Group, the top body which guides China’s farm policy. “Many people have worries and such worries are understandable,” he told a news conference on the sidelines of China’s annual parliament session.

The government must protect farmers from losing their land in the process as local governments have been relying heavily on land sales to finance local investment, Chen said. “If the urbanization process becomes a process of depriving and harming farmers’ interests, it cannot be sustained and society cannot maintain stability.””

via China faces social, financial risks in urbanization push | Reuters.

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01/03/2013

* China plans bond overhaul to fund $6 trillion urbanization

Reuters: “China plans major bond market reform to raise the money the ruling Communist Party needs for a 40 trillion yuan ($6.4 trillion) urbanization program to buoy economic growth and close a chasm between the country’s urban rich and rural poor.

A man walks past a construction site for a new stadium in Mentougou district, suburb of Beijing February 28, 2013. REUTERS-Kim Kyung-Hoon

The Party aims to bring 400 million people to cities over the next decade as the new leadership of president-in-waiting Xi Jinping and premier-designate Li Keqiang seek to turn China into a wealthy world power with economic growth generated by an affluent consumer class.

The urban development would be funded by a major expansion of bond markets, sources with leadership ties, and a senior executive at one of China’s “Big Four” state banks, who was formerly at the central bank, told Reuters.

“The urbanization drive will push the domestic capital market liberalization agenda,” the senior bank executive said on condition of anonymity. “Urbanization is Li Keqiang’s big project. He has to get it right and he is willing to pursue innovation to make it a success.”

Set to be confirmed as premier at the end of the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, which opens next week, Li must find ways to pay for the urban development that he has made a policy priority.

Central and local governments, as well as bank loans, will fund the costs, the sources said. But, sweeping reforms to create a fully-functioning municipal bond market, boost corporate and high-yield bond issuance and actively steer foreign capital into the sector, are crucial to raising the sums of money China will need, they added.

Despite its ranking as the second-largest economy globally after three decades of stellar growth, China remains an aspiring middle-income country riven with inequality and dependent on state-backed investment.

“If we continue to walk down the path of government spending, it’ll be like wearing new shoes, but walking the old road,” a source with leadership ties said, requesting anonymity to avoid repercussions for speaking to foreign media without authorization.”

via Exclusive: China plans bond overhaul to fund $6 trillion urbanization – sources | Reuters.

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