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| Brent Cross: "Faceless estates. Sprawling suburbs. Soulless financial districts. Discredited elsewhere as fostering the worst kind of urban angst" |
Actually, it's The Guardian:
"Why haven't China's cities learned from America's mistakes?" [Link above.]
"Faceless estates. Sprawling suburbs. Soulless financial districts. Discredited elsewhere as fostering the worst kind of urban angst: these are the vogue in China – but change could be afoot
"In the wake of economic reforms in the 1990s that helped set off the largest urban migration in history, China had the rare opportunity to embrace cutting-edge city-building approaches as it expanded its skyline. It could have avoided the mistakes that made Los Angeles into the land of gridlock, or bypassed the errors that turned the banlieues of Paris into what one American planner calls 'festering urban sores'.
"But China [or rather Barnet and Hammerson!] looked back instead of forward. Over the past decade and a half, the nation’s developers and government officials have replicated discredited urban planning templates, importing ideas that were tested, failed and long since abandoned in places like Europe and the US. Planning authorities have committed 'essentially all the mistakes that have been made in the western world before', says Yan Song, director of the programme on Chinese cities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"She recalls how 10 years ago, a delegation of planners from the US convened with Chinese officials, who were then working on eliminating Beijing’s cycle lanes to make room for more cars. 'The American planners were saying, "Don’t do that, please! We’ve done that, we have made that mistake. Don’t follow us,"' says Song. 'But at the time, when you have that kind of modernisation, people love cars – so unfortunately the planners there didn’t listen.' (A few years later, Beijing backpedalled, and since 2010 it has been working to bring back the bicycles.)" [Pity Barnet and Hammerson didn't listen, either!]
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