Beijing It seems like a crazy succession of centuries-old neighborhoods, spacious avenues and new residential areas which adds to the surprise: you don’t know what you’ll find around the corner or a hundred meters further. He chaos disappears from the air. There emerge the square and the bevel, a order configured by a historic center from which the concentric rings as if a stone had been thrown into the pond. It is enough to mention the ring and the cardinal point to orient yourself in a city of 22 million inhabitants. Fourth northern ring, for example, is the new Olympic zone.
Three moments have shaped Beijing. The Forbidden Cityan imperial residence, served as a nucleus for centuries, painted red and yellow to highlight the contrast with the gray plebeian homes swirling around its perimeter. What makes Beijing a unique case in the world is that a good number of those downtowns still resist. hutongsmade up of narrow streets and low houses, still inhabited by the poor classes. In 1949, when the Republic was born, a group of Russian experts arrived in Beijing to advise on its development. They ended up designing it completely and the city embraced the grandiloquent Soviet urbanism of imposing avenues and cement esplanades as hideous as the Tiananmen Square. He urbanism adapted to the controlling drive with the creation of danweis o work unitsself-sufficient cells that provided employment, housing and education to their inhabitants.
Los Olympics of 2009 gave him the pretext to push himself to the modernity. In those days the picket committed crimes against the hutongs but they also rose up ring roads and the network grew metro. “The image and infrastructure changed as happened in Barcelona. But the scales are different. Beijing has developed as an imperial city and is now the capital of the country while Barcelona is a provincial capital. Furthermore, the latter has nowhere to grow while the former has a plain,” says Isaac Landeros, a Mexican architect and resident in Barcelona after a decade in Beijing. “Badalona or L’Hospitalet have an intimate relationship with Barcelona but retain their independence, while the districts absorbed by Beijing lack autonomy,” he adds.
No country has experienced such an urbanization process. fast like China. Its ancient rural physiognomy was dynamited in four decades and the transition from rice fields to cement posed superlative challenges. Beijing is the great town, as it is Madrid in Spain, where Chinese from all over the country gather. It has avoided the painful poverty patterns common in developing countries such as the ‘slums‘ y favelas but structural problems persist. An official study from 2013 warned that the people of Beijing had an average of 119 cubic meters of water when the UN recommends less than a thousand and described the density of 1,300 people per square kilometer of unsustainable.
Sponge the center
The order is to fluff the center. Beijing is integrating the surrounding towns and districts and facilitating their growth. Daxingin the south, is an example: an hour and a half from the center, Beijing has built its new international airport, a torture for citizens, in order to develop the area. Tongzhouin the east, is another. It was a city despised for being noisy and peasant until Beijing moved the bulk of its mammoth bureaucratic body there, almost a million people. The transfer broke the imperial tradition that stapled power to the surroundings of the Forbidden City and that Mao preserved to underline his conquest. Today many liberal professionals choose Tongzhou over the Beijing frenzy.
A taxi and several bicycles cross an intersection in Beijing. / JESSICA LEE / EFE
Years ago, there was no shortage of urban projects in China that failed due to the lack of services and infrastructure. Beijing was always forward-thinking, opening metro stops between harvests when streets and buildings were still years away from springing up. A decentralizing process with 14 satellite cities It was already planned in 1993 but China then lacked robust public transportation. Now, however, his high speed network already allows his great dream: a conurbation that will encompass Beijing, the port city of Tianjin and the province of Hebei. It is known as Jingjinji, it will measure almost half of Spain and will have 120 million inhabitants. It is born from the certainty that a city of 22 million inhabitants is a traffic torture, pollution and real estate bubbles. Megaregions or “clusters” seek the economic, political and labor union of nearby cities to promote synergies, eliminate competitiveness and beat in unison. They are a solution to runaway developmentalism because they preserve the benefits of proximity to services but mitigate the harms of congestion. China is not their inventor but it is the one that has taken them further in terms of size and investment. “Clusters present many advantages but also challenges. Transportation infrastructure is solvable in China but different socioeconomic realities will persist. Per capita incomes in Beijing and Tianjin are much higher than in Hebei,” adds Landeros.
The pandemic It paused a process that, like so many issues in China, advances by trial and error. The initiative is driven by President Xi Jinping, so its success is taken for granted. The Beijing suburbs do not lack beauty, but they do not lack order either. “No city has expanded the subway as much as Beijing. The challenge of the private car persists, as in so many others, but Beijing works very well if we take into account its size and population. Few cities have achieved so much in such a short time,” concludes Landeros. .
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