Glaeser introduced the influential factors of the development and decline of urban cities, human capital and transportation is what he really concerned about. Just as he said, “cities aren’t structures, cities are people”, human-driven should be the key of current city plannings. For Glaeser, cities have higher productivity; cities make people happier; cities are lifestyle rather than the concrete. He warned us by the hallmark of certain declined cities such as Detroit that “they have too much housing and infrastructure relative to the strength of their economies”. Of course, that does not mean a halt of supply construction, but making the supply in demand, in other words, keeping pace with people’s needs. And it was also the new urban planning of China. Gone through so-called “modernization”, China tends to move from physical dimension to human dimension (link is here). Rather than building skyscrapers or other city icons, efforts should be made on the improvement of livelihood. One expert in the video, then pointing out two methods: the construction of underground, in other words, improving the public transportation to decrease the congestion, one of main big city diseases, and the care about education that profit-driven universities are not beneficial to higher education popularization. Glaeser also valued the transportation in his analysis of urbanization. With the claim “transportation always determined the urban form”, he listed the advantages of car cities: speed and space. Public transportation takes more time than private car on commutes, it only happened in small or middle-size cities in China, since extremely large population results in the extremely dense urban area, congestion could be the biggest problem. This is why underground is in urgent need in terms of improving living environment.
Roy discussed the urbanism from a different view. For her, the urban theory centered in the west mode should be modified to a provincial view since it demonstrates “how neoliberal urbanism is as much ‘Asian’ as it is ‘Western’, as much ‘homegrown’ as it is borrowed” (pp. 310-311). She particularly took an insight on the topics of worlding practices and subject-power in so-called “world-class cities” in Asia. Worlding being “a practice of centering, of generating and harnessing global regimes of value” (pp. 312), China is making very efforts on the worlding practices. Not only Shenzhen as the example she analyzed, Shanghai Pudong district (link is here), which is from a small so-called “fishing village” to the financial center (Lujiazui) gathering numerous talents and investments all over the world, and now Hangzhou where Alibaba settled down are contributed to the world-class construction. The e-commerce, Taobao, Jingdong or Meituan, based on the high efficiency of Chinese transportation system and supported by high speed delivery system, is definitely a worlding practice involving many subjects from e-shop owners, delivery men to the workers on the assembly lines since it not only includes overseas business, but also the window for the world to show the Chinese trade mode.
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