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Focusing on future urbanization

By Andrew Moody and Lan Lan (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-22 09:35
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Focusing on future urbanization

Two residential buildings in suburban Tongzhou district in southeastern Beijing. As the municipal government plans to build a new downtown for China's capital city in Tongzhou, the price of homes in the district is increasing sharply. [China Foto Press]

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"Many farmers may set up their own business and become entrepreneurs. Many of them set up businesses related to their agricultural backgrounds because they have a good understanding of what the market needs. They also tend to be very hard working," he said.

"A number of billionaires have been created this way and I expect there to be many more."

Wu at The Climate Group said new emerging cities offered the chance to redress China's concentration of population on the eastern seaboard with the creation of new cities in the central and western parts of the country.

She added there was a need to avoid the urban sprawl of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

"Is Beijing energy efficient? The answer is no. It is a city that has developed over many years and hasn't been planned around energy efficiency, " she said.

"Today if you have a piece of land and are going to build a new city, there are tools out there to make sure that it is built around its energy and water needs. Everything can be integrated so much better."

British author Jacques said it was important to understand how far China had traveled on the urbanization journey. In 1949 at the birth of New China it only had five cities with more than one million population.

"China is currently either at the end of the beginning stage or, at best, the beginning of the middle stage of urbanization," he said

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He added that megacities offered a solution because of the land scarcity in China compared with other countries.

"When the United States developed land was never an issue. The United States today is only a quarter as densely populated as China. You need to concentrate people to accommodate the numbers of people," he said.

Prof Lu at Peking University believes urbanization and the growth of megacities will be the engine of economic growth for the Chinese economy in the coming decades.

"It will be a process that will help drive the economy forward to the next stage as we leave the current economic crisis behind," he said.

 

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