Metropolises now too big for their own good

Air pollution, traffic congestion, high realty prices... one after another, the problems every resident in Beijing faces have come up for discussion at the ongoing annual meeting of the Beijing municipal people's congress.

Actually, what Beijingers are enduring is typical urban angst, something that has been experienced by people in almost all metropolises as they have expanded. However, when looking at the problems accompanying the rise of China's megacities attention has largely focused on the consumption of energy and resources and the environmental consequences of their rapid expansion. Yet underlying all these problems is the pressure of their ever-growing populations. Too many people are being drawn to the bigger cities in search of a better life. Beijing's population has grown continuously from 2004 to the end of 2012, and it is now 21 million, despite the aim to control the population within 18 million by 2020.

Aside from the highly visible problems, the rapid expansion in the population of the big cities has also caused less visible problems. For example, Beijing consumes 3.6 billion cubic meters of water every year, but its supply is only 2.1 billion cu m; the capital's annual per capita water resources are less than 100 cu m. According to the UN standard, an annual per capita water supply below 500 cu m annually is sufficient to define "absolute water scarcity".