Don't transfer urban diseases to Tongzhou
- By Pan Jiahua
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E-mail China Daily, July 23, 2015
Beijing's new "subsidiary administrative center" should avoid the functional mistakes of mono-centric cities. For instance, municipal departments for urban landscaping, cultural construction and traffic management can be located in other development zones and ecological conservation areas of Beijing to prevent Tongzhou from overflowing.
Primary schools and secondary schools, for example, have to be built near residential areas for students' convenience, but high schools can come up farther away from administrative institutions and densely populated neighborhoods. And universities do not have to and should not be concentrated in the new downtown area of Tongzhou. Instead, they can be small townships in themselves like Stanford University in the United States and Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.
Likewise, Grade III hospitals, or the best-rated ones such as the Xiehe Hospital, can be shifted, thanks to the increasingly convenient transportation, to remoter suburbs to boost local development.
To prevent the critical "urban diseases" that the capital has suffered from for long, Tongzhou needs to adopt a chessboard-type urban management featuring clear-cut division of functions and benign integration.
But Tongzhou is not yet ready to shoulder all the responsibilities because of its dependence on the traditional urban areas. So it is more than necessary to straighten out a few key concepts to guide Tongzhou through its mission.
A subsidiary administrative center should be independent of boundaries not only in terms of space but also urban functions. It should not be simply an expansion of downtown Beijing. If Tongzhou, as Beijing's de facto subsidiary administrative center, is not able to provide local residents better education and medical treatment, they will continue to flock to the urban districts for them.
Moreover, Tongzhou's industrial potential lies not in manufacturing but high-end services. Given the lack of water sources in Beijing, it should accommodate companies specializing in industrial design and technological innovation that consume less energy and yield high outputs.
The author is director of the Institute of Urban and Environmental Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
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