A few days ago, Fatty Wang from Beijing called and said that a young man took a vacuum cleaner to vacuum the streets of Beijing for a month, and then made a brick with the dust he absorbed. After hearing such news, in addition to feeling a little dark humor, people can't help but fall into contemplation.
Behind the appearance of this incident is the "urban disease" that is often mentioned. Before we know it, the city we live in is sick.
The city is no longer the city it used to be. Although the people are still those people and the streets are still those streets, the winters are getting colder and the summers are hot and seem a bit long. Since the mid-1990s, the climate has gradually become abnormal. This small town built along the river is no longer as bright as spring in all seasons. The sky is always gray, and the roads are getting wider and wider, but it is becoming more and more congested. During the rainy season, occasionally some low-lying areas are hit by rain.
After moving several times, there are fewer and fewer familiar neighbors, and the corridors are always empty, as if people have become tired birds huddled in the bedroom and living room, and there is no longer a comparison between parents and distant relatives.
In the professional definition, the so-called "urban disease" refers to a series of social problems caused by the concentration of the population in large cities. Population expansion, traffic congestion, environmental degradation, housing shortage, and employment difficulties, these urban diseases will aggravate the urban burden, restrict the development of urbanization, and cause physical and mental diseases of the citizens.
In particular, the travel time in cities is long. Due to traffic congestion and management problems, the city will lose a lot of wealth, virtually wasting energy and resources, and is not conducive to "the smooth development of the city". Many people must have a deep understanding of the anxiety and helplessness we feel when we travel every morning. Although many cities have taken measures such as building overpasses, BRT express bus routes, underground tunnels, subways, and intercity light rails, the results are not effective. Ideal. With the increasing scale of cities, there are social problems such as population increase, shortage of water and electricity, traffic congestion, and environmental degradation that are common in modern large and medium-sized cities, as well as the physical and mental diseases that urban people are susceptible to caused by the above problems. These problems and contradictions To a certain extent, it restricts the development of the city, aggravates the burden of the city government, and puts the city government into a dilemma.
In the past 100 years, with global warming as the main feature, the global climate and environment have undergone major changes: shortage of water resources, ecosystem degradation, increased soil erosion, sharp decline in biodiversity, depletion of the ozone layer, and changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
According to the prediction of the Intergovernmental Committee on Climate Change, the world will continue to warm at a faster rate in the future, and the temperature will increase by 1.4°C to 5.8°C in the next 100 years, which will bring more serious impacts on the global environment, such as crop yield reduction, disease and insect pests. The frequency and rate of damage will increase significantly, water scarcity will worsen, etc. Environmental pollution has turned cities from traditional public health problems (such as water-borne diseases, malnutrition, lack of medical services, etc.) to modern health crises, including air pollution caused by industry and traffic, noise, vibration, and diseases caused by mental stress. The impact of environmental pollution on the urban economy is very large. The World Bank has estimated that the health cost and loss of productivity caused by pollution are equivalent to 1% to 5% of GDP.
Speaking of which, I am reminded of some things that happened when I was in Europe a few years ago. During my stay in London for half a month, I encountered many traffic jams. The longest one was sitting in a taxi and staying in the choking car exhaust on the street for more than three hours. Against the background of the harmonious and beautiful city of Barcelona, he was robbed twice behind the hotel where he temporarily lived.
On the surface, these phenomena are just a small episode in life and travel, but behind the story are a series of hidden worries brought about by the rapid urbanization process. The deterioration of urban traffic conditions and the collapse of public security are rooted in the pathological development of cities caused by population expansion and uneven distribution of resources in the process of urbanization.
For more than a century, urbanization has become an unstoppable trend in the development of European and American countries. It is surging and caught off guard, causing a series of various social problems before people have taken various countermeasures. Especially in the late 19th century, the explosive growth of urban population in Western Europe and North America brought a series of serious social problems, and urban life began to undergo qualitative changes. This phenomenon has aroused the vigilance of many scholars and experts, and a large number of sociologists and economists have begun to study several problems in the process of urbanization. and improving the ecological environment; the second is the urban community, the social organization of the city, the way of life and the impact of social changes on the psychology; the third is the countermeasures and planning of urban problems, the theory and practice of urban redevelopment, etc.; the fourth is urbanization and modern life The relationship between mode and industrialization.
These theoretical studies have not only played an important role in curing the worsening urban diseases in Western Europe and North America since the 19th century, accelerating the construction of urban networks, and exerting urban functions, but also in the urbanization of the vast third world countries and developing countries as much as possible. Avoiding mistakes is also a major contribution.
Urbanization is not only a historical progress, but also inevitably brings certain urban diseases. This is not contradictory, as is the case with any new thing. The negative factors and negative effects of urbanization are objective facts, and the only correct attitude is to face it and try to overcome or alleviate it.
Judging from the historical lessons of western urbanization, there are many problems, some of which are basically universal and extensive. While some problems are not unique to cities, cities expose them more fully.
For example, urban villages in our country have many similarities with the slums in the 19th century in the strange state of urban villages, both of which are low-cost residential areas for floating population dominated by urban farmers. This paper briefly compares the slum problem in western countries before and after the 19th century with the current domestic urban village problem, and points out that the urban village problem will have a long-term nature, and social problems and floating population problems are the keys to solving the urban village problem.
Slums, also known as slums (corresponding to English as slum or squatter), are defined by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme as "high-density population settlements characterized by low standards and poverty". Its basic characteristics are: high-density population; low-standard living environment; population poverty.
According to this definition, the former Vice Minister of Construction Qiu Baoxing once pointed out: "Cities are surrounded by 'urban villages and cluttered buildings on the fringes. These places are the slums of China's slums'." Urban villages are low-standard high-density residential areas. At present, most urban villages in China have a building density of 90%, a floor area ratio of 6, and a spacing of less than 2 m. The ventilation, lighting and fire protection of these residences do not meet the basic requirements, but they gather a large number of people.
According to the definition of the United Nations Human Settlements Program, urban villages in my country can be regarded as slums. Most of the residents of urban villages are low-income migrants, mainly migrant workers. In many villages, there are tens of thousands or even tens of thousands of residents living in the residential area with only a few hundred to more than 1,000 household registrations. Most of the migrant workers have per capita wages. The income is maintained below the poverty line, and they can only barely get enough food and clothing, belonging to the bottom of the modern urban society. Urban villages are the dead end of urban management in my country, where people of all kinds are mixed, public security and environmental problems are very prominent, and they have typical characteristics of clutter.
As a kind of residential space differentiation phenomenon in the early stage of urbanization, the slums in western countries that were in the process of urbanization around the 19th century had similar functions to urban villages in our country, so the two have strong comparability.
Britain in the 19th century also produced a large number of slums. Under the initial big monopoly economic structure of the capitalist country, some land and construction-related businessmen, especially real estate developers, intensively built a large number of two-row houses with front windows and no rear in order to obtain high profits. Residential area with windows. The shortcomings of this kind of residential building, which is called "back-to-back house", are extremely obvious: the air is not convective, the distance is small, the municipal public facilities are extremely imperfect, and the average living room is 7 people, and the conditions are extremely poor.
France, which claims to be at the forefront of the world's urban development, until the end of the 19th century, "about one-third of Parisians lived in this crowded and dirty environment, without sanitary facilities, without lighting and without enough fresh air".
In the process of urbanization in western countries, Howard's "Garden City" theory and the urban zoning method modeled by Germany were introduced to various countries and gave birth to the satellite city theory, using express roads to link satellite cities and the main urban area. Traffic, living and working places Long-distance separation, long-distance separation of shopping places and home environment, long-distance separation of industrial areas and commercial areas, administrative areas and living areas. The suburbanization movement resulting from the combination of these theories and modern modes of transportation has resulted in the decline of many urban centers into slums.
In this regard, the famous American scholar Warner pointed out: "The central event from 1870 to 1890 was the division of the city into two parts: the inner city and the outer city; a slum city and a suburban city; City and a city of success and retirement."
The main measures taken by the domestic government can be roughly divided into three categories:
Category 1: The government directly invests in the renovation of urban villages. For example, a large number of shanty towns are being renovated in full swing in large and medium-sized cities in China. These projects are directly injected by the government, and construction units are recruited in the form of public bidding. It is also the main achievement project of the government.
The second category: transforming urban villages with the help of real estate projects through market-oriented operations. Taking real estate projects as an introduction, attracting funds to carry out large-scale urban village renovations. This approach is most typical of the “developer-led” renovation model in Zhuhai, that is, the government allocates land parcels, and developers invest according to the city’s overall planning. Planning, independently undertake demolition and resettlement, relocation construction and commercial housing construction, etc. During the entire transformation process, the government does not directly invest any funds, but promotes the enthusiasm of developers through market operation methods such as land price reduction and exemption.
The third category: Utilize the existing household registration system of the country, borrow some advantages of urban household registration compared with rural household registration, and indirectly promote the urbanization of the population of urban villages, the shareholding of village collective economy, and the reform of villager identity and economic mode at a lower economic cost. Urban Village Reconstruction. The government has taken various measures centered on the reform of household registration and the transfer of collective land to the state, and has incorporated urban villages into the urban unitary management system. The most prominent example in this category in China is Shenzhen. Shenzhen began to implement comprehensive urbanization in 2001, and transformed all the registered population in the city into urban residents in 2004. This measure cut off the origin of urban villages. It is possible to avoid further deterioration of the phenomenon of urban villages.
Compared with the measures to clear the slums in the West in the 19th century, the measures for the reconstruction of urban villages in China are relatively simple, mainly in the following aspects:
1. There is a lack of legislation. At present, there is no legislation specifically for urban villages in China, and there is a lack of unified legal norms. Therefore, there is no corresponding legal basis for the generation, restraint and transformation of urban villages. In the transformation of urban villages, there are a large number of disputes and social problems. There is no strict legal guidance on the effect.
2. Although it is not uncommon for the government to directly invest in the renovation of urban villages, the construction of public housing in many cities is insufficient, especially in some economically developed second- and third-tier cities, such as Jingzhou and Xiangfan in Hubei.
3. The participation and cooperation of social groups are lacking, and the main factor is the drive of economic interests or the pursuit of maximizing the economic benefits of enterprises. Market-oriented economic policies have dominated, resulting in the shrinking and deformed development of people's values. Therefore, at present, the social groups participating in the transformation of domestic urban villages are mainly real estate companies and village collective joint-stock companies, with almost no participation of non-profit developers and non-governmental organizations.
On the other hand, in the process of clearing slums from the middle of the 19th century to the early 20th century in the West, although various measures were taken, due to ignoring social problems and simply starting with solving the housing problem, it took 100 years to basically solve the housing problem, and the phenomenon of slums. It has been retained to this day and has not been completely cured.
Under the current domestic premise of "creating harmony and maintaining stability", we need to re-examine the pros and cons of urban villages and the current transformation methods, and face the problem of floating population in the process of urbanization from the standpoint of building a harmonious society. Starting from the fundamental interests and vital interests of the people, it is a low-income community that provides low-cost housing for the urban floating population in a practical and stable manner.
Therefore, in the transformation process of urban villages, the leader must have a clear theme: the purpose of transformation should not seek the location interests of urban villages, but to earnestly and earnestly for the low-income floating population who are vulnerable groups in the urban population. Living quality for welfare, guaranteeing their basic living rights and living and living conditions in urban life.
In the process of urban village reconstruction, it is a misunderstanding to ignore social problems and the hasty reconstruction of low-income floating population. This kind of thinking mode and practice based on economic interests may make a city pay a higher price in the near future. .
Driven by the process of urbanization, a modern urban system will inevitably be formed. This system is mainly determined by the economic network, that is, the movement of information flow, material flow, and currency flow along the economic network. The problem of urban villages is only one of several problems in cities. China is a developing country, and it has passed the initial stage of urbanization development. In the near future, it will face the peak period of urbanization development. From the perspective of politics and economy, we should make early preparations for urban diseases that are about to occur in urban development and those that have already appeared.
China is a big country with huge regional differences. Therefore, the scale of urbanization adopted in different regions and regions cannot remain the same. Especially in economically underdeveloped regions and ethnic minority regions, the control of the urbanization process and the occurrence of urban diseases in specific regions are all important factors. There should be preparatory measures in advance. We must formulate a correct urbanization strategy on the premise of following common laws and common trends. We must earnestly learn from the experience and lessons of urbanization in various countries, strive to avoid detours, avoid the negative factors of urbanization as much as possible, and prevent problems before they occur.
The progress of urbanization should be determined by the speed of economic development, but we cannot blindly use and artificially speed up the urbanization process to drive domestic demand and seek high GDP factors for infrastructure construction. Such cities will eventually reap the consequences and become "ghost cities" everywhere in the world. ", "City of Evil", "City of Crime", etc.
Take a city in Myanmar as an example. Due to the abundance of mineral resources around the city, the government moved a large number of people from the mining area to the urban area in order to accelerate the urban economic development, and used the method of providing long-term minimum living guarantees to free up the land in the mining area. However, due to the chaotic development and disorderly mining of the mining area for a long time, some areas around the city have been seriously polluted, and the heavy metal pollution of mountains, forests and cultivated land has been serious, and a large number of uninhabited areas and dead areas have been formed. The population of the mining area has moved to the new urban area, but the work, life and residence of these new urban residents are a huge problem. In addition, after the state requires the closure of disorderly mining in small mining areas, the life of these people who originally lived in the mining areas is even more difficult, and it also brings huge troubles to the city. In China, similar examples abound, for example, there is a similar phenomenon in the Thirty-Six Bays of Xiangjiang River, a well-known heavy metal pollution area.
The development of cities is an inevitable trend of social development, which is an irresistible law of social development. Therefore, scientifically developing cities in accordance with economic laws and social status quo is a major social and economic proposition.
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