Original: an Aoki source official account: distant Aoki has been authorized to reprint
Reduction development, a brand new term.
Recently, Beijing announced that it would reduce the amount of development. In the future, it will not add any new construction land, but will demolish 200million square meters of illegal construction land, and reduce the amount of urban and rural construction land by 110 square kilometers.
Meanwhile, compared with 2014, the population of Beijing will decrease by 15%.
From the area of construction land to the population, it is called reduction development.
Throughout the history of urban development in China and the history of global urban development, these are new terms that have never been seen before.
No city has ever done this, and Beijing is the first.
Why reduce development?
Beijing is a megacity in China, and all the megacities in the world have a characteristic, that is, it is becoming larger and larger, constantly sucking the population of small and medium-sized cities.
Modern economic society is based on division of labor and cooperation. Before the Internet era, division of labor and cooperation first need to meet and negotiate.
The more populated cities, the less difficult it will be for you to find partners, and the lower the cost of division of labor and cooperation.
Compared with small cities, the production cost of megacities is significantly lower, while the wages provided to outstanding talents are higher.
Therefore, population and resources are bound to be concentrated in megacities again, which is an irreversible economic trend and a manifestation of efficiency.
If this is the case, the emergence of mega cities is a good thing. It would be better if the population of the whole country were concentrated in one city. It would be most convenient for everyone to meet and communicate.
However, when a large number of people gather in megacities, it will lead to a serious slum problem, which occurs in almost all major cities in the world, especially in developing countries.
For example, slums in Brazil.
For example, the slums of Mumbai, India.
For example, the slums in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
The reason for this problem is that the speed of population influx exceeds the speed of housing construction.
Adding 1million people to the population is not just a matter of adding 1million people on paper. You need to build a house for 1million people. This is a very huge project and requires a lot of investment.
Besides the houses of 1million people, you also need to build a large number of supporting roads, subways, shopping malls, hospitals, police stations, fire stations, etc., which require a lot of money and resources.
The newcomers attracted by the high salary can not afford the money, and the state will not be able to mobilize so many resources to build new towns for a while.
I want to come, but I have no money, so I can only build some cheap slums to live in.
It is simple, without supporting facilities, and it is very difficult to deal with once it is formed.
It is not only the scar of the city, but also the scar of the new urban residents. They face the huge gap between the slums and the downtown every day, forming a huge psychological gap and brewing a lot of dissatisfaction.
In addition to slums, the urban carrying capacity of megacities should also be considered.
Theoretically, if you concentrate the people of the whole country in one city, the efficiency can be maximized. But have you ever considered whether the environment of this city can carry the population of the whole country.
Although the strength of modern countries is far stronger than that of ancient countries, it is impossible to concentrate the population of the whole country in the same city.
There is a limit to the carrying population per unit area, and it is impossible to increase infinitely.
The density of permanent residents in Beijing has exceeded 20000 people / km2, which is a very outrageous figure, more than seven times that of Washington, D.C.
Therefore, it has brought a very serious load pressure problem. Beijingers can’t shake the license plate number and are crowded into meat cakes by subway. Water resources are overwhelmed. This is just a drop in the ocean of disadvantages.
Beijing’s unit population density has reached the human limit and cannot be increased any more. If you want to increase the population, you can only increase the urban area.
But when it takes more than 5 hours to drive a city from the east to the west, is it meaningful to blindly increase the urban area?
It doesn’t take five hours to drive Hubei Province from the expressway.
When the city is big enough, there will be little communication between the East and west of the city, because it is faster to go directly out of the city to Tianjin.
When the people in the east of the city do not see the people in the west of the city once a year, they are only in the name of a city and will not improve efficiency.
This is the theoretical expansion limit of megacities.
The most appropriate size of a megacity is significantly lower than this limit.
In addition, when a large number of people flow into megacities, it means that a large number of people flow out of small and medium-sized cities.
Indeed, the competitiveness of small and medium-sized cities is far inferior to that of megacities in terms of efficiency and cost.
However, the national population is evenly and reasonably distributed in all large, medium and small cities, which is very good for the country as a whole.
Detroit, USA, was once a very beautiful city.
But now, the factory in this city has become like this.
The “small villa” in this city has become like this.
It is not uncommon for small villas to end up like this. In many rural areas in China, you can see that many independent houses have become deserted. This is the inevitable outcome of being bled by megacities.
Detroit is not a country, it is a city, so it is very shocking.
The once glorious central station is full of weeds and no one takes care of it.
Detroit is not a resource-based city, but a former American automobile center. It is a factory with good transportation and environment.
Theoretically, it can be used in many industries.
But the competition between cities is the same as that between companies. The strong are always strong and the weak are always weak.
Everyone is willing to go to a well-developed city to add icing on the cake. No one is willing to go to a declining city to provide timely help.
Once your economy collapses, no one wants to go again, and if no one wants to go, you will be even more unable to get up, forming a vicious circle.
Such a city itself is valuable and has good natural conditions. It is a waste of resources to decay like this.
From the perspective of the country as a whole, it is not a good thing, so the country should stop this kind of behavior in order to maximize the overall national strength.
Therefore, in recent years, China has gone against the law, actively regulated and restricted the development of first tier cities.
In theory, the larger the city, the faster the population growth, because everyone wants to go to such a city.
However, in recent years, China’s second tier cities have risen. Cities such as Hefei, Wuhan and Hangzhou have a much faster population growth rate than those in the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, which can not be explained by general laws.
This is the active regulation of the state.
Among them, Beijing’s suppression of scale is the most severe.
Beijing is the political center of China, but it is also the economic center of the whole North.
The political center itself will bring a lot of population, the economic center will bring a lot of population, and Beijing’s water resources pressure is also very large.
Therefore, among the first tier cities, Beijing has the strongest driving force to reduce the size of the city.
In 2015, Beijing put forward the “ceiling” of 23million people to actively limit the soaring urban scale.
In 2016, with the introduction of the points settlement system in Beijing, it became increasingly difficult to obtain Beijing hukou.
In 2017, the central government decided to build xiong’an, a brand-new city, to ease all the “non capital functions” of Beijing to this city.
Since the beginning of this year, housing prices around Beijing have peaked and dropped sharply.
The housing price around Beijing in 2022 is about half of that in 2017. The down payment has long been lost. Many people are even willing to give away their houses for free. They just want someone to take away the loan.
There are many people who do not want to sell. They think that if they fall too much, they will always rise. They think that if they fall too much, there will always be no foam. They are still struggling.
Now I tell you that although the area around Beijing has fallen a lot, the foam is not small at all. If the first tier cities plummet in the future, the housing prices in the area around Beijing will plummet again on the basis of the current prices.
It will not rebound, nor will it resist falling.
Because the population is gone, the population of Beijing is gone. How can we get around Beijing.
At the beginning, I thought that the housing price around Beijing would rise. I just thought that so many people would rush into Beijing, and Beijing could not live in Beijing, so I had to live in Beijing. Even if Beijing expanded outside, I could only bring the area around Beijing into Beijing, so buying a house around Beijing early would surely make a fortune.
But now, on the basis of five years’ population growth, Beijing has directly proposed to reduce the population by 15%. When I saw this news, I immediately thought of the housing price around Beijing.
It’s hopeless. I have to fall.
With this news, I guess that xiong’an will be built soon, and the economic enterprises in Beijing will be able to move slowly in the next few years.
Once the economic enterprises pass, the jobs will pass, and the population can only follow.
At that time, a lot of houses will be vacant in Beijing.
If you don’t sell it, you can at least rent it, but not so many people rent it.
As for Huanjing, no one will rent it.
At that time, we will find that although the area around Beijing is close to Beijing, it is only a prefecture level city, or even a small county. You can’t assume that it will become Beijing in the future.
Reducing development is a major innovation. If it can be achieved, it can pave a new way for China’s urbanization.
If Beijing’s reduction is proved to be beneficial to the overall economy, Shanghai and Shenzhen will soon “reduce” the population to second tier cities and create more than a dozen new first tier cities.
After these new first tier cities also reach the upper limit of scale, use the same method to limit their scale, and then let the population concentrate in the third tier cities to support a number of new mega cities.
In this way, in the end, China will have a large number of megacities, which will be evenly distributed throughout the country and make use of all places with good environment, rather than concentrating on a few big cities in disorder.
Theoretically, this can maximize the overall resource efficiency of the country, give consideration to efficiency and fairness, and achieve common prosperity.
No one in the world has ever done this, but it is feasible in theory, so we conducted this experiment in xiong’an new area, and then Beijing took the lead in “reducing development”.
When Beijing succeeds, other cities will follow up.
I hope that Beijing will succeed in verifying the theory with practice, because this is the fastest way to achieve common prosperity while ensuring efficiency.
There is no way to bring everyone to Beijing to become a Beijinger, but we can build dozens of cities in the country that are no less than Beijing, so that people can enjoy the same urban treatment without going to Beijing, so as to achieve common prosperity and eliminate urban differences.
This is the significance of the “reduction development” experiment in Beijing.