Better City, Better Life: A Window into the Chinese City

Last summer Shanghai hosted the World Expo, a lavish party meant to put the city on the global stage. While Beijing had the 2008 Olympics, Shanghai had expo. Attracting over 73 million visitors and included the participation of 192 countries it was the largest expo yet held. The theme of this gathering was ‘Better City, Better Life.’

As part of this theme Expo organizers created four themed pavilions dealing with different aspects of the urban experience throughout the world. Two of the pavilions dealt with sustainability and energy, using enormous visual displays to convey consumption quantities and technological fixes. A third pavilion celebrated the persona of cities using short films of different cities around the world; including a campy clip of people dog sledding through Edmonton. Perhaps the most effective pavilion however was the fourth one, titled Urbanian. This pavilion took four families from different parts of the world and compared their experiences with their city.

In the line for this pavilion visitors could answer a small electronic survey kiosk asking about your experiences from the city in which you lived. The results to this inconspicuous survey ended up being a fascinating window in the lived reality of Chinese urbanism (or at least those Chinese fortunate enough to attend Expo). The survey had been taken by about 5000 people before me, most of whom were likely mainland Chinese. The results the surveyed showed revealed a few interesting aspects of Chinese urbanism and how the Chinese feel about their rapidly evolving cities.

For starters, the survey results showed the obvious fact that many people have come to Chinese cities only within the past decade. Keeping in mind that the survey was about ‘your city’ and not Shanghai in particular it was impressive to see that almost half of the respondents said they had come to the city in past 10 years.

While China’s cities are definitely attracting newcomers, their occupants are far from satisfied with the quality of life they are finding. Only 28% of respondents said they were very satisfied with the quality of life in their city while a full 25% said they were not at all satisfied. In terms of health and education respondents were also generally dissatisfied. Only 20% said their city offered good and affordable medical care and only 34% were satisfied with available education for their children.

Although it may be economic opportunity drawing people into the cities, the survey also indicated that respondents were not faced with an abundance of work with 81% saying it was either ‘not easy’ or ‘very difficult’ to find a job.

There were however a few places where Chinese cities scored very well. Over three quarters of people called their city safe and 52% said their housing was much better today then when they were young. Chinese cities also score well in places you wouldn’t expect, such as environment and green space. Here, only 17% of people called their home city’s environment ‘unhealthy.’ To put this in context, a tour guide in Shanghai was happy to tell us that pollution had improved so much during Expo that there had even been a few days of blue sky.

Finally, there were two very telling areas where the results were very different than what would likely be found in Canada. The first was multigenerational homes. According to the survey 41% of respondents said they live with three generations in the same home. I would expect this number to be much lower in North America. Secondly, transportation time was also very different. The survey showed 64% of respondents lived within half an hour work. Contrast this to the average GTA commute time that Statistics Canada estimated in 2005 to be 79 minutes.

China’s booming cities may well become the incubators of urban innovation for the 21^st century.  The lives of the people living in these cities and their perception of how well their city serves them will drive their evolution in the future.

Look for more about the Shanghai Expo 2010 in the upcoming issue of Spacing Magazine.

Photo by Marcus Bowman