The scale of Beijing’s metropolitan area is massive. Since the 1990s, the aggregation of huge numbers of people, buildings, vehicles and companies has posed a challenge for urban planners: Striking a balance between centralization and decentralization in city development.

In 1998, two decades after the country adopted its reform and opening-up policy, Beijing’s population surpassed 12.5 million, GDP hit 216.9 billion yuan ($26.2 billion) and its urban area expanded from 100 square kilometers to 488 sq km. The rapid development drained residential buildings, increased urban density, burdened public transportation, and worsened traffic congestion and air pollution. It took around two hours for commuters living in the west of the city to get to work in the east side.

To tackle those problems, the city government took measures such as putting quotas on residential registration for migrants from other cities, building more residential neighborhoods, improving road networks, adding new lines to the subway system and encouraging factories to relocate away from the city. Building satellite cites and ring roads were main measures taken at the time.

Beijing administered six urban districts and 12 counties in 1998. The counties each had a population around 100,000 back then, yet if each had a population of 500,000, the total would be 6 million — equal to half of the city’s population at the time — which would contribute to decentralization and create a city layout that looked like a grape bush, with the counties being the fruit and the connecting roads being the vines.

The city then began building ring roads — it now has five — which made traffic much smoother and the connection between the downtown and surrounding counties more convenient.

However, the ring roads didn’t help form the decentralized layout as expected, but instead gathered more migrants and market resources in the center of the city. From the 13-km-diameter Third Ring Road to 50-km-diameter Sixth Ring Road, the construction enlarged the scale of Beijing, akin to an increasingly big pie. Once a ring road was completed, the built-up area alongside would rapidly become crowded with people who came to carry out economic activities and live, which then called for another ring road to facilitate traffic. As a result, the built-up area has been expanded to 1,960 sq km within the Sixth Ring Road.

Although it’s a good idea to develop satellite towns, the investment in infrastructure in satellite counties have not advanced the decentralization of Beijing and brought more people to counties and towns around Beijing. Apart from the districts and counties inside the Fifth Ring Road, the population of distant satellite counties and districts such as Miyun, Mentougou and Yanqing is still less than 400,000.

By the end of 2017, Beijing’s population exceeded 22 million, with most living in the central area within the Fifth Ring Road, with the built-up area covering nearly 1,700 sq km. Although urban infrastructure including housing, parks and roads has been improved with government support, the problem of over centralization in Beijing has not been slowed down.

There are many factors contributing to such situation, but two are most crucial. The market economy is the fundamental factor to the massive scale of Beijing, as the downtown holds lots of business opportunities. The closer people work to the downtown, the higher the land rent and the more the capital gains. That’s why urban construction (capital investment) flows to the center of the city.

For example, a house in downtown Beijing can sell for 60,000 to 100,000 yuan ($9,560 to $15,880) per square meter, while in suburban counties the house price is 20,000 yuan per sq m at most. As the infrastructure is more complete in downtown areas, people including immigrants from other cities tend to live there.

Transportation also counts. If the Beijing government had connected satellite towns and the urban central area via subway or railway in the ’80s and ’90s and provided convenient transportation, more people would choose to live in satellite towns, which would help decentralization. However, Beijing has put most capital into constructing metro lines in central areas over the past 20 years. For instance, the population of Tongzhou district increased from 610,000 to 1.37 million in the decade after the subway system reached the district. This indicates that constructing rail transit systems in districts and counties around a city is key to avoiding excessive density and aiding decentralization.

The author is former general director of policy at the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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