Harmonious cities - UN-Habitat

COVER STORY China and India: a telling contrast
43 percent urban, India only 30 percent. The
rates of urban growth are 2.7 percent per year
in China (going down towards two percent)
and 2.4 percent in India (going up towards
2.6 percent). At the start of the reform, in
1985-90, the urban population of China was
growing at the very high pace of five percent
per year.
If China has enormously urbanised during
the last 20 years (in absolute terms the
number of urban residents doubled, from
288 to 577 million), India has also followed
the same universal trend, but at a slower pace
(urban increase from 205 to 350 million). In
2030, according to UN projections, China
should be 62 percent urban and India 41 percent.
China is likely to reach the 50 percent
urban threshold by 2016.
Main features of the urbanisation
process
As far as the size of large cities is concerned,
China and India are rather similar.
The two countries have indeed the same
number (eight) of cities of more than five million
people. In China they are in 2008: Shanghai
(15.3 million), Beijing (11.3), Guangzhou
(nine), Shenzhen (7.8), Tianjin (7.3), Hong
Kong (7.3), Wuhan (7.3) and Chongqing (6.6).
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WORLD
November 2008
In India, also in 2008: Mumbai (19.3), Delhi
(16), Kolkata (15), Chennai (7.3), Bangalore
(seven), Hyderabad (6.5), Ahmedabad (5.5)
and Pune (five million in 2010). The parallels
are striking: the two big ports in the
lead, followed by the two capitals. The figures
in parenthesis correspond to the physical
agglomerations (the only pertinent ones
for international comparisons) and are not
related to administrative boundaries, which
often include large rural territories (the Autonomous
Municipality of Chongqing which
gathers 32 million inhabitants over 82,300
km 2 — it is de facto a ‘small’ province – and
would be, by such an administrative definition,
“the second most populous city in the
world” after Tokyo!).
It should be noted that the eight largest
Indian cities are much better distributed on
the national territory than their seven largest
Chinese counterparts, all located in the
eastern coastal region with the exception of
Wuhan and Chongqing. In India the hexagon
Delhi – Kolkata – Chennai – Bangalore
– Mumbai – Ahmedabad nicely covers almost
the entire country.
In China, urbanisation intensity focuses
primarily on three eastern corridors:
those of the Bohai industrial region (Bei-
jing – Tianjin – Tangshan) in the north, of
the Changjiang/Yangtze delta (Shanghai –
Nanjing – Hangzhou) in the centre and of
the Zhujiang/Pearl River delta (Guangzhou
– Shenzhen – Hong Kong) in the south. We
may add two secondary corridors: the Shandong
peninsula and the Yangtze valley. The
extreme case of Shenzhen, a city whose population
increased tenfold in two decades,
illustrates the boom of the Special Economic
Tianjin, with 7.3 million people, is one of many Chinese cities that has urbanised dramatically in the last 20 years Ph o t o © tu d o u mA o
Zones and the magnitude of the migrations
to the coastal provinces since the beginning
of the economic reform in the 1980s. If
it were a separate country, the Pearl River
delta economic zone, with 65 million
people, would be the world’s 18 th -largest
economy and its 11 th -biggest exporter, ahead
of India. According to The Economist, it
has enjoyed an astonishing average annual
growth rate of 17 percent for the past
quarter century.
In 2008, China had 100 cities with populations
of one million or more, 140 cities
with more than 750,000 people and 670
cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants
while India counts only 35 million plus cities
(known as metro-cities), 57 cities above
750,000 inhabitants and 400 cities above
100,000 inhabitants.