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What would happen if your city suddenly lost half of its population?
This is actually not a fantasy, and there is no need to ask Thanos to snap his fingers, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta before and after the Spring Festival have the most right to speak.
I remember that some Shanghai natives would run to the local popular social platform when the Spring Festival approached, and sighed with a relaxed mood: Shanghai seems to have returned to the past. And add some pictures of the empty streets.
But after saying this, these natives will have to worry about the next few days of life.
Barbershops and breakfast stalls are getting fewer and fewer, takeaways can't be called, car wash prices are skyrocketing, and part-time workers can't be found even if you raise the price. The streets are empty, life is empty, and everything that was easily available has to be solved by yourself.
Around the Spring Festival of 2011, I lived alone in Liuli, Shanghai, and I was also worried about these crimes every day, but fortunately there was a nearby home in Sanjiangyuan, which became my canteen for the Spring Festival until I ate ramen out of the psychological shadow.
Fortunately, the Spring Festival always passes, and slowly, the order returns to the past, and life is convenient again. It's just that people don't sigh anything anymore, as if nothing had happened.
But our thinking can continue – what if this continues for a while? Will your lifestyle change drastically?
Breakfast can only go to the supermarket to buy frozen food, vegetables, fruits and meat and poultry prices have soared, try to cook their own meals, try to wash their own cars, and queue up in front of the few affordable barbershops left. You can no longer buy time with a small amount of money, as you once did, or you can only buy the original service with a higher expenditure.
In short, the cost of living will inevitably rise, and the convenience of life will disappear. The fundamental reason for all this lies in the loss of the original urban ecology after the disappearance of the floating population.
You can think of cities as natural-like ecosystems, and the disappearance of any group of people may cause drastic changes in ecosystems, just as the disappearance of a large number of species will inevitably endanger the maintenance of the entire natural ecology.
Those seemingly inconspicuous roadside stalls, waiters, cleaning aunts, takeaway workers, etc., have long been integrated into the urban ecosystem, and it is also because of their existence that the urban ecology you experience and experience can be maintained.
Photographed by Frank Chen
You can eat breakfast for less than ten yuan; you can go out of the office and taste the food of the whole neighborhood; you can spend 20 yuan to 40 yuan for a haircut; you can spend less than 100 yuan to let the cleaning aunt make your home look new; you can also ask an aunt to manage the children and clean up the housework, and you can go out to do beauty, go shopping and watch movies, ask your girlfriend to drink afternoon tea in the Internet celebrity shop, or find a decent job to expand your social circle.
Each city can have a different rhythm of life because of the existence of foreign populations. Even the rich in the city need to have a nanny and housekeeper to take care of their lives. And these people usually come from foreign populations as well.
Why are you talking about this topic today? Because it is related to the next very important policy of the moment, that is, the organic renewal of the city.
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Obviously, in order to truly realize the organic renewal of the city, we must first thoroughly understand what is called the organic nature of the city.
According to the natural sciences, organic refers to an organic solvent that allows hydrogen atoms to be attached to carbon atoms. More generally, it refers to the universal association that exists between things.
The different groups of people in the city can be regarded as the organic solvent that connects everything in nature, and it is the existence of this "crowd solvent" that allows the ecology of the city to exist, which is the basis of urban organicity and makes urban life incomparably wonderful.
Let's do a simple deduction.
As mentioned earlier, those who stay in the city usually engage in goods and services that urban people do not want to participate in, but can provide convenience for urban people, including a variety of low-cost daily necessities, domestic services, transportation services, and various recreational activities.
Urban people buy these goods and services at lower prices and have more time to spare. For example, the time to cook, the time to walk, the time to clean, the time to take care of the children. Then devote the rest of the time to the activities that interest you, so as to lead to a more exciting lifestyle and more industries.
For example, some people can stay at home to play mobile games, which has spawned the online game industry; those who love to be lively can go clubbing and K songs, which has spawned the bar industry and the entertainment industry; love literature and art to watch various exhibitions and dramas, which has promoted the prosperity of the cultural industry; and can also spend more time traveling, which has promoted various cultural tourism industries.
The more diverse the people in the city, the more diverse the services provided, such as a large chemical reaction, urban life due to the joint participation of different groups of people, constantly catalyzing and deriving more lifestyles, the urban economy is more active, the streets of the city are prosperous, and thus attract more people to the city.
Why is the more super-city it is more attractive? Why do Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, New York, London, Paris survive for so long? There are thousands of examples that can be given, which ultimately lie in the diversity of the populations of these cities and the creation of rich and active organic nature of cities.
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Therefore, the real urban organic renewal is to achieve organic renewal on the basis of maintaining the diversity of urban populations and without destroying the original ecology of the city. Rather than simply organic renewal of urban functions.
So how do you do that? What behaviors should I avoid in updates? This is another huge topic, which is related to the multiplicity of urban ecology - in addition to the ecology formed around the urban indigenous people, there is also an urban sub-ecology.
This ecology is linked to a new question – how do those unknown migrant workers live in the same city as you?
Obviously, most of them have mediocre incomes, and some of them need to be sent back to their hometowns. But they can still live in the same city as you, which obviously shows that your city has another organic ecosystem.
The answer is the urban village, a seemingly more inconspicuous existence.
Around 2010, I had a friend from Ningbo who was a local native who lived in Songzhao Bridge. At that time, the Songzhao Bridge City Village spanned Tiantong North Road, more than twice as large as it is today.
My friend lives on the west side of Tiantong Road, and this area now has a tall name, The World. Ten years ago, it was a large area of low-rise houses, and if the local natives had free space, they would convert the houses into group rentals. A small studio is cheapest for only 200 a month.
Just like my songzhaoqiao indigenous friend, his family has more than a dozen group rental houses, and the rent ranges from 200 to 400. His tenants speak the dialect of the south and the north of the world, engage in various inexplicable occupations, and interpret their lives in a hidden order.
In addition to cheap rents, they also have ways to push the cost of living to the limit.
For example, in the songzhaoqiao urban village, they can buy pots and pans that are cheaper than Pinduoduo, eat mobile food stalls with five yuan pipes, wash a few yuan once in the bathhouse, and even physical needs can be solved by only twenty or thirty yuan.
And those that provide these kinds of services, they also have low-cost supply chains. The most core of them is in the three cities of Nanmen, which have been relocated. There are incredibly cheap business appliances there, and at a price of almost 1/10 of a regular store, you can get all kinds of facilities with decent performance.
This low-cost supply of daily necessities can also include transportation.
In the Sangjia plate of Jiangnan before the demolition, there was a super urban village no less than Songzhao Bridge, which had the most active used car trading market in Ningbo, as well as other related industrial chains, such as automobile maintenance, transaction loans, old car refurbishment, and parts imitation.
For a while, Ningbo was almost the city with the highest concentration of wading vehicle trade in the country, and the Sangjia in Jiangnan was "indispensable". This huge industrial chain has also created a low second-hand car transaction price and an extremely rich vehicle category, which is supplied to people from all walks of life.
In this way, from all levels of food, clothing, shelter and transportation, this group organically forms another set of hidden urban living ecosystems in the city. And because of the organic operation of this ecosystem, these foreign populations can stay in the city and smoothly participate in the daily operation of the city.
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But this clearly places higher demands on our city managers. Because this kind of management involves sociology, social psychology, humanism, class analysis, etc., and these disciplines are seriously lacking in traditional Chinese urban management and planning.
In a recent book on urban planning outside the country that I read, I saw that the author analyzed the reasons for the crime rate from the characteristics of the neighborhood, and he concluded by citing real cases that the ideal neighborhood design helps to reduce the crime rate.
In another book, the author makes a systematic analysis of the ethnic structure, belief structure, and gender structure of the neighborhood, and then gives a reasonable block design plan and an urban supporting supply plan.
These studies actually show that urban research, first of all, should be the study of urban populations, followed by urban design, which is not to see the city as a collection of inanimate buildings and streets, but an organic urban ecology.
This is undoubtedly a completely new field of urban studies, even abroad, a young discipline. So much so that in my thinking, I often ask myself whether the source of this statement is sufficient, whether the basis for the conclusion is reliable, whether it is too radical or ill-conceived.
But this kind of thinking is really interesting—all the knowledge of people can be interesting.
Previously, I also heard many people in Ningbo say that although the statistical permanent population is increasing, in actual feelings, the activity of some neighborhoods seems to be decreasing. As a result, the number of people taking the bus has not increased, and the street shops in some neighborhoods have become more and more withered.
Is this also because although the permanent population is increasing, it is also due to the large-scale disappearance of urban villages, resulting in the loss of floating population?
An official involved in the demolition work in Yinzhou District has similar concerns to mine about issues such as these. In the progress of his work, he also discovered the inextricable association of outsiders with urban life, and discovered the impact of the disappearance of these populations on the vitality of cities.
Of course, these conclusions still need to be supported by more data, such as the number of urban management population, the average rent of neighborhood shops, the change of the actual population of the community, the change of labor costs, the change of the trajectory of crowd activities, and so on.
I hope that every city will think seriously about the above issues. Because this is related to the current urban renewal, whether it can really achieve organic renewal and whether it can not harm the natural growth of the city.
Perhaps we can set up a simple principle of controlling the cost of urban renewal, because the excessive cost of urban renewal (or urban development cost) is bound to raise the cost of survival of urban people.
To be more specific, it is to avoid drastic updates in some already vibrant neighborhoods. First fully study the sources of plate vitality, and then make a moderately limited update. So that the city continues to maintain its original vitality.
But such an operation will also encounter resistance from the current logic of urban development.
The development logic with the balance of funds as the core element makes urban planning a rigid set of calculation formulas. It starts from the elimination of block styles that can quickly achieve surplus, so it constantly increases the plot ratio and caters to the developer's land acquisition habits, and puts the human dimension on the second seat.
While it's good to think about running a city, it must be built on a long-term doctrine to achieve sustainable and growable urban dynamism. Instead of letting the government only play the role of land operator, it is bound to make the city gradually lose its former temperature and let the city lose its real mastery.
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Originally published on the public account [Listening to geography channel]