Zhao Zheng: Creating High-Quality Urban Living Spaces
Cities are the vital spaces for the people’s happy life. The Central Urban Work Conference [1] held in July this year proposed to "strive to build comfortable and convenient livable cities," pointing out the direction and providing the fundamental guidance [2] for constructing high-quality urban living spaces. The Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Promoting High-Quality Urban Development further made systematic deployments for "creating high-quality urban living spaces." In the face of new situations and new tasks, we must profoundly grasp the stage-specific characteristics of China's urbanization and urban development, deeply practice the "People's City" concept [3], anchor the goal of a modernized People's City, promote high-quality development, continuously strengthen the construction of high-quality urban living spaces, and persist in improving urban livability, making cities a beautiful home that everyone yearns for.
Urban living space is not only a place of residence for urban dwellers but also a comprehensive field that carries economic activities, social relations, and cultural memories. The quality of urban living space is directly related to the people's experience of a better life and is an important dimension reflecting the effectiveness of modernized urban construction. Continuously improving the quality of urban living space helps promote consumption, stabilize investment, encourage innovation, and stimulate the endogenous driving force of high-quality development. Currently, China's urbanization is shifting from a period of rapid growth to a period of stable development, and urban development is shifting from a stage of large-scale incremental expansion to a stage dominated by improving the quality and efficiency of existing stock. Such historical changes endow high-quality urban living spaces with even richer connotations for the times. Specifically, in terms of value orientation, we must adhere to the people-centered approach; we need to both meet the basic living needs of residents and promote the leap of people's well-being to higher levels, such as common prosperity in spiritual life and the promotion of free and well-rounded development. In terms of construction content, we emphasize "investing in things" to improve the "hard conditions" of urban life, such as housing, roads, pipe networks, water, electricity, and gas; we also emphasize "investing in people," continuing to exert effort in the supply of high-quality public services such as education, medical care, elderly care, and childcare. In terms of functional structure, we highlight being people-oriented, adhering to the integrated planning of population, industry, towns, and transportation, optimizing urban spatial structures, improving urban spatial functions, and releasing the multi-dimensional synergistic effects of elements such as population, industry, transportation, and ecology, thereby promoting the deep integration and coordinated development of "people, industry, and city."
Focus on "excellent housing for all" to consolidate the foundation of high-quality urban living spaces. "Excellent housing for all" is the core manifestation of high-quality urban living spaces. Facing the major changes in the supply and demand relationship in China's real estate market, only by continuously improving housing conditions while further optimizing the overall residential environment and systematically promoting the construction of "good houses" and "complete communities" [4] can we consolidate the foundation of high-quality urban living spaces. We must promote the optimization of increments. We should promote innovation in real estate development and construction models: in the housing design stage, balance architectural aesthetics with practical functions; in the construction stage, promote green and low-carbon building materials and prefabricated processes to enhance building durability and residential comfort; and in the operation and maintenance stage, improve the full-life-cycle maintenance mechanism for houses and effectively link it with actions to improve property service quality, building new houses into safe, comfortable, green, and smart "good houses." We must promote the quality improvement of stock. We should promote the renovation of "villages in the city" [5], dilapidated buildings, and the upgrading of old urban residential communities in an orderly manner, promoting the organic integration of land redevelopment with industrial and cultural functions to realize the iterative upgrade of urban living space value and allow more old communities to radiate new vitality. We must accelerate the construction of complete communities that are safe, healthy, well-equipped, and orderly managed, coordinating "good houses" with "good residential areas." For example, the Binfen Community in Binjiang District, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, through measures such as district-wide elderly-oriented renovations and child-friendly facility construction, has built a "15-minute life circle," achieving convenient and efficient services and comprehensive coverage of different groups, causing the erstwhile old resettlement community to display a new look of a modernized community.
Improve infrastructure to enhance the carrying capacity of high-quality urban living spaces. Infrastructure is the "lifeline" of urban operation and the solid support for high-quality living spaces. Currently, China's urban spatial pattern and infrastructure framework have basically taken shape. Against the backdrop of stabilizing urbanization speeds and rapidly changing demographic structures, urban infrastructure construction needs to place more emphasis on systematic integration and efficiency enhancement. We must promote "filling the gaps" in traditional infrastructure. Focusing on underground pipe networks for gas, water supply, sewage, and heating, we should implement renewal and transformation projects, construct comprehensive utility tunnels according to local conditions, and solve problems such as "zipper roads" [6] and urban inland flooding. We must weave a dense network of rapid trunk transportation, residential distribution transportation, and green slow-travel transportation, realizing convenient transfers between buses, subways, and slow-travel systems to enhance the travel convenience of urban residents. We must promote the deep integration of new-generation information technology with urban infrastructure, accelerate the layout of new infrastructure such as 5G, gigabit optical networks, computing power networks, and the Internet of Things (IoT), and build a digital foundation for the interconnection of things, data, and intelligence, achieving the "dual-wheel drive" of digital technology and life scenarios. For example, the Jiefangbei Underground Loop urban renewal project in Yuzhong District, Chongqing, on the basis of connecting the ground and underground transportation facility systems, deployed the "5G + BeiDou" precision navigation system, realizing precise navigation in underground spaces, which has greatly alleviated the travel pressure on residents, significantly improved the passage efficiency of the core urban area, and demonstrated the practical results of digital-intelligence technology in empowering high-quality urban life.
Improve the level of public services to manifest the "temperature" of people's livelihoods in high-quality urban living spaces. Public service is the core function of a city and directly affects the quality of life of urban residents. Creating high-quality urban living spaces requires not only solid efforts to strengthen inclusive, basic, and "bottom-line" livelihood construction [7] but also increasing the supply of higher-quality and more balanced public services in fields such as education, medical care, and elderly care, so that high-quality urban public products and services cover a wider range of groups and meet diverse needs. For example, Sichuan Province has promoted the sinking and remote sharing of high-quality basic education resources, connecting high-quality schools in the province with schools in ethnic minority areas and remote, weak areas, giving play to the radiation and driving role of high-quality urban basic education resources, breaking geographical restrictions, and delivering high-quality educational resources to more schools. Increasing the supply of high-quality public services also requires full consideration of the differences in needs among different groups. For the elderly, promote elderly-oriented home renovations and increase the supply of smart elderly care services; for families with infants and young children, focus on improving community childcare facilities; for groups such as flexible employees, migrant workers, and laborers in new forms of employment, improve employment and social security policies. Through the "precision drip irrigation" [8] of high-quality public services, we can effectively transform the vision of people's livelihoods into the reality of tangible and accessible high-quality urban living spaces.