China's Urban Infrastructure Challenges

Abstract

To meet people’s needs in daily life, production, and recreation, city infrastructure including a wide variety of structures, such as stores, factories, office buildings, houses, roads, and pipelines, have been built. The rapid growth of urban populations, along with people’s pursuit of a better life, have led to a greater demand for buses, railways, airways, cars, and subways; to larger scales of production, logistics, transportation, and waste; and to the establishment of service facilities, such as malls, banks, sewage treatment facilities, telecommunication infrastructures, data centers, healthcare centers, and senior care centers. As a result, cities expand rapidly and urban physical systems become increasingly complicated. Poor urban planning and management inevitably result in traffic congestion, pollution, unemployment, monotonous building, and other “urban malaises.” The current issues confronting Chinese cities primarily arise from a misunderstanding and poor management of the complexity of physical systems in the process of industrialization and urbanization, bringing great challenges to economic and social development.