I. URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

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C. Heavy industrialization: the changes of city functions

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2. Brand of Industrialization

Since 1949, Shanghai had experienced intensive industrialization. With the emergence of a ring structure of industry (figure 5), its infrastructure construction, commercial locations and new residential quarters developed on the fringes of the city. More specifically, the rings consisted of an inner zone of less concentrated industries, a central zone of concentrated industries and outer zone of newly-built industries.

(a) Inner ring zone

It included the downtown area between Nanjing Road and Huaihai Road and its surrounding areas in the north and south with an area of 16.5 square kilometers. It was the commercial, trading, financial, service and entertainment centre before 1949 and was dotted with about l000 middle and small neighborhood factories from the 1950s to 1970s. It is now the crowded city centre where the tertiary sector thrives most, where finance, trade and offices are most concentrated, and where neighborhood factories are not compatible with its status.

(b) Outer ring zone-

It is a spherical zone of about 126.5 square kilometres in area and 10 kilometres away from the city centre. It consisted only of vegetable fields in the middle 1950s but a lot of factories were set up of which many were key enterprises. They formed the specialized industrial zones, which are Wujiaochang, Ganqiao, Qingningsi and Zhoujiadu, and played an important role in completing Shanghai's industry system. There were 1178 enterprises in this zone in 1987 and their total gross industrial value reached 14.48 billion yuan.

Figure 5. The ring structure of industrial allocation in Shanghai

(c) Central ring zone

It lies between the inner and outer ring zones and has an area of 132.46 square kilometres. It has a high density of industries with 3,850 enterprises occupying respectively 45 per cent, 68.7 per cent, and 79.4 per cent of the total area, the total number of factories and total gross industrial output value in the central city. Industrial blocks, which means the factories are located in the city centre where the land should be residential or the tertiary sector instead of the second industry, is a most important industrial form in this area and a legacy of historic errors. The close proximity of factories and neighborhoods affects residents severely due to the three wastes and noise from the factories and at the same time the disorderly layout within the plants and high-density buildings make the industrial neighborhoods even more crowded. Ironically, industrial blocks played an astonishingly important role in Shanghai's industry. The problems they have brought are typical in Shanghai's urbanization.

The spherical industrial layout stifled the city of Shanghai. More than 20 new residential quarters had been built in the central ring zone from 1950s and were dangerously polluted because they were surrounded by industrial blocks inside and industrial zones outside. Because of some inappropriate conceptions, the renovation of the old city was mistaken for the renovation of industry by utilizing every possible bit of space. Though satellite towns were set up in an administrative sense, they had not fulfilled their goals of dispersing the industries in the city because industry instead of infrastructure was given absolute priority in development thus resulting in difficult communications within the urban system itself.

Briefly, there were two main reasons that led to the spherical structure of Shanghai's city development from 1949 to 1970:

1. The lopsided development of industry resulting in unilateral city functions and (b) the negligence of people and life in the city constructions resulted in a lag in infrastructure construction.
   
   Shanghai was made the industry centre of China and was burdened with a large hinterland to be served. Its gross industrial value was the highest in China with a percentage of about 10 per cent and it also surrendered taxes exceeding 10 per cent of the total of the whole country. Heavy taxes and shortage of investment made it unable to renovate its enterprise techniques and replace its old equipment, so the high consumption of energy caused severe pollution. In addition, the high concentration of industries in- the central city, land shortages and a disproportion of light and heavy industries could not satisfy the people’s needs to improve their living standards and the accumulating conflicts of industrial development were shifted to the urban development of the whole city which prevented the urbanization process from adapting to new economic situations.
   
   Shanghai has faced another stage of adjusting and remodeling of its city functions in the transformation of a traditional planned economy to a socialist market economy since the implementation of reform and open policy in 1978. Accordingly, it will be built into a modern city and the biggest economic and trading center on the western bank of the Pacific with a thriving economy, advanced technology, flourishing culture, rational city layout, convenient transportation, responsive information and a tidy environment .

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