Beijing: Sound business vs urban renewal
( 2002-07-15 10:43 ) (1 )

Word that Beijing's famous Sanlitun Bar Street will be pulled down by the end of this year focused attention on how to solve the conflict between fairness to existing businesses on the commercial street and urban redevelopment.

With the move towards redevelopment of the South Sanlitun residential area in Beijing's Chaoyang District, some famous bars located in the area, like No 88, were demolished earlier this year.

Many people feel sorry about the bars' disappearance and worry that bars on North Sanlitun Street will share the same fate.

The street is famous for its unique collection of bars and has been nicknamed the Sanlitun "Bar Street."

According to Beijing's general plan, the North Sanlitun area where the prosperous Bar Street is located, with its mid-1960s buildings, is part of an old residential area that needs to be redeveloped.

This means that the self-grown commercial street will ultimately be facing redevelopment or relocation, though there is still no specific plan.

People are worried over whether the street will keep thriving after redevelopment or relocation.

The Chaoyang District government has mapped out two plans for Bar Street, but no final decision has been made, said Li Guo, deputy director of the Chaoyang District government.

One is to rebuild the street. To redevelop the residential area on the western side of Bar Street, the government plans to co-operate with a real estate developer to build high rises with ground-floor space reserved for bars and western-style restaurants.

The upstairs apartments will be rented or sold to people who love - or at least don't mind - bars, to solve the problem of the annoyance the bars brought to nearby residents.

The other option is for the government to build another bar street in the under-construction Chaoyang park, guiding bar owners to move their businesses there.

Li described a beautiful blueprint for a new pub city, which will be more modern, more energetic, more standardized and will have an underground parking lot able to hold 600 cars.

The government hopes and believes that the redevelopment or reconstruction of Bar Street will improve its environment, make it more attractive and more prosperous.

However, some bar owners and commercial experts voiced their worries about the future of the street.

"The emergence and development of Bar Street was decided by the market and customers' consumption customs. It has taken several years for the street to develop into world famous commercial street with unique characteristics.

It is really hard to tell whether it will be better or not, if a new Bar Street is organized by the government," said an anonymous pub owner in the Sanlitun area.

"The strong commercial atmosphere enjoyed by Sanlitun Bar Street could not be formed overnight," said Wang Yao, deputy secretary-general of the China General Chamber of Commerce.

Once the existing commercial street is pulled down, during the redevelopment, customers could turn to other places to meet their consumption demands and then, their habits changed, may not come back even when the redevelopment is completed.

The redevelopment of the other two commercial streets in the Sanlitun area provides an example.

The two streets, a garage street and a costume street, were pulled down in late 2000 and moved to new places, but the businesses have suffered a decline compared with before.

A businessman surnamed Zhu who sells costumes said that in his old place he could earn an average 500 yuan (US$60) per day with the highest exceeding 1,000 yuan (US$120). But after moving to the new market, he earns only 200 to 300 yuan (US$24 to US$36) in one day.

Liu Yong, director of the Sanlitun Neighbourhood Committee, said that they had learned a lesson from the unsuccessful redevelopment of the two markets.

"It's a pity to have demolished some existing markets in urban construction," said Liu.

The experience might be one of the reasons that the neighbourhood committee and the Chaoyang District government have not decided what to do with the street, though the redevelopment of the North Sanlitun residential area has been on the agenda since the early 1990s.

The featured commercial streets, especially those with a famous brandname like Bar Street, have generated an invisible fortune for the city, playing a distinctive role in the local economy and enriching peoples' lives.

The streets have also formed their own cultural atmosphere, which is attractive to customers. These streets have become a symbol of the city.

Thus, it is necessary and important to keep the cachet of the existing commercial streets as intact as possible and to help them survive and thrive during urban reconstruction.

The government should be cautious as it works on future urban redevelopment, to avoid further destruction of commercial centres in Beijing, many of which have disappeared during reconstruction.

Though the government's intention to improve the capital city's appearance in line with the requirement of the 2008 Olympic Games is good, reconstruction and redevelopment have not always led to satisfying results, Wang, from the chamber of commerce said.

The artificially business centres are not always as prosperous as the planners expect.

Wang sited the construction of Ping'an Avenue as a failure. The avenue was planned as a street with comprehensive functions combining traffic, tourism and commerce.

However, when the road was broadened the traffic problem may have been solved, but the shops along the both sides of the avenue have not seen prosperity.

Wang even considers the reconstruction of the Wangfujing Pedestrian Street unsuccessful, since it is less thriving than before.

Beijing has learned too many lessons from the redevelopment of such commercial streets, like Yabaolu, Dazhalan and Longfusi. The businesses of all these markets were depressed by redevelopment.

The conflict between urban renewal and the commercial well-being of businesses on these streets is hard to solve.

Wang urged that when making decisions on urban construction, the government should not follow its own wishful thinking but should take extreme care to consider the irreversible outcome.

Wang also urged that the government should not fully rely on either academic or practical city planners, but ask for opinions and suggestions from all circles.

Business owners should be a strong voice taken into consideration in urban planning and reconstruction, Wang said.

He suggested preservation of the features of the existing commercial streets, but a further standardization of operations to create a cleaner and more comfortable business environment.

Meanwhile, Wang believed that the redevelopment of the streets should not be done if it leads to a burdensome increase in operating costs.

The health of business depends on people's consuming habits. For example, it is impossible for Xiushui Costume Market to remain popular if it is changed from an outdoor market to an indoor one, since customers who go to the market are used to buy the desired goods in a open and casual way.

But some city planners said that the commercial streets should give way to city construction, if there are contradictions between the two.

Feng Zhongping, a professor from the Architecture School of Tsinghua University agreed, but said that in some cases the self-grown commercial streets should be retained.

"The existence of the commercial streets like Sanlitun Bar Street and Xiushui Costume Market must have reasons," Said Feng.

Feng said that the self-grown commercial streets were developed based on the demand of certain consumer groups.

But not all the home-grown centres of commerce are rational and immovable, Feng said.

In urban renewal, the rational part should be preserved, but the irrational part should be rebuilt.

An anonymous official from the Beijing Commerce Committee also agreed that urban redevelopment should have priority over the preservation of the featured commercial streets.

Problems created by commercial streets affect not only the streets, but whole neighborhoods.

Sources from the Beijing Municipal Administration Commission said that Bar Street has problems from the point of view of urban infrastructure.

Most bars are located in provisional buildings which need to be pulled down, due to their location on major pipelines which serve to transport water, heat, energy, etc.

Long-term occupancy on the pipelines is likely to cause distortion of the ground, damage to the pipelines and leakage of the pipeline content, which will bring inconvenience to nearby residents and endanger their lives and property.