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Small cities happier

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-12-30 07:39

What is it that makes a city a happy one to live in? One could think of many things for an answer, but the right facilities for its residents' work and living and a comfortable environment must be absolutely the basic marks of a happy city.

It is not the size of a city and the degree of its prosperity that necessarily make all the difference. That at least is the suggestion from the list of top 10 happy cities announced last week. That Beijing and Shanghai, the country's two largest and most prosperous cities, failed to enter the list reinforces the point.

The top 10 happy cities were selected by 7 million questionnaires and 70 million online votes. It is the fifth such selection since it was initiated in 2004.

Such economically developed cities as Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Beijing have much more opportunities for well-paid jobs. But they are not happy places to live in, compared with the top 10 cities. This may be a pointer to how cities should be developed when the country is in the process of large-scale urbanization.

The fact that the cities on the list are almost all medium-sized points to the question of how large a city should be. In an agricultural country like China, many used to take it for granted that the quality of life would improve with the size of a city, that the quality of life would be better in a larger city.

Beijing can be a good example. The city proper used to be just within the second ring road around the site of ancient city walls before the 1970s. Now it has its sixth ring road, and the rural areas several times larger than the areas within the second ring road have been developed into residential areas. And its population has increased from 5 million in the early 1970s to nearly 20 million now.

It is quite common for many living outside the fifth or sixth ring roads to travel more than an hour or even three hours by bus or subways between their homes and their workplaces everyday. With 3.5 million motor vehicles on road, traffic jams and pollution have greatly worsened the quality of life.

Because of unbalanced development, many are still trying to elbow their way into big cities. Economically developed big cities will undoubtedly become even bigger in the foreseeable future. And, it would be nave to expect the quality of life in them to get any better.

(China Daily 12/30/2008 page8)