Chinese Urbanization: Land, Superblocks, Hukou and Ghost Cities

Chinese urbanization is the largest movement of people from countryside to city in history: in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping's reforms began, fewer than 20 percent of Chinese people lived in cities, and by 2023 the share exceeded 66 percent, more than 900 million people, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Between 2011 and 2013 China used more cement than the United States in the whole twentieth century. That growth was not spontaneous but the product of a system with four parts that explain both its achievements and its contradictions: state ownership of land, the superblock as the unit of construction, the hukou household registration and the overbuilding that produced the ghost cities.

Land-based finance: growing is the business

The first part is land. In China urban land belongs to the state and is never sold: use rights are granted for 40, 50 or 70 years. Local governments discovered in the 1990s that they could take rural land, reclassify it as urban, service it and auction the use rights to developers for enormous sums, then finance metro lines, highways, parks and airports that in turn raised the value of the next plot. Economists call it land-based finance, and for years it supplied more than a third of municipal revenue. The consequence is that Chinese cities grow because growing is the business, with or without people to fill them.

The superblock: the stamped city and the 2016 correction

The second part is the superblock. Where a block in Barcelona's Eixample measures just over a hundred metres, a Chinese superblock can be half a kilometre on a side: a residential compound, often gated, with thousands of identical flats designed and built at once, surrounded by avenues of eight or ten lanes. It is faster to approve and finance a package of ten thousand homes than a thousand small projects, so the city is stamped rather than woven. The price is lifeless streets and distances impossible on foot, and in 2016 the State Council ordered gated compounds opened and a return to small blocks and dense streets, a correction that advances slowly because undoing concrete costs more than pouring it.

Hukou: urban in body, rural on paper

The third part is the hukou, the household registration inherited from one's parents that classifies each citizen as urban or rural and ties them to a place, deciding access to school, healthcare and pensions. Some 300 million migrant workers live in cities where they hold no local hukou: they build Shenzhen's skyscrapers and deliver Shanghai's food, but their rights stayed in the village. It is the model's central paradox: the most massive urbanization in history was carried out with a built-in demographic brake that opens the city to labour but not to full citizenship. Recent reforms loosen the hukou in mid-sized cities and keep it strict in Beijing and Shanghai.

Ghost cities, urban villages and the Evergrande debt

The fourth part is overbuilding. When building is the business, too much gets built, and so the ghost cities were born: new districts with towers, museums and stadiums and almost nobody inside, such as Kangbashi in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, planned for hundreds of thousands and empty for years. The nuance is that many of those districts eventually filled, because China builds first and populates later; the real problem is the debt that financed them and the collapse of developers such as Evergrande from 2021. Another contradiction is the urban village, a rural settlement swallowed by the city that keeps collective ownership and houses millions of migrants in extremely dense buildings, as in Shenzhen.

The lesson of Chinese urbanization is that a state with control over land can build in thirty years what others took a century to build, and that speed has costs: municipal dependence on land sales, cities designed for the car, hundreds of millions of second-class citizens and a property debt that threatens the economy. The government itself is now trying to correct the model with open blocks, hukou relaxation and limits on speculation. For planning, China is at once proof of what planning can do and a warning of what happens when growth becomes the goal.