Beijing Reborn

Beijing was overdue for a face-lift. When the Red Army first marched into the capital in 1949, Mao Zedong dreamed of turning it into a city of industry with "a forest of chimneys"—a vision he soon helped realize. When China's capitalist boom began many years later, Mao's smoking factories were soon surrounded by ugly glass-and-chrome office towers, many topped with unintentionally kitschy pagoda roofs. The result was a mess: polluted, chaotic, hard on the eyes and decidedly less than world-class. "You can't say it was all rubbish," says Professor Zhou. "But just about."

The cleanup is well underway, and much will be done by the time the Olympics open on Aug. 9, 2008. Six new subway lines, a 43km light-rail system, a third airport terminal and runway, and 25 million square meters of property development—all this will greet a projected crowd of 500,000 foreign visitors and 1 million mainland Chinese. The leadership has earmarked some $12 billion for "greening" projects, from a 125km tree belt around the city to mandatory adoption of strict European vehicle-emission standards. Earlier this year, entire blocks of run-down low-rise tenements along the northern Second Ring Road were replaced within weeks by a two-kilometer-long green belt of parkland, walkways, small playgrounds, lighting and 25-foot-tall trees. And that's just one of numerous green spaces, including a 12-square-kilometer Olympic park.

Mao's beloved chimneys are quickly disappearing. Parts of the Capital Iron and Steelworks and the entire 1.5-sq-km Beijing Coking and Chemical plant have been shuttered or moved to neighboring Hebei province. During the desperate industrialization of the Mao era, both factories were great sources of prestige. But Party leaders are now increasingly concerned with the environment—especially with reducing Beijing's eye-stinging air pollution before the Games begin. Closing the Coking and Chemical Plant alone should reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 7,500 tons annually, says plant president Zhang Xiwen. "Still, it was a big sacrifice," he says.

And it's not the only one. The speed of Beijing's makeover has further diluted much of the sense of order in this imperial capital founded by Kublai Khan. Ming emperors built the Forbidden City, with city gates and walls revolving around it, in a rectilinear grid. On taking the capital in 1949, Mao and his Russian advisers collectivized single-family courtyard homes, built factories and razed the city wall to make way for the Second Ring Road. (Now Beijing has six ring roads.) "Regrettably, very, very little of Old Beijing's look has been preserved," laments Ma Zishu, formerly deputy director of the high city's cultural-relics bureau. "The problems of disorder and high density began with the plans of Mao's Soviet experts," says Domus's Feng. "Now all of a sudden the government is trying to turn Beijing into an international city, so all of the tensions and conflicts [of spacing] have been intensified."

Many experts worry that insufficient thought is being given to preserving community and historical continuity. Ancient neighborhoods are vanishing. Beijing preservationists lament the disappearance of charming labyrinthine residential lanes known as hutongs—a Mongol word for "alleyway," many of which have been razed to make way for wide, modern boulevards.

Patchy central planning has created a city with a disjointed, deracinated feel. Entire villages near the Olympic facilities were demolished to make way for space-age-looking structures; nearby clumps of skyscrapers seem as if they'd been airlifted from Tokyo or New York and plunked down at random. Chinese "starchitect" Zhu Pei complains that Beijing's uprooted "ghettoes"—all business buildings here, all luxury residences there—make him feel as if he's "living in an urban archipelago." This approach, says James Brearley, head of the Shanghai-based architecture practice BAU, is typical of Chinese planners' preference for "superscaled segregated-zoning practices" once common in the West during the last century, with central business districts (CBDs) that emptied out at night and apartment complexes lacking retail outlets. The Chinese approach to city design thus far, he says, "is based on one single model, and the model is f—-ing disastrous. You can quote me on that."