Since the beginning of the reform and opening in 1978, mega-cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have seen ever faster development and actively plan a “global city” strategy in this beginning of the new century. However, accelerated urbanization and improved urban functions may not be completely synchronous with an enhanced sense of social security. Due to the mega scale and the diversification and complexity of urban populations, mega-cities (or super-large cities) are inevitably exposed to social risks beyond general logic, in resources, environment, and public security. Therefore, it’s necessary to have deep, complete, and systematic understanding of the contemporary mechanism of social risks imposed by economic and social transformations taking place in the urban environment, and then to reexamine and forge practical management capabilities for mega-cities to obviate and control these new-type social risks.
Life Cycle of Cities and Diversity of Risk Sources
Cities have both physical properties, including artificial infrastructure like roads and buildings, as well as natural conditions and cultural properties consisting of human cognition of cities, sense of belonging and cultural wealth of urban civilization. Cities are also societies where different modes of production, power mechanisms and pluralistic value pursuits coexist and interact. Cities are always under construction and constantly evolving. Changes of social structure, transformation of industrial structure and reproduction of cultural structure in cities cooperate and conflict, resulting in extraordinarily complicated changes and various phased risks in social development of cities.
In the course of urban development, public risks accumulate in different forms and consist of different sources in different stages. With expansion of urban population and construction scale, various resources, markets and information gather in cities. As a result, cities are increasingly exposed to structural risks, like unbalanced social order and growing population pressure on the environment, resources and public services. When cities are lacking in vitality and enter a relative decline phase, urban risks will systematically explode. For instance, reduction in employment opportunities will increase social poverty; aging urban infrastructure and housing tension will lead to the growth of public security problems and social conflicts. Mega-cities represented by New York, London, Chicago and Detroit have had profound experiences and lessons in this respect since the 1960s. As for China, population size and spatial density of mega-cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are reaching the critical point of various resources. In addition, because priority has long been given to economic motivation and profit extension in urban development and growth, the infrastructure and public service system is lagging in construction scale and inferior in construction quality, ages too fast but renews slowly, and there isn’t an overall systematic planning for public security evaluation of various new projects. Moreover, the awareness of public security is inadequate, and diversified education on public security for a heterogeneous population in highly open cities is very weak. Therefore, if a mega-city is incapable of timely and efficient self-renewal, or incapable of systematic adjustment and integration in institutional and policy fields, it faces the risk of various public security accidents at any time or may even result in violent social upheaval.
Recognition of the Complexity of Multi-stage Multi-type Risk Aggregation
Mega-cities are centers of population, resources, capital, information, science & technology, and fashion. Owing to advanced economic development and highly open society, risks in mega-cities are concentrated, flowing and superimposing. Compared with western mega-cities, which experienced a long history from pre-modern to modern and post-modern times, mega-cities in China have expanded for merely 30-plus years, and risks in the mega-cities also exhibit overlapped features of globalization and localization, and features of different social stages. As the mega-cities accelerate their development towards “global cities”, various social risks connected with liquidity and openness will keep coming to the fore. As a report of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) points out, in the 21st century OECD countries will face severe emerging system risks. That is, the health system, traffic and transportation system, energy supply system, food and water supply system, and information and telecommunication system, upon which mankind depends for survival, will all be threatened. The social risks and emerging system risks coming with globalization may also be transmitted or passed along in central cities of all countries first, achieving spatial accumulation. Due to staged and imbalanced economic and social development in China, risks in different historical stages coexist in the same time and space, while traditional and non-traditional risks are superimposed. In mega-cities with such a complicated risk structure, even traditional risks like fire, flood and epidemic diseases may be more destructive due to the high population liquidity and density. Therefore, the superimposed effect of traditional risks and non-traditional risks is a big challenge to be taken seriously in the governance of mega-cities in China.
Systematic Governance of Risks in Mega-cities
The Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the CPC has stated explicitly that we shall improve the mode of social governance, stick to systematic governance and perfect the public security system, which provides important guidance and direction for risk governance in mega-cities. This also shows that the Chinese government has realized the superimposition and polymerization features and the potential destructive consequences of risks in mega-cities. For example, in its government work report early this year, Shanghai stated, “urban security must be unremittingly vigilant”. To implement the policy, we must make every effort to transform the government-dominated administrative risk control system into a diversified and systematic risk management system.
Considering the structure of risks in mega-cities and the uncertainty of destructive consequences, we need more scientific and systematic governance systems and mechanisms. For instance, in risk identification and analysis, we must form a timely and effective risk information extraction and feedback mechanism and employ multiple channels to grasp risk sources and spreading routes. In the handling of complicated risks and crises, we must form an organization system and operation mechanism featuring government control and effective coordination of multiple departments and forces. In post management of risks, we must build a rigorous examination and assessment system. Besides, we must seriously think about social and cultural origins of risks in mega-cities, and try to eliminate various causes of complicated risks through a series of institutional and policy arrangements and mechanism designs.
Furthermore, to cope with risks in mega-cities through systematic control, we must consider how to guarantee effective operation of a scientific, rational and strict risk governance system. Given that the stereotyped institutional arrangements in risk governance systems (or response plans) of mega-cities in China are out of step with the complicated reality, we must give further attention to the following two aspects. First, we need to make the most of organizations at all levels in high-level promotion and cross-system mobilization, promote all departments to fulfill their own responsibility, form an interlocked and institutionalized responsibility chain, and incorporate the system into the legal and regulatory system to promote cross-department integration and mobilization in risk governance. Second, we need to work out a reasonable incentive mechanism for key decision makers, correct city managers’ view of political achievement, reduce decision-making risks, and create a new performance assessment system around input-output ratio in risk governance.
