Endless City, Endless Congestion: Interactions Between Urban Form and Mobility in Beijing
Date
2014
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Bryn Mawr College. Department of Growth and Structure of Cities
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
This thesis traces the developmental roots of Beijing's current urban form as a sprawling, decentralized metropolis, and analyzes the intersections of this development with transportation and personal mobility in the city. I track Beijing's urban form through the Republic of China era, through the Maoist regime, and into the modern era of reform and opening up as different stakeholders with different priorities HAVE left their mark on the city, marginalizing the economic importance of the historic core and creating a network of decentralized, sectoralized expansion over a wide geographic footprint. I show that this process has led to great challenges in moving people through the contemporary city, creating a transportation system prone to long travel times, congestion, and class-based hierarchy of modal dependence on parallel systems of inadequate connectivity and capacity: a highway system for the wealthy and a subway system for the working classes.