Nanjing

(Those aren't clouds, that's smog)

Nanjing is the site of Sun Yat-Sen's Mausoleum. He is considered the father of modern China. We had a very non-city planning day yesterday, just walking around two different parks surrounding tombs. They have a very nice central pedestrian zone including outdoor cafes and bars lining canals in front of a Confucian temple. Today we will visit one of the planning and design studios that foreign consultants need to partner with in order to do city planning in China.
The smog is so bad that you can see it in the halls of our hotel. If affects visibility after 30 feet. Everyone's eyes are burning, and the more sensitive of us are dreading Xi'an and Beijing for this reason.

The visit to the Nanjing Planning Institute was the best planning function of the trip. This was the only government planning agency that we visited, and they explained how things work in a way that made sense and fit with what we saw going on around us. Just as they don't necessarily have the cash or capacity to clean up their industry right away, they do not have the time to go through the tortuous planning processes that we can afford in the States. Their demand for urbn living is so high that they need to get cities built right away, otherwise people will starve and or revolt. During this phase of their urbanization, the marginal increment of speed is more important and valuable than the marginal increment of accuracy, so they forge ahead. They can build and populate cities of 300,000 in three years.