What is the significance of the central government’s urban work conference held again after 37 years? News updates

Obviously, the Central City Work Conference that ended yesterday and was attended by the Seventh Standing Committee was not held specifically for Shenzhen. But because of the accident in Shenzhen, we will have a more intuitive and perceptual understanding of "urban work".

After all, the last national urban work conference was held 37 years ago in 1978.

This is big news.

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The current Central Committee has many precedents for raising individual tasks to the central level for meetings, upgrading them for the first time, or reopening them after many years. The former is like mass grouping and united front; the latter is like literature and art. Their common characteristic is that they are highly valued by the current Central Committee and believe that it is not a matter of a certain system or a certain department, but should be viewed and grasped from an overall and overall perspective.

So, is urban work so important?

Yes. At this meeting, there was a new statement on the status of cities: "Cities are the center of my country's economic, political, cultural, social and other activities, and play a decisive role in the overall work of the party and the country"; similarly, cities are also "all kinds of activities in our country" "The place where factor resources and economic and social activities are most concentrated" is the "locomotive" for building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way and accelerating the realization of modernization; "Urban development drives the entire economic and social development, and urban construction has become an important engine for modernization."

In other words, this "urban work conference" is not only "urban work" in the narrow sense related to urban management, urban planning, etc., but also looks at the city from an overall and systematic perspective. In contrast, there is only "rural work" - as you know, the Central Rural Work Conference is held every year.

Convening this meeting 37 years later, what is even more realistic is that the city is still "severely ill."

illness

Every time he went on a business trip to other cities, Uncle Dao would tell his local friends sincerely after three drinks that he really didn’t want to return to Beijing (no wonder the natives of Beijing) .

Except for the psychological factors of siege, you and I all share the same experience of urban sickness. If you drive to and from get off work, there will be traffic jams; if you drive to and from work, the subway and buses will be crowded. There are a lot of cars driving, the surrounding factories and construction sites are operating at full capacity, and there is haze; shopping in the supermarket, seeing a doctor in the hospital, etc. If you live far away, it will be tiring; if you live closer, it will be expensive. When I was begging on the subway, I held a bowl in front of me, which was annoying; when I saw the urban management scolding the vendors, I was actually indifferent. It rains heavily, and the streets flood with water, making them even more clogged. Now we have to worry about where the garbage will be taken care of. Everyone was in a bad mood and seemed to be in a hurry and indifferent to things other than themselves.

Urban diseases are superficial and underlying. A city without a sense of belonging comes from the strangeness of a foreign place; the lack of integration in a foreign place is also deepened by housing prices and imperfect social security systems. This is true for urban drifters without household registration, and even more so for migrant workers who have no voice. Behind them, there are left-behind children, abandoned land, empty villages and many other problems.

Urban disease also has another expression.

For example, large-scale demolition and construction. In Uncle Dao's hometown, a certain municipal Party committee secretary once shouted the slogan "a small change every year, a big change every three years", and created a group of extremely wealthy citizens through vigorous demolition. They didn't know what to do with Land Rover, so they had to After the demolition of the real estate, all the people took out loans. In the end, the capital chain was broken and the city government was besieged every day.

The scale of large-scale demolition and construction varies, but the city-building movement has been vigorous in the past period. A senior who has studied abroad for a long time said at the dinner table that even in Beijing, the heart of China, one does not feel that this is China at all. It seems that there is no difference between this place and most cities in the world and China. Here, there are issues related to the protection of historic sites, as well as issues that vary from city to city.

Sickness comes like a mountain falling, and sickness goes away like a silk thread.

The problem

To cure a disease, you have to find the root cause.

The natives in big cities will ask: If you think the city is not good, go home! But in big cities, people will say: Apart from big cities, where can we go?

Take Beijing as an example. Among Uncle Dao's university classmates, many students from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong are not nostalgic for Beijing; for them, the opportunities in their hometown are equally good and the environment is better. For example, in Beijing, provinces and regions with large populations and underdeveloped development, such as Hebei, Henan, and Northeast China, have the largest concentration of non-local populations.

They either come here because of their studies (there are no high-quality universities in this province), or they choose to leave home because the distance is closer and there are more opportunities. On the one hand, big cities are miserable; on the other hand, surrounding small cities and towns have also been unable to develop for a long time due to the "siphon effect" of resources and talents, and can only linger in low-end industries. "Contribute" to regional central cities in a general way.

In the final analysis, this is a problem of imbalance between urban and rural areas and uneven regional development. And when it comes to urban management, urban planning, urban governance and other issues, they are also difficult to memorize.

In an era of rapid urban expansion, the protection of historical sites and environmental protection are mostly not on the agenda. After all, construction, scale, and political performance are important, and leadership changes so frequently. Under the default logic of "construction-achievement-promotion", officials have strong motivation to engage in construction (not to mention that there may be room for economic interests to operate), just like the previous baton effect of GDP; how to modify and build urban projects, Whoever builds the project often makes decisions in a single word, with pats on the back, hearings go through the motions, and bidding is internalized.

This is why almost all central inspection teams have raised the issue of "relatives and children of leading cadres involved in infrastructure construction" in the provinces they inspected - there is no legal thinking and no legal supervision environment, so the rule of man is rampant.

And due to unreasonable planning and random demolition and construction, not only waste is caused, but also management blunders are caused. The construction of the slag dump in Shenzhen was assigned to one department and management to another department; the administrative overlap between the port area and the urban area exposed by the Tianjin explosion is also impressive. Not to mention disasters, even the "innocuous" thing of prematurely demolishing houses, and even the "smashing glass to make the glaziers have work" method of boosting GDP, China wastes more than 4,600 yuan on this matter every year. billion.

Let’s put it this way, urban work covers almost every conceptual category that you are familiar with in your life: economy, society, ecology; household registration, education, medical care, housing, pension, employment, social security; demolition, construction, petitioning , urban management, sanitation, planning... Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes, not to mention that China considers small cities to be urban areas with a permanent population of more than 200,000.

So, this is a very large system project.

Treatment

If the disease is serious, there is a lot of work, and the roots are deep, we must look at it from an overall perspective and break it with higher-level power.

The central government’s formulation is an abstract “five coordinations.” On the basis of respecting the laws of urban development, firstly, coordinate space, scale, industry, and improve the overall situation; secondly, coordinate planning, construction, and management, and improve systematicity; thirdly, coordinate the three-wheel drive of reform, science and technology, and culture to improve sustainability. ; 4. Coordinate the three major layouts of production, life, and ecology to improve livability; 5. Coordinate the three major entities of government, society, and citizens to increase enthusiasm.

It sounds abstract, but it’s actually not too difficult.

From the perspective of thinking, first of all, urban work must be connected with the overall national strategy. In the front, there are the national urban planning and urbanization strategies; in the back, there are the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, and the Yangtze River Economic Belt. In other words, whether it is optimizing and cultivating urban agglomerations, or linking urban and rural work, everything must be considered on this plate. To put it bluntly, if there are ten Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen-style cities or sub-central cities distributed in various regions across the country, not only will China's economic development be healthier, but it will also be a great benefit to social issues such as population mobility and resource allocation. The “strive to complete the renovation of urban shantytowns, dilapidated houses, and old communities by 2020” mentioned this time has a certain policy connection with the “70 million people lifted out of poverty” and also provides room for policy maneuvers in real estate destocking.

Second, city managers should have more “positioning” thinking. When this meeting was held in 1978, the main focus was on "construction", which was based on the background of the times; when a similar meeting was held in 1949, China's urbanization rate was only 18%, and China also needed to engage in large-scale construction. But now, the urbanization rate has exceeded 52%, and it is no longer the time to blindly spread the pie and expand the scale. How to position your city? How to combine resource endowments, location advantages, and cultural characteristics to find your own unique selling points? This is a must-answer question for all city managers. If you answer this question well, if you are close, you can solve the same problems in thousands of cities; if you are far, you can grasp the rhythm and planning of reform, development, and urban construction.

Third, city managers should have a "service" mindset.

At this meeting, "safety" was placed at the top of the city's work. This not only has actual disasters as the background, but also makes city managers think about the purpose of urban construction and urban management. The slogan of the Shanghai World Expo "Better City, Better Life" is not just a slogan, but should also become a kind of inquiry and self-reflection. In line with the strategy and positioning, the construction of social security systems such as household registration, education, and medical care also fall into this category; the protection and restoration of the environment and ecology are not just about completing tasks responsibly.

Fourth, city managers should have a “rule of law” mindset. The plans set by the previous leaders cannot be changed just by changing the person; we advocate urban repair and consider the inheritance of urban history, and we also require that large-scale demolition and construction should not be carried out casually. Similarly, "defining public participation, expert argumentation, risk assessment, etc. as statutory procedures for major urban decisions" also requires legal thinking rather than complete government dominance. The planned party and urban residents can only resign themselves to fate and have nowhere to confess.

In fact, what interests Uncle Dao most is this sentence: "The main leaders must take charge personally and establish and improve the urban work pattern of unified leadership of the party committee and joint management of the party and government." In other words, this matter will no longer be just a matter for the leaders in charge, but will become a matter for the top leaders of the party and government, like anti-corruption, environmental protection, and party building. If responsibilities are clear, it will be easier to hold accountable those who do not do well.