Pearl River Delta for 20 Years: Expansion of Urban Ocean

All this can not help but make people feel that the process of urbanization is so fast that the suburbs of Guangzhou have disappeared in just over 20 years. Not only the suburbs of Guangzhou, but also the suburbs of almost all cities in the Pearl River Delta are disappearing ... This small plain has become a metropolis.

Friends in old Guangzhou always recall the suburb of Guangzhou of 1984, saying that it is another situation. At that time, the banks of the Pearl River were covered with reeds, and there was a scene of "reed flowers like Melissa Zhou". In addition to the old city, it is surrounded by suburbs. After crossing the Haiyin Bridge, it is an old factory that declined in the planned economy era. In the area around Luoxi Bridge, before the completion of 1988 Luoxi Bridge, the ancient ferry was used to cross the river. Standing on the ferry and looking at the other side with the roar of the engine is like looking at a desolate ancient painting, with scattered crops and farmland and dotted western Western jackdaw.

At that time, people probably never thought that they could take the subway to Panyu, nor did they think that the dark wasteland between Luoxi Bridge and Panyu Bridge, where even street lamps were scarce, would suddenly grow so many high-rise buildings, factories and schools, and even a wild zoo where giraffes and zebras lived, just like crayons for children.

My friends think that this city is developing too fast. It's only been more than 20 years, and the area we live in is getting farther and farther, and our city has become boundless. Looking down from the air, the place where we live today is an area where the suburbs are disappearing, a single center is replaced by multiple centers, the radiation areas of adjacent cities are getting closer and overlapping, and the economic ties between cities are close and the mutual influence is increasing. This region has become one of the regions with the highest degree of urbanization, the highest urban density and the fastest urbanization in China, namely the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration.

As a reporter of an economic newspaper, 1999 went to Nan 'ao Town, Longgang District, near Shenzhen, and made an unannounced visit to the waste computer and electronic instrument processing factory which was explicitly prohibited by the government. At the foot of a container mountain full of industrial waste, a huge hand-intensive high-tech production line is running at high speed. Different from the traditional factories in the planned economy era, these factories are no longer the repetition of the traditional industrial areas in the midwest of the United States in the 1970 s and the declining traditional industrial Ruhr area in Germany. Although it looks shabby, it has all the essence of "emerging enterprises" They know how to market, and they have made huge profits. Together, they have gradually become so-called new cities, such as Jiujiang, Yanbu, Rongqi, Furniture City and Shiwan.

Relying on extensive economic, a factory with the characteristics of township enterprises, the Pearl River Delta began its original leap. This small plain, which is less than 42,000 square kilometers washed away by the Pearl River, became the heavy radiation area of Hongkong's manufacturing industry as early as 1980s, and became the experimental field of China's new economy and the earliest and largest factory in the world in China. By the 1990s, there were more than 70,000 manufacturing enterprises in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, Zhuhai, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Huizhou and other places. These factories built in suburbs and rural areas gradually joined together, encroaching on the space between cities and completing the process called "Little Pearl River Delta Urban Agglomeration". The Pearl River Delta in this period was called "the metropolis of southern China" by American contemporary sociologist castel.

After 1997, Hong Kong and Macao returned, and the Little Pearl River Delta became a "Greater Pearl River Delta Urban Agglomeration" including these two pearls, with an economic aggregate equivalent to the sum of the Bohai Rim Economic Zone and the Yangtze River Delta Economic Zone. The "Pearl River Estuary Bay Area" formed by the Greater Pearl River Delta, known as the "San Francisco Bay Area" of China, has further become the Dutch architect Rem? Koolhaas called it "the land of the Great Leap Forward" and was good at turning politics into strategy.

Today, the Greater Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration is striving to become a "Pan-Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration". In the concept of economic geography, it finally includes Southeast Asia such as Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. It is said that by 2025, the three largest international urban agglomerations in Asia will probably be the Tokyo metropolitan area with Tokyo as the center, the Yangtze River Delta metropolitan area with Shanghai as the center and the Pearl River Delta metropolitan area with Hong Kong-Guangzhou as the center.

Dilated "blood vessels"

After successfully shrinking the land, the city has become a large-scale community full of scars, and expressway, as the most important public landscape of urban agglomeration, has been highlighted. One year, on the famous National Highway 324, namely "Yunfu Baili Stone Gallery", my passengers and I were stuck in traffic for nearly 23 hours. In retrospect, it was just an ordinary event in the era of "traffic jam" At that time, the whole Pearl River Delta was building the expressway, and the rocks split by explosives showed ochre red sections, which were roughly placed on both sides of each expressway. Where roads are built, there will be traffic jams.

However, many people don't mind being blocked. Some people say that when you sit on a steam train in India, you will fall in love with this traffic jam, because at least you have booked a better life in the future at this price. Bombing one more mountain and building one more road means building one more factory or opening one more shop, so it seems that people don't mind waiting for squatting in the humble toilets of roadside gas stations with dozens of passengers from all corners of the country, bargaining with farmers who hobble along the stagnant car river on pole and sell a box of 10 yuan instant noodles, and don't mind air pollution and heavy rain.

This period of history happens to be 1988, which is what many atlases say. China has no expressway, and now expressway has the second longest mileage in the world, which only takes 15 years. At the same time, it is also the most prosperous period of "road economy" in the Pearl River Delta. Farmers who wash their feet sell everything on the road: slate, fake agate, artificial jade and glass, Buddha statue, Guanyin, Jesus made of plaster, modern furniture, oranges and almond cakes, steel, gas appliance, shiny Italian ancient Roman lighting, seafood restaurants selling crocodiles and puffer fish. The history of traffic jams ended with the completion of various expressway, but this landscape of "building roads with money and buying and selling along the way" has continued until now.

People who used to live in the Pearl River Delta would know that it was Kaiping because they saw the pirate-era towers on both sides of the road. Look at the Qing ancestral temple with blue bricks and green tiles and smell the taste of Shunde; Seeing the beautiful wood carvings of thirteen lions on the eaves, you can already hear the sound of Shantou sea wind. At present, expressway's network is nearly 6.5438+0.8 million kilometers, like blood vessels criss-crossing the human body, and more than 4.3 million vehicles are like blood in blood vessels, rushing in large and small arteries between cities. From high altitude, the whole urban agglomeration is almost covered by these veins; When you walk in, you will find that the once familiar rice fields near expressway have disappeared, and the mountains and rivers have already turned into clouds, leaving only shops, factories, warehouses, billboards, a large number of vacant properties, and narrow strip-shaped house business districts built to save street area. Walking on the road, I only know that Siemens has arrived, Samsung SDI has arrived, Rongqi refrigerator has arrived, ICC factory has arrived and Country Garden has arrived. ...

Lu gradually lost his memory, or someone said, "Does Lu have a memory? If it hadn't been repaired for so many years-there is no road at all! "

As the provincial capital, "Guangzhou" was the political, economic and cultural center of Guangdong Province before 1980s. An old man living in Yangjiang described it this way: "It took a whole day to go to Guangzhou that year! Going to Guangzhou means going out of the provincial capital. It's hard to sit in the hard iron armchair on a long-distance bus. When you meet a muddy gravel road, you can shake people to pieces. We have to wait for the ferry on the banks of large and small rivers. If the car in front has an accident, the car behind will wait all night and cross the river at dawn. " "Going out of the provincial capital" is a "great event (Cantonese)", which is a lot of trouble. However, from now on, people who have been to Guangzhou can say to others, "I am out of the provincial capital!" " "