CRI听力:Experts: City Planners Need to Be Far-sighted

Reporter: The heavy rainfall flooded 20 key areas across the city on Sunday. Two-thousand cars were submerged in the streets and the operations of more than five-thousand buses were suspended. High-speed rail services linking Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the provincial capital, was halted.

A local resident who runs a business in one of the flooded areas says that the flooding is not a rare occurrence. Flooding has happened every year since she moved into the area.

"Each year, when there is big rainfall, water floods into my store. The drainage system is always stuck. It's happened five or six times since last year."

Despite the city's drainage infrastructure being worked on over the past 30 years, the city has time and again dealt with heavy flooding every time it experienced heavy rainfall.

When Shenzhen was first built as a modern city, the municipality's original design, including its drainage system, was based on a population capacity of one million. However, Shenzhen's population exceeded 10 million several years ago.

Pan Jiahua, director of the Institute of Urban and Environment Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says city planners were not forward thinking, and did not plan for how the city would develop in the future.

"Take Shenzhen as an example; we didn't realize the speed and scale of the city's development could be so fast. Plus, there was not much cooperation between planners responsible for different sections. This resulted in the fact that the designs of our cities now are still focused on the ground and surface rather than the infrastructure underground and long-term design. So, the current underground drainage system is wholly insufficient to sustain the city's fast development."

Pan Jiahua says the infrastructure design of some foreign cities can be used as reference for Chinese city planners. For example, in Paris, the drainage pipes are 50 meters under the ground, rather than close to the surface, the length of these underground pipes reached 2,300 kilometers in total, far longer than its metro line.

While in Munich, Germany, the 13 underground reservoirs can store a large amount of water if the rainfall is severe, and they release the water gradually into the city's drainage system, so the pipeline won't be suddenly overloaded.

Pan Jiahua emphasizes during China's urbanization process, the design of a city's infrastructure and service facility should be planned for long-term sustenance.

"This isn't the first time heavy rainfall has caused flooding in Shenzhen - or other cities. It shows that there are problems in the planning, design and management of our cities in the face of China's new phase of urbanization."

Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show that China's proportion of permanent urban residents stands at 53.7 percent. According to China's new urbanization plan, by 2020, China's ratio of permanent urban residents to total population will reach about 60 percent.

For CRI, I am Li Dong.