In China, labor is cheap, the land belongs to the government, air pollution is the primary environmental concern, and political pressure moves largely in one direction -- from the Communist Party leadership on down.
"If the government wants to do something, even if the conditions are not ready for it, it will be done," said Zheng Shiling, an influential Chinese architect who teaches at Tongji University in Shanghai.
At the risk of only slight oversimplification, the system works like this: Planners draw subway lines on a map. Party officials approve them. Construction begins. If anything is in the way, it is moved. If they need to, Chinese planners "just move 10,000 people out of the way," said Lee Schipper, a transport planner who has worked with several Chinese cities in his role as director of research for EMBARQ, a Washington-based transportation think tank. "They don't have hearings."
Schipper recalled consulting with one Chinese metropolis whose ancient city wall stood in the way of a transportation project.
"One of the members of the People's Committee said, 'Oh, I know how we'll solve the problem. We'll move the historic wall.' " It was, he said, as if a planner in Washington proposed moving the Potomac River to make way for construction.
Yu Jifong understands all this from personal experience.
For 25 years, the bubbly Shanghai native lived in an apartment that sat on the site of a future subway station, part of what will be Shanghai's 10th subway line. Not long ago, she got notice that she would have to move. Last month, she was settling into a new apartment miles away from the old one, in a new development housing more than 1,100 families displaced by the construction of Line 10. Many others accepted compensation that would help them buy apartments elsewhere.
What is striking in Shanghai is how few people seem to mind this upheaval, in part because the city has dramatically improved the compensation it provides to dislocated people and businesses, and in part because residents seem to accept the idea that the subway represents the greater good for the city.
Yu, who is unemployed, was overjoyed by the opportunity to move from the slum tenement where she had lived with seven other family members in a 300-square-foot apartment.
Far from resenting the move, she said, "we were looking forward to relocate so we could change our situation."
