According to media reports, on October 29, 2022, a large-scale stampede occurred in Itaewon area of ​​Yongsan District, Seoul, South Korea. As of now, 151 people have died, which has attracted great attention.

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✪ Pan Weijiang

China Association for Science and Technology -Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Institute of Science and Technology Organization and Public Policy

(This article was originally published in " Democracy and Science " 2021 Issue 4)

[Introduction]

According to media reports, on October 29, 2022, a large-scale stampede occurred in Itaewon area of ​​Yongsan District, Seoul, South Korea. As of now, 151 people have died (including 4 Chinese citizens), which has attracted great attention.

According to witnesses, about 100,000 people participated in Halloween events that night, and the scene was crowded. After someone fell in front, there were people behind him, resulting in serious stampede. This serious accident is a microcosm of safety accidents in public places in big cities in recent years. once again shows that how to coordinate urban development and security and optimize urban risk governance has become an urgent and unavoidable major issue.

This article points out that China is gradually becoming a complex society on a super-large scale, and one of the prominent features of is the rise of China's super-large scale cities. This has almost become an irreversible trend and has a far-reaching impact on national governance and social development. The author believes that

super-large-scale urban governance means treating super-large-scale cities as a super-large-scale complex system for governance. This requires grasping the internal laws of urban development: On the one hand, super-large-scale cities are a breeding ground for social progress and innovation. The larger the population size of the city, the stronger the population heterogeneity, the stronger the personalized independent choice of space and selection ability, the denser the various organized networks, the more likely it is to gather more innovation possibilities overall, and amplify these innovations into scale effects at a faster pace, thus forming innovation advantages.

But on the other hand, innovation does not always mean increasing returns, but also increasing risks, which means greater liquidity and more instability. The author of

This article is excerpted from "Risk Governance and Challenges in my country's Super Large-scale Urban Society", originally published in "Democracy and Science" 2021 No. 4 ,

.

The

Risk governance and its challenges in my country's super-large urban society is to treat super-large cities as a super-large complex system. How to use complexity science to grasp the various characteristics and laws presented by such a complex body of a super-large city, so as to prescribe the right medicine and form good laws and good governance for super-large cities. This is a big problem facing all super-large urban managers in China, and it is also a big problem that must be done well.

▍The differentiation of Chinese cities and the rise of super-large-scale cities

At present, More than 40 years of A very important historical effect brought by the reform and opening up of is that China is gradually becoming a super-large-scale complex society. If the saying "a great change that has not been seen in three thousand years" is true, this is probably what China is experiencing. Looking back three thousand years, China has always been a super-large country with a brilliant civilization, but it is hard to call it a super-large-scale and complex country and society. According to the view of German sociologist Nickras Lumann, complexity includes three dimensions, namely the number of elements, the heterogeneity of elements, and the frequency and possibility of linking and communication between elements.In terms of these three dimensions of complexity, although China has been a wide range of people in the past three thousand years, the communication between various regions, limited to technologies such as transportation and communication, as well as various institutional obstacles such as household registration system, is very limited. Therefore, although the number of factors and even the heterogeneity between each other is quite large, the communication and exchanges between each factor are not active and frequent. Only after reform and opening up, especially after China joined , World Trade Organization and gradually became a world factory, economically developed regions such as the southeast have generated huge labor demand. In addition, the multiple rounds of evolution and popularization of China's transportation and communication infrastructure have produced huge flows and transfers of personnel, information and materials in China, thus making the three aspects of complexity appear on a large scale active state in China.

Currently, China's super-large-scale and complex society also presents a characteristic, which is the rise of China's super-large-scale cities. This has almost become an irreversible trend and has had a series of far-reaching and profound impacts on China's national governance and social development. The rise of China's super-large-scale cities includes at least the following levels:

First of all, , it is a microcosm of China's urbanization development. There is a set of data that illustrates the problem. In 1949, the proportion of China's urban population to the total population was 10.64%. By 1979, the proportion of China's urban population was only 19.96% (for this reason, there was a very popular saying at that time that "80% of China's population lives in rural areas"). By the end of 2019, China's permanent urban population had risen to 60.6%, and the urbanization rate exceeded 60% for the first time. In 2021, the National Bureau of Statistics released the results of the seventh national census , of which 63.89% of the population living in urban areas accounted for 63.89% of the , and the proportion of urban population increased further.

The population movement from rural areas to cities is not a unique phenomenon in China, but a common phenomenon around the world. For example, in Japan, the population flows to the Tokyo metropolitan area, and many rural areas show hollowing characteristics. This is because compared with rural areas, urban areas have more complete infrastructure and more convenient life. At the same time, more importantly, cities can provide more job opportunities and higher incomes than rural areas. In addition, the convergence of urban populations can often bring about the integration and convergence of diverse cultures, form innovation, and lead the trend, so it has a stronger attraction to young people.

second , it is a new stage of China's urbanization and reflects the new characteristics of China's urbanization development. The new feature of this new stage is the trend of binary differentiation of cities in China. This trend roughly began around the time when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Before this (around 1978-2001), China's basic national policy for urban development was to "strictly control the scale of large cities, rationally develop small and medium-sized cities, and actively develop small towns." Therefore, although the urbanization process has accelerated, it is mainly reflected in the development of small and medium-sized cities and small towns. If we trace it back earlier, from the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to before the reform and opening up in 1978, the main feature of China's urban development at this stage is that its urban development is slow development and far behind the pace of industrialization. For example, from 1952 to 1978, the proportion of industry in GDP increased from 17.6% to 44.4%, an increase of 27 percentage points, while the urbanization rate increased by only 5 percentage points during the same period.

After China joined WTO , it quickly and deeply integrated into the world trade system, and relying on its own scale advantages to gradually become the "world factory". This is also a period of significant changes in China's entire urban development strategy. Before this, the focus of China's urban development strategy was the development of small and medium-sized towns. Since then, the focus of China's urban development has gradually changed to supporting the development of large cities. When China occupied an important position in the global industrial chain, a large population flow process followed by a large number of people, and a large number of people continued to flock to key cities in economically developed regions, thus giving rise to a number of megacities. In addition to the binary distinction between rural and urban areas, has quietly formed a new binary differentiation, namely the differentiation between super-large-scale cities and small and medium-sized cities.

Therefore, the rise of China's megacity is not only part of the universal story of population moving from rural areas to cities, but also has the national conditions of China. On the one hand, from the history of urban development in China, unlike cities that have been based on industry and commerce and characterized by charter and citizen autonomy since the Middle Ages, China's cities are mainly developed based on the central and governments at all levels, taking into account various factors such as military, transportation and economic development. Cities with higher administrative levels and larger scale often have superior geographical locations and richer various political and economic resources, thus the better development opportunities. On the other hand, an important feature of China's current national and social governance is competition among local governments. An important institutional basis for this kind of competition is the centralized personnel appointment and removal system and performance appraisal system. Under this political championship system of local governance, localities often pursue the system of strong provincial capital , concentrate resources to support super-large cities such as provincial capitals, seize national policy resources through the development of super-large cities, and use provincial capital cities as locomotives for local economic development to drive the development of the entire region.

The above factors are superimposed on each other, not only causing the differentiation between Chinese cities and rural areas, but also causing the differentiation between megacities and small and medium-sized cities. Simply put, some cities that occupy favorable political and geographical locations, seize various historical opportunities, and win in attracting investment and economic development will further integrate into the national and even global industrial chains and value chains, become stronger, and attract more population inflows, thus increasingly developing into megacities. There are also a group of cities that do not have the advantage in politics and geographical location, and have missed various historical opportunities. At the same time, cities that are lagging behind in the political championships of local development have gradually become cities with net outflow of population, or are constantly shrinking, or staying at the scale of small and medium-sized cities. A large number of large cities between the two move in these two directions according to their objective position in the social and economic development of the entire country: in this process, some cities further shrank into small and medium-sized cities, while some cities continue to grow into super-large cities.

The author recently visited several small and medium-sized cities in Zhejiang that will soon be connected to high-speed rail. cadres in these cities who are responsible for investment promotion and talent work have expressed their concerns to the author. Because with the opening of the high-speed rail, these small and medium-sized cities and super-large cities such as Shanghai and Hangzhou will be within an hour's drive. In this way, the disadvantages of small and medium-sized cities and these mega-scale cities in education, medical care, urban infrastructure, etc. will be further highlighted. Many local advantageous industries may move their headquarters and R&D centers to mega-scale cities such as Shanghai and Hangzhou, leaving only some relatively basic and low-end production bases locally. This kind of worry cannot be said to be unreasonable.

▍ Opportunities brought by the rise of China's super-large-scale cities

The rise of China's super-large-scale cities has attracted great attention from the theoretical community. First of all, the rise of megacities has brought about a larger resource aggregation effect, higher resource utilization efficiency, and greater innovation possibilities, which is also conducive to China's maintenance and expansion of existing advantages in the new round of global industrial competition. At the same time, the development of super-large-scale cities can also form a cluster effect. Through the aggregation and cooperation of adjacent super-large-scale cities, a super-large-scale urban agglomeration can be formed, thereby further leveraging the advantages of aggregation and innovation, driving the economic development of small and medium-sized cities in surrounding areas and even rural areas, and forming a truly urban-rural integration.

There are very typical examples in ancient China about the important role of cities in economic development and governance in rural areas. Chinese historian Xu Zhuoyun once wrote a very interesting book called "Agriculture of the Han Dynasty". There is an interesting concept in the book called "Z activity", which refers to the fact that during the slack season, farmers devote their energy to activities that are not related to agriculture, and are divided into two parts: F for their own consumption and Z for direct sale.The ratio between part F and part Z is closely related to the development of the market network. When the market is developed, farmers' activities during slack farming are more partial to the Z. When the market network is not developed, farmers' activities during slack farming are more partial to the F, that is, they do not sell them to the market, and mainly provide them with their own consumption. The degree of development of market networks often depends on the closeness and activity of communication between the rural areas where farmers live and the cities. Weihe basin, the Yellow River Plain and the upper reaches of the Huaihe , that is, the Jifu area (now central Shaanxi), Henei (northeast of Henan), Hedong (southwest of Shanxi), Shangdang (southeast of Shanxi), Zhaoguo (central and western Shanxi and central and eastern Hebei) and Taiyuan (central Shanxi). They are all developed cities and developed markets, and are also the areas with the most serious land annexation of , and are called the basic economic zone.

In this book, Xu Zhuoyun collected and listed the peasant uprisings during the Western Han Dynasty and . He listed two tables. He found that a particularly interesting phenomenon was that these uprisings occurred in areas outside the basic economic zone, with only three exceptions. The areas that are most likely to break out - Yi are located in Hebei, Shandong, Anhui and Hubei provinces, and they are all on the edge of the central area of ​​Shaanxi and Henan. This is because, "the basic economic zone concentrates the largest urban center and the largest number of consumers. Because of the ability to utilize the developed market system, the livelihoods of local farmers can be supplemented."

The current breadth and depth of urban development and the development of market economy in my country are of course far from comparable to Han Dynasty . At that time, the industry and commerce in rural areas were mainly limited to the excess agricultural and sideline products produced during the slack period. After the reform and opening up, the township enterprises in rural China far exceeded this restriction and became a professional and industrialized industrial production. The super-large-scale urban clusters formed by Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen as the core, such as the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration, the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration, have relatively effectively integrated and driven the surrounding small and medium-sized cities and rural areas, thus forming a regional economic circle and market network, and forming a regional market-oriented resource integration and allocation mechanism.

Go further, The super-large-scale cities that have emerged in China in recent decades are almost all cities that are deeply involved in economic globalization and are closely related to China's world factory status. Compared with small and medium-sized cities, these mega-scale cities are actually both economic hub cities in the vast areas around the country, but also deeply embedded in the entire international economic system and play an increasingly important role. The result is that the industrial production in China's megacities is no longer just to meet the daily needs of the surrounding local population, but to maximize the pursuit of profits. expands the reproduction of , and continuously expands the boundaries and scope of the market through various means until it penetrates into the global industrial chain and value chain. This means that the economic development and prosperity brought by scale by mega-scale cities is not limited to the city and its limited perimeters themselves, but is focused on the development and prosperity of the entire country.

▍ Risk governance challenges brought about by the rise of China's super-large-scale cities

The rise of China's super-large-scale cities has not only brought important development opportunities, but also brought new challenges.

According to the standards of the "Notice on Adjusting the Standards for Urban Scale" issued by the State Council in 2014 (Guofa Document No. 51), cities with a permanent population of more than 10 million in urban areas are megacities, and cities with a permanent population of more than 5 million in urban areas are megacities. According to the "2019 Urban Construction Statistical Yearbook" released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development in 2020, there are 6 megacities in my country, namely Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Tianjin; there are 9 megacities in total, of which Wuhan has the largest population, and the others include Chengdu, Dongguan , Nanjing, Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, Xi'an, Shenyang and Qingdao .Compared with old super-large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, these nine emerging quasi-megacities that are currently in megacities but are accelerating to become megacities. They not only face major development opportunities, but also face arduous challenges at the governance level. This situation of coexistence of opportunities and challenges is also applicable to 100 major cities with population below 5 million and a good development momentum. In view of this, the so-called megacities in this article also take into account cities with a population of more than 5 million and an active economy and innovation.

China's urban governance has a long history. In the long historical development, relatively stable governance models and traditions have gradually been formed, and have continued to this day. They mainly show the following characteristics: relying on the bureaucratic system of the entire country, the population is fixed in an appropriately large-scale closed space through organizational or grid-based governance, and the management and governance is carried out through administrative suppression laws. For example, before the Song Dynasty, Chinese cities implemented strict Lifang . The so-called Lifang is actually a closed block so that the government can implement grid management. At the same time, like in the Tang Dynasty , a curfew was imposed at night to ensure urban security. Commercial activities must be carried out in special areas, such as East City and West City. Although after the Song Dynasty, with the development of urban industry and commerce, the closure of the Lifang system was broken, and the prosperous urban landscape presented by " Qingming Shanghe Tu " appeared, the complete set of concepts and means of urban grid-based closed governance symbolized by the Lifang system did not disappear, but was continuously transformed into many new specific urban governance measures with the development and evolution of the city.

Even in contemporary Chinese urban governance, the traditional Chinese Lifang city governance concept can be seen in many common measures. For example, urban communities in my country are basically mainly closed communities, and various types and natures of urban communities formed by walls, roadblocks, etc. can be seen everywhere. The traffic congestion common in my country's super-large cities is hardly related to the closedness of Chinese urban communities. In order to alleviate traffic congestion, many cities once advocated opening closed communities to form capillaries for urban traffic circulation, but similar reforms ended in vain.

For example, whether it is urban planning, municipal appearance management, registered population and civil affairs management, industrial and commercial tax management, social security management, and cultural education management, urban governors are more inclined to regulate in the form of administrative laws. Many of the contents of the laws and the process of drafting and revision are deeply engraved with the influence of the traditional Chinese bureaucratic system. After decades of legal construction and development, my country's urban governance has made tremendous progress, which is an obvious fact. But we still see that in many aspects, there are still areas that are contrary to the spirit of the rule of law in the process of urban governance of . For example, some megacities promulgate local laws, administrative regulations and orders. The core content is not to protect citizens' personal rights and interests, nor to set various qualifications, conditions and procedural restrictions on the exercise of public power. Instead, it stipulates various prohibitive regulations for urban residents and private individuals for management needs and considerations.

The focus of this kind of urban governance is public security. The main methodology is to reduce the activity of urban population activities and the frequency of contact and communication between each other, and try to install urban population into a relatively closed space for isolation and control, thereby achieving the safety and stability of urban governance. For example, through the household registration system, institutional thresholds and obstacles are set for foreign populations in terms of education, medical care, insurance, etc., try to exclude these people from urban life, and maximize the exemption of urban managers from responsibilities to this part of urban residents, thereby reducing the complexity and challenges of urban governance.

It is undeniable that these ideas and measures of traditional urban governance are more effective in achieving urban public security.From the period from reform and opening up to China's entry into the WTO in 2001, China pursued a strategy of curbing super-large-scale cities and focusing on the development of small and medium-sized cities, and to a large extent it was also affected by this urban governance strategy that prioritizes public security. Controlling the scale and mobility of cities and trying to reduce the diversity and complexity of urban population can reduce the complexity of urban governance, thereby achieving stability in urban governance with lower costs and more primitive means.

However, this kind of urban governance ideas and measures are inconsistent with the reality and trend of China's urban development since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. At this stage, due to its deep integration into the global economic order, China has become the world's factory, and as the industrial chain continues to migrate inland along various transportation hubs, some large cities continue to develop into megacities, and megacities continue to develop into megacities. Whether the population inflow and the development speed of the urban population size have become key indicators for measuring the economic strength and development prospects of cities. How to effectively improve the speed and degree of urban expansion has become an issue that most urban managers must consider.

Because it cannot break through the traditional urban governance ideas and measures that take public security as the core, the governors of many large cities in China have to swing between strict control and deregulation through various contradictory policies and measures, thus leading to chaos and disorder in urban governance. In order to seize the opportunities of historical development and promote urban economic development, it is necessary to invest as much resources as possible to focus on the construction of various regional central cities, so as to make these cities develop into big cities and megacities, and even eventually develop into megacities with active economic and innovative activities and huge scale and energy. Only in this way can we gain a leading position in local political championship competition. Once traditional control measures for public security purposes restrict or hinder this, under the direct intervention of the highest decision-makers in urban governance, these urban control measures often have to be flexibly dealt with, forming various exceptions and breakthroughs, which is essentially avoided. Of course, there are risks in this way, because these temporary measures are often in a vague area of ​​policy. Although they can temporarily bypass some unreasonable old customs, they also contain many new risks and hidden dangers. When a city develops to a certain extent and its scale and complexity reach a certain critical point, these risks and hidden dangers will also be amplified, and a certain scale effect of spreading risks will eventually lead to accidents and disasters.

▍Update the paradigm of China's super-large-scale urban governance

A series of governance diseases, difficulties and challenges that have emerged in the process of China's super-large-scale urban governance show that traditional governance ideas that take public security as the core value and use the grid decomplexing and controlling urban population to perform various decomplexing and decomplexing urban governance has been difficult to adapt to the current emerging real needs of China's super-large-scale urban governance. The traditional urban governance idea that pursues public security as the core is based on the life experience and actual governance experience and measures summarized based on the life experience and practice of a small-scale living community. The essence of this kind of governance is to hope to divide large-scale urbanization into pieces through the division of space and population, thereby realizing the decomplexity of urban governance and reducing the difficulty of governance. The cost of

is the loss of the advantages of innovation and more efficient allocation of resources formed by urban scale aggregation. This is because the essence of innovation is actually a deviation from the conventional. The benefits brought by innovation, that is, the benefits brought by deviation from the conventional, or more accurately, the advantages of innovation are to quickly amplify the scale benefits formed by deviation through various high-density networking. The primary condition for any deviation or innovation is to give individuals greater choice space and possibility of choice. And this is exactly what the traditional security-style urban management model strives to prevent and avoid. Because any deviation means a challenge to the existing order and the release of new risks. This is also why people often call innovation "creative disruption".

can truly enhance China's major fundamental and cutting-edge innovations in global competition, which are often produced in megacities where innovative talents are highly concentrated. This is because the larger the urban population size, the stronger the heterogeneity of urban population, the stronger the independent selection space and selection ability of urban individualization, the more dense the various organized networks, the more likely it is to gather more innovation/departure possibilities as a whole, and the more likely it is to amplify these innovation/departures into scale effects at a faster rate, thus forming an innovation advantage in global competition. But at the same time, deviation does not always mean an expansion of returns, but it does mean an expansion of risks, which means greater liquidity and greater order instability.

The various problems highlighted in the process of China's super-large-scale urban governance are reminding us that both urban innovation and development and urban governance security must not be neglected and must develop simultaneously. This requires a new urban governance idea that can take into account both. The emerging complex scientific theories of the 20th century provided many important inspirations for this.

According to the summary of American scholar Michel, who specializes in complexity research, complex systems have two core characteristics. The first feature is self-organization, that is, the regular behavior of complex systems is not controlled by internal and external controllers. For example, whether it is the ant in the ant colony, the neurons in the brain, or the immune cell in the immune system, they are not controlled by any internal and external control, and they almost act independently and instinctively. But a large number of these autonomous and simple actions eventually resulted in an extremely complex system. The second feature is Emergent. Emergence is a completely opposite thinking direction to reductionism . It refers to the actions of the overall complex system connected by countless simple individuals from simple individual behaviors, let alone understanding the characteristics of the overall complex system. For example, in the case of an ant colony, "driven by hereditary nature to find food, respond simply to the chemical signals released by other ants in the ant colony, resist invaders, etc. However,... although a single ant behaves very simply, the structure constructed by the entire ant colony is surprisingly complex." By examining the relationship between neurons in the brain and the brain, as well as the relationship between immune cells and the immune system in the immune system, we can all observe similar phenomena.

If we use a complex scientific perspective and methodology to observe and analyze the new phenomena and new challenges presented by China's megacity governance, new ideas and new methods will be generated. Complex System Theory inspires us that in the process of urban governance, urban managers should pay more attention to summarizing various phenomena and laws of urban life from a macro perspective, and use macro-mechanical means such as interest rates in macroeconomics to regulate, rather than governing cities through unreasonable control of individuals at the micro level through administrative orders and various prohibitive regulations. At the micro level, the core content of the law is to protect the basic rights and legitimate interests of individuals, and to restrict the exercise of public power based on the protection of individuals' legal rights, qualifications, conditions, procedures, etc., so as to maximize the individual's possibility of free choices and actions, and to maximize the promotion of individual innovation. Urban Governor should strengthen the study of the system effects formed by frequent interactions and contacts between a large number of free individuals in cities, so as to understand mega-scale cities as a super-large-scale complex system formed by ultra-high frequency contacts between super-large-scale heterogeneous populations.

Hyper-large-scale urban governance means treating super-large-scale cities as a super-large-scale complex system. How to use complexity science to grasp the various characteristics and laws presented by such a complex body of a super-large city, so as to prescribe the right medicine and form good laws and good governance for super-large cities. This is a big problem facing all super-large urban managers in China, and it is also a big problem that must be done well.

This article was originally published in the 4th issue of "Democracy and Science" magazine in 2021, with the original title being " Risk governance and challenges in my country's super-large urban society ". is welcome to share it personally. Please contact the copyright owner for reprinting in the media.

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