Sleepy town gets wake-up call
- Source: Global Times
- [00:58 November 18 2009]
- Comments
Slow Ningbo
The shocked staff and bewildered residents of Cicheng have fallen victim to a struggle between the competing and contradictory ideas of Ningbo city government, the district government and cultural preservation experts.
Ningbo city government and Jiangbei district government agreed in 2001 to protect and develop Cicheng. The Jiangbei government joined hands with the city's State-owned company – Ningbo Urban Construction Investment Holding – to form Cicheng Development, a conservation and development company.
Jiangbei and Cicheng governments agreed to handle land acquisition and evictions, while Ningbo was responsible for redevelopment of old buildings and compensating the local citizenry. Cicheng Development Company has restored five tourist sites in eight years – the County Government, Confucian Temple, County Examination House, Qing Taoist Temple and Town God's Temple.
Clusters of houses were also repaired along the eastern side of the turtle-shaped town, with UNESCO honoring the work with the Asia- Pacific Heritage Award for Cultural Heritage Conservation this year.
"I think the Cicheng development project has reached a level as high as the most advanced in Europe,"said Wu Xiangdong, a member of the awards committee.
International awards did not overly impress Jiangbei district officials, the source said. They remain unsatisfied with the slow pace of work.
"After eight years' protective development, only one tenth has been finished,"said the source at Cicheng Development. "They just don't understand that rebuilding an old town is 10 times harder than building a new one."
Take roads for example.
"We should keep old pipes and wires which are still useful and meanwhile install new ones,"the source said. The result was that one road near the southeast corner of the 2.7-square-kilometer town has been dug up and replaced three times.
"Protection and development of an ancient town is usually handled by the local government, but Jiangbei district government was not really able to pay for it. So we had to handle it,"according to the Ningbo city source.
The city of Ningbo has spent more than 1 billion yuan ($1,475 million) on protecting and developing the old town, the source said, including compensation for eviction of residents.
Compensation had proved much more costly than initially had been expected, said Duan Wensheng, vice-manager of project management at Cicheng Development, and often a tough nut to crack.
"Sometimes we just had to wait a while,"Duan said.
Critical to understanding the lack of urgency is that Cicheng Development was not working towards a deadline.
"The original plan never aimed for a massive influx of tourists, but instead was steered more toward a rest and recreation zone for the citizens of Ningbo,"Shao Yong, one of the town's urban planners and an associate professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning of Tongji University in Shanghai, told the Global Times.
"The city government approved the concept and since 2002, I have returned to Cicheng several times and found the development company was doing an outstanding job."
