Three Gorges Dam Accelerating Urbanization?

"As a trickle of environmental problems emerging from the Three Gorges dam area steadily grows into a deluge, Chinese authorities have begun weighing plans to relocate several million people to avert an ecological catastrophe.

The dam, which has created a 640 km-long reservoir on the Yangtze River, suffers from landslides, silting and erosion that could accumulate into an environmental disaster if not quickly fixed, according to experts.

[T]he government of Chongqing metropolis in the reservoir region was putting forward a blueprint, which outlines the mass relocation of 1.17 million people from the dam area.

The resettlement, which local leaders want to complete by 2020, would bring the total number of people displaced by the Three Gorges project to 5.3 million.

Instead of moving people uphill to new land, the municipality of Chongqing -- a large urban sprawl on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, is planning to absorb uprooted farmers into the city proper and transform them into city dwellers. By giving up their land rights, relocated farmers would be allowed to apply for social security of urban dwellers.

Curiously, the disclosure of the relocation plans come shortly after Chongqing municipality and Chengdu, the adjacent capital of Sichuan province, were awarded the much coveted inside the country status of a 'new special experimental zone', which allows them to benefit from central funds and preferential policies. Perhaps even more importantly in a country with scarce land resources like China, it gives them a freer hand in making decisions on land management and urban planning.

Chongqing too, needs more land and funds as it struggles to tackle the legacy of the Three Gorges Dam. The city is by some reckonings the biggest urban sprawl in the world, customarily described in China as a 'village within the city'.

But the attempt to present the new resettlement as part of an accelerated urbanisation process has made some environmental observers doubt the motives behind it."