She asked what I saw at the hot spring and whether I had learned anything about Eastern Fortune’s plans. We squatted and talked. It was a weekday, and the road was empty save for us, pawing at the black earth. She wondered aloud if there was such a thing as too much development. “How do you know when a place has developed just enough?” When I had lived in Beijing, I interviewed scores of residents, officials, and urban planners over four years. No one had ever asked this question. And no one—from architects to developers to the government—had ever asked my neighbors what they thought about plans to renovate—or, more commonly, raze—their courtyard homes and community. Many of them would have preferred a new apartment far away from the crowded, dilapidated lanes. Others would have suggested upgrading a house’s heat and hygiene, then leaving the people alone to live in a neighborhood that had thrived for six hundred years. As the capital—once a densely textured masterpiece of traditional urban design—transformed into a car-centered sprawl linked by beltways and malls, I often politely pointed out that this was the sort of planning the United States had begun to reverse.
