Weird little quirk about Chinese housing law, asked a Chinese friend and they said there's usually a house or two per city like this. Usually they do get demolished by the time construction is done but construction companies really hate haggling for a price and the residents can just sit there until the construction company is fed up and pays out a big sum.
not enough urban villages, they should be crammed between every other kinda-central highrise development. (if you're in eastern china they're the best place for sichuan food)
also a city bigh enough to have a massive ring road would also have like three new train stations on opposite sides of the city. and many cities don't have an old train station, they went from no train straight to HSR like ten years ago.
HOWEVER if the city does have an old train station, the area on the map labeled "hotels" are going to be the sketchiest type of hostels you've ever seen, catering to people just coming in from the countryside. see the hostel scene in Lost on Journey for reference
This is pretty accurate to Wuhan except there's like 3 ring roads and like 100 lakes. Even the position: Shanghai directly east, Beijing to the north and Guangdong to the south.
Nah, European Cities have layers. There's the old city in the center (not just a gate but the entire old city that was enclosed by the medieval fortifications) which is surrounded by 19th century neoclassic quarters with mixed use. Instead of factories there's brownfields where factories used to be. Nail houses don't exist at all. There may be some high rise quarters but not as many, and instead of having that clear break between city and surrounding farms there's scores of suburban single family home developments.
That really doesn't describe London or Paris. Yes there was once an enclosed old city, there are some famous landmarks within it, but that enclosed old city is literally the skyscraper bank/finance-capital zone of London now. In Paris it doesn't exist because the city was and rebuilt by Napoleon. All the other features are mostly correct.
They kinda do though. Big buildings, broad roads, endless malls, and copy-pasted public transport. Obviously there'll often be unique points in every city (Beijing's Hutongs, Shanghai's FFC, Xian's wall, etc), but in general, urban China is pretty homogenous in how it looks, I think it's just a result of a lot of rapid development all at once.
Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive because of years of white people making the "all Chinese people look the same" comment to my face, but having lived for decades in three major Chinese cities and travelled to at least a dozen more, I don't see how many of them are "the same" unless you're focusing on the things that would be generally "the same" in every country.
Like yeah, of course public transport is gonna be copy pasted in most places anywhere in the world because there's only so many effective and efficient ways to build a bus stop or train station. But I don't see how you can look at the massive mountains of Chongqing and now they impact urban design and say "this is the same as the relentless flatness of Shanghai". Hell, even though Beijing and Shanghai are both pretty flat, Shanghai's streets are much more curved and flowing because they follow rivers as opposed to the radial geometry of Beijing.