China is set to flex its industrial muscles on a scale the world has never seen -- with a 'mega-city' twice as big as Wales and a population of 42million.China seems to have been overtaken by development megalomania. The proposed city will pave over the entire Pearl River Delta to create a city with a population density of only 1000 per square kilometer, or one thirtieth the density of Mumbai, India, or one fourteenth the density of Shanghai. In other words, a catastrophic case of urban sprawl.
The project's senior consultant Ma Xiangming said: 'The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas.'
All that this scheme will insure is a massive waste of energy and time as people are forced to commute long distances to obtain basic services that could be provided, and in a sane community would be provided, at the local level.
Well China does everything on a gigantic scale, including screw-up, apparently. The key to energy efficiency and the good life is to concentrate human dwellings on a small land base surrounded by parks and agricultural land, so that people have little distance to travel either to work, to shop or to find places for relaxation and recreation. That way urban areas can be rid of automobiles and the stink, noise, waste of energy and hazard to life and limb to which automobiles give rise.
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Sounds like the intro to "Escape from Guangzhou". Snake, I heard you was dead....
ReplyDeleteUntil last month, I worked with an researcher from Macau, the south west side of the Pearl River Delta. He was a swamp back growing up and lived off the waters eating shrimp, crayfish, and fish that he caught. After his last trip home, he said the waters he played in as a child 25 years ago are polluted and there is nothing alive in the waters.
His apartment in Macau has gone up 20 times the purchase price in 10 years as the Casinos keep going up he said. But he has no desire to return and instead has chosen to raise his family in Omaha Nebraska.
The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge will be longer than the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. I can see it now a SUPER NEW ORLEANS or Houston - Galveston - Port Arthur with the entire population of Canada squeezed in!!!!
"Low Plains Perspective"
Sounds like they've made such a mess of the area they decided the only thing they could do was pave it all over -- what the Japanese may have to do with much of their country, also.
ReplyDeleteTo be less cynical, they should be creating a green belt, or green matrix, while repairing the environmental damage already done in the interurban areas and intensifying development within the bounds of the existing cities.
ReplyDeleteWhere you talk of the entire population of Canada squeezed in" that is really the problem: it is not being "squeezed in" it is being spread out at a very low density, particularly by the standards of Asian cities.
In fact, at Hong Kong densities, they could accomodate the entire population of China in within the proposed metropolitan area. But even the Chinese don't need to get that crowded.
"pave it all over"
ReplyDeleteThat's kinda what I was thinking when I read the article you posted. China has tons of engineers so it should be a sight to behold.
Japan appears to be in serious trouble. I did not know until this event that Russia had built a sarcophagus at Chernobyl. I just assumed they had just poured cement over the whole thing.
Apparently a replacement has been designed so these Russian/Ukrainian scientists and engineers surely have some skills to share.
It is gonna have to be Hoover dam size!
"Low Plains Perspective"