Christof Spieler

Cities of the future in China?

Director of technology & innovation, Morris Architects / Lecturer, Rice University School of Architecture / Metro Board, Sep 27, 11.

Tagged with sprawl, cities, development

There was a time, around 1980, when the world came to Houston to see what the city of the future looked like. Rapid economic expansion, population growth driven by domestic migration, miles upon miles of new subdivisions, massive infrastructure projects, and gleaming new high-rises transformed the city. Today, the cities of the future are in China, and they look oddly familiar to a Houstonian.

China is urbanizing fast. In the past 30 years, the population of Chinese cities has grown by 300 million; secondary cities like Chongqing, Wuhan and Chengdu are now bigger than Houston, and Shanghai’s metropolitan area has 3 million more people than New York’s. To see what those cities are like, the Rice Design Alliance sent me to China this summer.

As the Chinese build, they are looking to western cities like Houston for models. Pudong, Shanghai’s largest business district, was planned by a French firm and its tallest skyscrapers are by American architects. On the ground, it feels like Post Oak, only at a larger scale: wide streets, sidewalks designed as much for decoration as for pedestrians, buildings set back behind lawns and driveways, vast indoor malls full of luxury goods, and a skyline of gleaming glass towers. Like Houston, Shanghai has several downtowns, and each is trying to outdo the other.

Chinese urban sprawl looks very different than Houston’s, but there are similarities. In this nominally communist country, everyone’s moving into gated communities. On the river in Shanghai, I found a walled compound of 30 high-rise towers. Inside were private parks, playgrounds, a day care facility, a supermarket and a beautiful river walk.

Like Houston, Chinese cities have grown with little regard to history or nature. It’s estimated that in the next decade, 12 million farmers will lose their land to make way for this growth. China has a real urban history: Beijing was the world’s largest city at the time of Marco Polo. But three quarters of Beijing’s historic neighborhoods have been leveled.

Full Story: Cities of the future being built in China
Source: Houston Chronicle, Sep 23, 2011

Rice Design Alliance: Offcite coverage of China

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