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Sky's the limit for well planned city of Shanghai
By Nate Stein |
October 28, 2010, Thursday
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Print Edition
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"BIG" is a good word to describe Shanghai. Likely it is even larger than that, but Chinese demographics are on a scale entirely unknown to me, an American.
At 1.3 billion people, China is quadruple the size of the USA with an almost identical land area. Over 100 million people live in China's 11 largest cities; 12 of its cities have at least 5 million people each. Shanghai is merely "big" in China, and it is skillfully preventing the overcrowding problems often associated with its size that would earn it the title "too big."
Cities change based on countless factors that both limit and encourage growth. Besides geographic and political boundaries, a city may have an invisible boundary at the distance that is about 45 minutes from downtown. Beyond this border, people will look for work outside of the downtown area to avoid the long commute. This boundary is quite variable according to the mode of transport.
The prevalence of buses, bicycles, cars, or subways all change the 45-minute commute to work, and infrastructure - adding lanes to a highway or switching from buses to subways - can effectively push outward the border, while additional residents and cars increase congestion and pull the boundary inward.
After building a subway in 1995 that has quickly grown to the world's longest and most traversed, Shanghai's invisible border moved outward significantly and drastically increased its growth potential. Instead of surrounding dense urban development with sprawling suburban homes, Shanghai's residents live in apartment buildings that do not restrict the growth of a city like stand-alone homes do.
Being built upon a backbone of compact flats and public transit, rather than homes on large lots and personal automobiles, means that the population has no upper boundary or, in a very literal sense, the sky is the limit, depending on how many people can fit in one building.
People are stacked on top of and below others as growth extends up, and not out. Concentrations of people make mass transit feasible and waste less fuel and energy. Efficiency greatly increases in compact cities and provide for the feasibility of small businesses staying in demand among residents without cars who need the convenience of small neighborhood shops.
The almost entirely urban design of Shanghai provides for impressively sustainable growth potential. The problem of overcrowding is on the horizon, but Shanghai has been effectively advancing its transit infrastructure. There is a two-level road tunnel under the Bund, the main portion of downtown, to prevent congestion and high-speed rail lines coming into existence that will further extend the reach of its invisible 45-minute boundary.
Right now, trains push the invisible boundary of the city even further out to neighboring cities like Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. By adding whole cities to its municipality, and perhaps having up to four "centers" of the city surrounded by housing units, Shanghai can become a hybrid mega-city with such a vast land area that overcrowding would seem impossible.
If Shanghai absorbs them, as it seems poised to do, it will definitely become the greatest (in size and scope) city on Earth. I don't doubt its potential to grow bigger, but never too big.
(The author is a writer living in Shanghai. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.)
At 1.3 billion people, China is quadruple the size of the USA with an almost identical land area. Over 100 million people live in China's 11 largest cities; 12 of its cities have at least 5 million people each. Shanghai is merely "big" in China, and it is skillfully preventing the overcrowding problems often associated with its size that would earn it the title "too big."
Cities change based on countless factors that both limit and encourage growth. Besides geographic and political boundaries, a city may have an invisible boundary at the distance that is about 45 minutes from downtown. Beyond this border, people will look for work outside of the downtown area to avoid the long commute. This boundary is quite variable according to the mode of transport.
The prevalence of buses, bicycles, cars, or subways all change the 45-minute commute to work, and infrastructure - adding lanes to a highway or switching from buses to subways - can effectively push outward the border, while additional residents and cars increase congestion and pull the boundary inward.
After building a subway in 1995 that has quickly grown to the world's longest and most traversed, Shanghai's invisible border moved outward significantly and drastically increased its growth potential. Instead of surrounding dense urban development with sprawling suburban homes, Shanghai's residents live in apartment buildings that do not restrict the growth of a city like stand-alone homes do.
Being built upon a backbone of compact flats and public transit, rather than homes on large lots and personal automobiles, means that the population has no upper boundary or, in a very literal sense, the sky is the limit, depending on how many people can fit in one building.
People are stacked on top of and below others as growth extends up, and not out. Concentrations of people make mass transit feasible and waste less fuel and energy. Efficiency greatly increases in compact cities and provide for the feasibility of small businesses staying in demand among residents without cars who need the convenience of small neighborhood shops.
The almost entirely urban design of Shanghai provides for impressively sustainable growth potential. The problem of overcrowding is on the horizon, but Shanghai has been effectively advancing its transit infrastructure. There is a two-level road tunnel under the Bund, the main portion of downtown, to prevent congestion and high-speed rail lines coming into existence that will further extend the reach of its invisible 45-minute boundary.
Right now, trains push the invisible boundary of the city even further out to neighboring cities like Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. By adding whole cities to its municipality, and perhaps having up to four "centers" of the city surrounded by housing units, Shanghai can become a hybrid mega-city with such a vast land area that overcrowding would seem impossible.
If Shanghai absorbs them, as it seems poised to do, it will definitely become the greatest (in size and scope) city on Earth. I don't doubt its potential to grow bigger, but never too big.
(The author is a writer living in Shanghai. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.)
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