Just when You Thought that Cities Couldn't Get Any Bigger

Those of us who have lived in a large city know all about the overcrowding, the frequent heavy traffic and traffic jams, air pollution and smog and other problems that you associate with living in the big city.

China doesn't see any reason to let this hold it back though, as it plans to create a mega city of 42 million people, and to spend billions on the transportation and communications infrastructure to achieve it and make sure it works.

The mega city, which will be in the Pearl River Delta area of China, which borders on Hong Kong, and will be formed by merging nine existing cities (Guangzhou, Foshan, Dongguan, Huizhou, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Zuhai and Shenzhen).

The resulting metropolitan area will be 16,000 square miles of urban area. To visualize this, imagine an area that is twice the size of Wales, or 26 times larger than Greater London.

The area includes a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, and accounts for almost ten percent of the Chinese economy.

At the current time transportation and communication links between these nine individual cities are mediocre, like much of the Chinese transportation systems, however the government is planning to invest around 2 trillion yuan (around US$300 billion) in linking the vital infrastructures of the area together - transport, energy, water and telecommunications.

The proposed transportation improvements include 29 new railway lines, a total of 3,100 miles, which will reduce the time to travel between cities to a maximum time on an hour.

There will also be a standardization of charges for public transportation, energy and water, and universal rail cards will be available so that people can commute easily around the new city.

With the new telecommunications facilities, it is expected that the cost of phone calls in some areas could fall by as much as 85 percent

By 2020 China hopes to be in a position to move even more people into it's cities, and it planning ahead for zones containing 50 million and even 100 million people.

Pollution, which is always a problem in urban areas, especially those with vast manufacturing facilities, will be dealt with by having a unified policy across the region, however the thought of that many people living in such close proximity to each other doesn't sound too appealing to me.

Can you imagine that in maybe ten or twenty years time, there will be millions of people in China who have never seen the sun rise over the ocean from a deserted tropical shore. Many millions who have never seen the Milky Way because of the air and light pollution from the cities. Millions who have never seen animals grazing in the fields, or experienced walking through a virtually deserted rural area.

I suppose in the eyes of the Chinese government this is a huge step forward in China becoming a super power, in particular with regard to manufacturing goods for export to the rest of the world, but at what cost to the population, who have in many cases little option but to accept these changes, for better or worse.

Sources:

The Daily Telegraph