Designing Dongtan

Pop-Up Cities: China Builds a Bright Green Metropolis is a story on Wired about a built-from-scratch city in China that’s designed for peak environmental efficiency:

Today Gutierrez and a team of Arup specialists from Europe, North America, and Asia are finalizing a plan for a scratch- built metropolis called Dongtan. Anywhere else in the world, it would have been a thought exercise, done up pretty for a design book or a museum show. But Shanghai’s economy is growing three times faster than the US economy did at the height of the dotcom boom. More than 2,000 high-rises have gone up within city limits in the past decade. The city’s most famous stretch of skyline, including the jewel-box-like Jin Mao Tower and the purple rocket-shaped Pearl TV Tower, was a rice paddy just 20 years ago. Now some 130 million people live within a two and a half hour drive of downtown. Even the wild ideas get built here.

This idea that the only limit to construction is imagination seems to something that resonates with visitors to Shanghai. I know I was floored by the sheer grandiosity of the plans city-builders had for Shanghai, and Amanda wrote a great piece on it after she visited the city earlier this year.

People have often remarked that one of the huge advantages China has over the west when it comes to building and development is the ease with which it can repossess land. Need an extra couple of blocks? No worries; just bulldoze whatever is there and move the people elsewhere. It’s one of the reasons I’m so glad I visited Beijing before the bulldozers moved in for the Olympics.

That said, a consistent theme in current Chinese developments seems to be a desire for environmental sustainability and that can only be a good thing.

Posted in China on Sunday May 6, 2007.