Wish to Live With 42 Million People in a Megacity the scale of Switzerland? [China]

City planners in China are hoping to turn the nine cities inside the Pearl River Delta into a single, humongous megacity the scale of Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire combined. Its population: 42 million.

Sounds awesome, right? I mean, I like living in Manhattan City, but I always find myself saying ” This just isn’t enough like a dystopian near-future science fiction comic book.” So when my lease is up, and when it’s ready, I’m heading to the unnamed megacity currently being planned in China! The Telegraph writes :

The ” Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area it is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the scale of Wales.

The new mega-city will cover a huge section of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for just about a tenth of the Chinese economy.

Over the subsequent six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a value of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line can even connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.

The city doesn’t have a name yet (Neo Tokyo? Mega City One? The Sprawl?), and its still several years far from completion. And, mostly, it’ll just be a large number of right rail and development money, and not actually 16,000 square miles of forbidding, brutalist housing projects and blank, glassy office buildings, policed by authoritarian paramilitaries in flying cars and populated by gangs of anarchist hacker punks engaged in constant low-level fighting. But, I’d say we’re on target!

Here’s what they’d be combining:

[ Telegraph ; image of Hong Kong via Shutterstock]

Source

This post is tagged: development money, infrastructure projects, island connecticut, pearl river delta, telecommunications networks