You want big? Here comes Pearl River City
January 27th 2011 02:00
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Vyoos news
Listen up, Dubai, with your tall toy tower and pretty island residential developments, when it comes to really big, you have a way to go to catch up to China.
The world's biggest economy (yes, America, get used to it) has just announced an infrastructure scheme which dwarfs anything in history.
They plan to spend more than US$1 trillion creating a mega-city of more than 40 million people. They will do it by connecting a series of existing cities in the Pearl River Delta, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen, currently China's third and fourth-largest cities.
In all, eight existing cities, ranging in population from just under two million to almost 12 million, will become a mega-city with a population of more than 40 million, all linked by super-modern road, public transport and telecommunications infrastructure.
Try an exercise of this size anywhere else, such as those problematic countries where residents get a vote and like to have a say in planning issues, and such a project would get bogged down for centuries in committee hearings.
The Chinese, however, are planning to have the whole thing finished within six years.
As an interesting aside, literally, the mega-city will border both China's reclaimed territories, Hong Kong (with its estimated 7 million people) and Macau, and will have superfast train links to them.
The planners have only one problem - they haven't decided yet what to call the world's largest city. We respectively suggest that much of the world has heard of the Pearl River and its fertile delta. Pearl River City sounds good to us.
telegraph.co.uk
Shanghai (including an artist's impression of the Shanghai Tower, right, which is still under construction) is just a village of 20 million compared to the new Pearl River mega-city.
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