China’s Distopian Dream

Move your feet, lose your seat.

Dystopian dreams – Megacities – are spread throughout our pop culture, movies like Blade Runner feature mega cities that cover an entire state, a city state. Historic precedence was set by New York city when it passed 10 million people in 1950. The current mega cities of the world have all grown naturally – organically - China is doing it a little differently. They are enacting a plan on unprecedented scales.

The Pearl River Delta is the site of China’s first purpose built Mega Factory. Once infrastructure works are currently underway and are expected to be completed in six years. The un-named Mega City will have 42 million residents, within 20 years the Mega City will reach an estimated population of 200 million. There are also expectations for the population of Greater Beijing to grow to 250 million withinin the decade. Within 2 decades China may have 3 cities with over 100 million citizens.

China is being urbanized at a rapid rate, the population of China is shifting away from a mainly rural population – 87% in 1953, 79.4% in 1982, 64% in 2001, to city based population. The real impact of these numbers though can be seen when you convert them to people – you have to count the feet – Chinese population shifts are literal. Between 1982 and 2001 15.4% of China picked itself up and walked from rural landscapes, into cities, that’s over 200 million people.

The growth of China’s manufacturing in the past decade has been forbiddingly steady – scrupulously well planned. Manufacturing by nature is both very labor intensive and it loves centralization, Mega Cities provide this in spades. For the Mega-cities to fully develop hundreds of millions of people will need to continue this urbanization over the next two decades.

The China that we see today is only just the beginning, looks like Blade Runner should have been set in China.