China’s City in the Sky

China’s “mega cities” impact the environment far less while housing vast amounts of people.

Rapidly urbanizing China is revolutionizing the way we think about cities and the urban landscape. And B.C. had better start listening.

As an avid urbanist, I was fascinated by cities during a recent trip to China. The country is currently the world’s largest experiment in rapid urbanization.

My wanderings took me the “mega cities” of Hong Kong/Shenzen and Shanghai, and an ancient “town” (only about 5 million people) called Suzhou. Each of them was a veritable forest of tall residential buildings.

China, it appears, is urbanizing at a breathtaking pace. According to a report by the McKinsey consulting group in Shanghai, 600 million people already live in 800 cities, and 15-20 million from the countryside move to cities every year. By 2030, it’s expected that a billion people will live in cities.

This involves an annual construction of 1,500 buildings more than 30 floors tall, the equivalent of a new Chicago every year. Anyone who’s visited Hong Kong can tell you about the Chinese’s amazing ability to erect tall buildings on postage-stamp lots to squeeze in ever more people.

So what, you say. That’s their problem, not ours.

Actually, it is our problem, but it’s more of an opportunity.

In economic terms, why aren’t our builders hot-footing it over to China to get in on the action? We certainly have some experience in building reasonably green high-rises. And why aren’t our forestry companies landing loads of lumber on Chinese docks to fit out these millions of apartments?

In environmental terms, why aren’t we learning from China? The country is taking up green thinking in a big way, no doubt as a result of the constant haze that hangs over most cities because of rapid industrialization.

Cities in the sky – of which downtown Vancouver is a very small example – are much more efficient than the sprawling suburbs with which so many of us in North America are enamoured. Linked by public transit, crowded cities require far fewer cars, and hence far less use of fossil fuels.

It’s really a question of attitude. We’re used to the wide open spaces and like to see ourselves as loners in a big land. But we’re putting the lie to that self-image as more of us pour into our cities and recognize that we can’t all have half an acre of lawn in front of our house.

The truth is, we can’t afford to think like that any more. We have to go up instead of out. We have to leave a smaller footprint. We have to learn that living in a city in the sky doesn’t mean you have to feel like a bee in a hive. Even in an apartment, you can still be a rugged individualist.

As Shanghai (population 20 million or so) and other Chinese “mega cities” show, you can house vast numbers of people in small spaces relatively cheaply and without impacting the earth as much as we do now.

Sure, they have some problems, but they’re solvable. So why aren’t we listening?