ABSTRACT
The breakneck pace and growth of China’s cities over the last two decades is both numbing and worrisome. It provides example of how central government ambitions can shepherd vast resources into housing, infrastructure, services, and new consumer venues – and transform what was recently a developing country into a global player. A booming economy, rapid urbanization, and a massive construction industry (the size of California’s population and barely keeping up with demand) are some of the key inputs to skylines that grow across the Chinese landscape. Although its urbanization rationales are extremely practical in function (providing places for a growing population to live, work, travel, and consume), its urban descriptors are largely targeted at achieving superlatives: the most housing, the biggest shopping mall, the longest freeway system, the fastest and most innovative train, and so on. This is the treadmill of global competition writ large. Sustaining and continuing this pace of growth will require huge resource demands. How this will impact the rest of the global population that will compete for these limited resources is unknown. In China’s process of expansion, cities are also experiencing unexpected demolitions, rapid erasure of historic places, population displacement, immense sprawl, and environmental degradation. It becomes a living example of Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction.” While we look with awe at the scale and pace of this transformation, those in the west should be cautious with respect to the portability of China’s urban lessons to other places.
