ABSTRACT
Estimates in 2010 place the population of Shenzhen at 15,250,000 people. Not only is it one of the most populous cities in the world, it is also the largest municipality in the world’s biggest urban agglomeration – the Pearl River Delta (PRD) – whose population of just over 50,000,000 lives in one contiguous band of urbanization, a horseshoe-shaped megalopolis. 1 Even more astonishing than its world-historical scale is the speed with which it was constructed. In China, “Shenzhen tempo” once referred to its unprecedented speed of construction – one floor of an office building every 2.5 days – but it can equally be applied to the pace of urbanization itself. 2 Shenzhen grew from an urban and rural population of 300,000 living in fishing villages and small towns to its current population in just over 30 years; this amounts to an influx of approximately half-a-million new people every year and requires a development and construction industry designing and building structures to accommodate them. Shenzhen is an unprecedented event in the history of urbanization, but it has also played an important role in the transformation of architectural theory.
