China Superblocks

China Lab Guide to Megablock Urbanism, Contributors, Data, Densities, Formats, High Density, Jeffrey Johnson, Politics and economics, Territory and mobility, Topics, Urban Paradigms

Beijing, China, Collective housing, Commercial infrastructure, Community, Data, Economy, Facilities, Industrial context, Megacities & High Density, Mixed use, Residential, Urban Block, Urban Development, Urban mobility, Urbanism

This essay is an excerpt of "China Lab Guide to Megablock Urbanism" by Jeffrey Johnson, Cressica Brazier and Tat Lam, published by Actar Publishers -- https://lccn.loc.gov/2019955208

China has experienced a historically unprecedented rate of urbanization since Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening policies in 1978.
To put this in historical perspective, and to better understand its scale and magnitude, China’s recent urban growth took only a single generation to achieve as compared to a century in America.
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, this would create more than 220 cities with 1 million or more inhabitants (the United States currently has only nine cities with a population of 1 million or more and Europe has only thirty-five such cities). One hundred seventy new mass-transit systems would need to be built to support 40 billion square meters of new floor space.