Rise of the Supercity
Xi Jinping chaired a symposium on the Yangtze River Delta in Shanghai yesterday, emphasizing that further promoting the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta, further enhancing innovation capability, industrial competitiveness and development level. Taking the lead in forming a new pattern of higher-level reform and opening up is of great significance for China to build a new development pattern, promote high-quality development, and comprehensively promote the construction of a strong country and the great cause of national rejuvenation through Chinese-style modernization.” MANOJ KEWALRAMANI
Cities generate ninety percent of the world’s economic growth, so Chinese planners studied the most prosperous megacities, like Seoul and Tokyo, and concluded that there is no need to limit their size if they are well planned.
Since the effective size of a labor market is defined by the average number of jobs within a sixty minute commute, planners are creating nineteen supercity clusters averaging 100 million people, which they expect to generate ninety percent of the national economy by 2030.
Mega Regions
The first step is strengthening the links between cities – along two horizontal and three vertical corridors – to create mega-regions, of which Beijing has prioritized three to drive national economic development by 2020: the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, and expect two medium-sized clusters, Yangtze Mid-River and Chengdu-Chongqing, to eventually join them.
Though each is ambitious in its own right, the government is turbocharging them by linking the clusters along two horizontal and three vertical corridors, the five biggest of which will average 110 million people, three times the size of Tokyo. The two ‘horizontals’ are the Land Bridge Corridor in the North and the Yangtze River Corridor; the three verticals are the Coastal Corridor, the Harbin-Beijing-Guangzhou Railway Corridor, and the Baotou-Kunming Railway Corridor.
By linking the Yangtze River Corridor’s existing airports, railways, highways and waterways horizontally they will anchor the ‘land’ end of the Belt and Road Initiative, while the Coastal Corridor anchor the maritime road. Clustering will reallocate resources from bigger cities to smaller ones which tend to be at earlier stages of industrialization, and help them move up the value chain and away from heavy polluting industries. New free trade zones (FTZs) will help bigger clusters attract innovation-based investments and focus on the Made in China 2025 industrial strategy. Alain Bertaud says, “When I saw the original plan for Shenzhen, a fishing village that became one of China’s richest cities, I told them, ‘You’re being too ambitious.’ But I underestimated China’s enormous ability to get these things done.”
The mayor of remote Chongqing, whose thirty million people are clustering with Chengdu’s eight million says, “We became part of the high-speed rail network in 2017. Today we’re seeing China’s old pattern of provincial production based on self-contained industries being replaced by a more rational division of labor and production across the nation in a unified, efficient domestic market. Our objective was to become the economic center and major growth pole of Western China by 2020 and for our large urban and rural areas and to balance our urban-rural development. Today, fifty-one percent of us live in urban areas and forty-nine percent in rural areas. Once our urban population reaches seventy percent we will have three urban layers: one large metropolis, thirty medium cities and a hundred small cities. We’re creating a livable, green, drivable, safe, healthy Chongqing.”
Xiong’an New District
Of all the urban projects, Beijing’s Xiong’an New District, sixty miles to its south, is probably the most ambitious. The forty square mile development, which physically connects the world’s richest city to its poor hinterland, will re-house industries incompatible with the needs of a world capital. Its twenty-five-acre city hall opened last year and seven hundred miles of new track put Beijing thirty minutes away and keep all commutes in the region under sixty minutes.
More commuter lines connect the district’s city centers, universities, factories, hospitals, offices, institutions and government departments and, to optimize space, much transport, water and electricity infrastructure is underground. Four high-speed train lines will run through the region and connect its three new airports: Beijing Daxing, Tianjin, and Shijiazhuang. Since airlines must choose between Beijing’s existing airport and Beijing Daxing, planners doubled the speed of the trains running to the more distant airport to make them equi-temporal.
Xiong’an’s infrastructure runs on 5G Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, big
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data cloud computing, smart sensors, smart lighting and integrated facial recognition–all to reduce energy, time and manpower investment, improve energy efficiency and reduce management overhead. Local media claim it will have neither traffic lights nor traffic jams because Alibaba’s CityBrain AI platform provides its traffic management and Baidu and China Mobile are running remote controlled self-driving vehicles.
Who will pay for this whizzbang technology?
The UN’s Alain Bertaud says the new clusters will provide a productivity edge over competing cities, just as the Industrial Revolution gave England a productivity advantage over the world. Like China’s high speed rail network, it will pay for itself.
