China’S Next 30 Years: Building the World’S Biggest Cities

By D’Arcy Doran

SHANGHAI: China’s past 30 years of reforms planted seeds that will in the coming decades produce future coastal megacities, an urban population of one billion and possibly the world’s biggest economy.

What the next 30 years of reforms have in store may be unclear but experts agree with widespread pollution problems and a tidal wave of migration set to hit China’s cities, urbanisation will be the future’s biggest challenge.

“The next 30 years are going to be a critical timetable for addressing all the needs of a large population and how China manages cities,” said James Canton, author of “The Extreme Future”.

By 2025 China’s urban population is expected to rise to 926 million from 572 million in 2005 – an increase equal to the entire current population of the United States, according to management consultants McKinsey & Company. By 2030 that number will increase to a billion.

Over the next two decades China will build 20,000 to 50,000 new skyscrapers – the equivalent of 10 New York cities, according to McKinsey.

More than 170 cities will need mass transit systems by 2025 – more than twice the number in all of Europe – in what McKinsey described as the “greatest boom in mass-transit in history”.

Chinese cities will leverage their manufacturer strengths to become innovation centres for products like nanotechnology, smart materials and state-of-the-art pharmaceuticals, Canton predicted.

They will also be home to the world’s largest middle class, he said. But to accommodate more than a billion people, entirely new forms of infrastructure and security frameworks will need to be developed.