worth reading The Rise of the Soul-Less City

We all know the world's mega-cities, and may have even visited some of them: Beijing, New York City, Tokyo, Mumbai, Mexico City, London. These are the sprawling urban centers that define nations, fuel ambitions, and capture imaginations. If you can make it there, as the song goes, you can make it anywhere.

But Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times believes that “the real, phenomenal growth in world cities is happening outside these famous, historic -– almost romantic -– centers, in the second-tier cities of Asia that can seem to spring up overnight.”

The way Heathcote sees it, these meticulously planned second-tier cities will serve as models for Asia's urban future and may soon re-define the way all of us live. Here's an edited version of his story about these emerging urban centers in China:

Earlier this year, I ascended the 100 stories or so of Guangzhou International Finance Centre –- the tallest building ever built by a British architect, Wilkinson Eyre. It is an elegant, streamlined cigar of a building. From the top, you could see perhaps four or five miles in every direction before the yellowish industrial smog swallowed up the horizon. The young architect showing me around said that when construction on the tower started, a couple of years ago, virtually nothing was there; it was all farmland, there was no city to see from the site.

Guangzhou has exploded -– the same goes for Wuhan, Chengdu, Shenzhen, and dozens of others. But these are not cities growing through informal settlements at their edges, haphazardly; they are ruthlessly planned. A McKinsey report published in March this year predicted that, in 2025, 100 of the world’s 600 top cities will be new entries from China.

It is calculated that 40 percent of global growth over the next 15 years will come from 400 mid-size cities, many of which we will never have heard of. That growth equates to more than that predicted for all the world’s developed economies and the mega-cities of the emerging markets (including São Paulo, Mumbai, Shanghai, and the others) together.

The top five fastest-growing cities in the world are all in Asia -– and they may come as quite a surprise: Beihai (China), Ghaziabad (India), Sana’a (Yemen), Surat (India again), and, despite everything, Kabul [Afghanistan]. Somehow business will need to re-orientate itself towards these exploding cities and their vast opportunities.

The Chinese government has long realized that its extraordinary industrial boom is not only attracting former agricultural workers from the country to these new mid-size cities but that it is creating a new bourgeoisie, a business class of entrepreneurs and managers.

This emerging and increasingly wealthy middle class is exactly where China has decided to invest. It has realized that they will begin to demand the infrastructure of bourgeois city life, from education, health care, and public transport to leisure facilities, shopping, and parks. And China’s notably top-down planning system allows the creation of these at a stroke. Huge, almost unimaginable infrastructure projects are being put in place not only in the big centers, in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, but in these secondary cities. . . .

The established mega-cities -– New York, Istanbul, London, Cairo, Beijing, Tokyo, and São Paulo -- developed over many centuries, from historic cores that bred poorer, less formal settlements around them, which were then themselves subsumed and upgraded into new quarters, so that cities grew in concentric rings.

These new cities, theoretically, will allow their planners to bypass the problems of historic cores and aging infrastructure, to wire in connected city tissue from the outset. And if you stroll along the green spine of Guangzhou’s Zhujiang new town, which conceals a subway built beneath a central pedestrian park space and a seemingly endless shopping mall at sub-basement level, you get the feeling that these cities could work. . . .

It is easy to criticize these new cities as soul-less and corporate –- which they are -– but the scale of the achievement in building these places is astonishing. These are cities that will be capable of housing the millions still pouring in from the country. The rural population, currently standing at 900 million, is expected to decrease by 500 million over the next 30 years. . . .

Is it a choice between vibrancy and inefficiency versus the grimly repetitive but inarguably efficient? One is making do and getting by, the other is getting on with it. It is impossible not to admire the Chinese for their extraordinary determination, even if their vision of the future is not necessarily one we all might want to live in.

At least they have a vision.