Paolo Soleri’s Proposal for Urbanizing China
Lissa Mccullough
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Beijing City Planning Commission Model
PHOTO: Ivan Walsh |
Originally published in the October 2012 issue of Empirical
City planning in China, as in the rest of the developing world, is coping with rapid urbanization while at the same time facing limited natural and energy resources, pressures on agricultural production, and concern about environmental degradation. Currently about 40 percent of China’s population lives in cities. By 2025, an additional 350 million Chinese will become urban, raising China’s urban numbers to one billion. Because China’s cities are growing outward as well as upward, urbanization has consumed a massive amount of rural countryside. The “spreading pancake” (tan da bing) of urban growth in China has devoured some 45,000 square miles of productive farmland in the last thirty years. This sprawl has also generated demand for the automobile. China’s domestic automobile market now exceeds that of America. If China were to match car ownership in the United States per capita, it would mean more than one billion cars.
