City planners in China are hoping to turn the nine cities in the Pearl River Delta into a single, humongous megacity the size of Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire combined. Its population: 42 million.
Sounds awesome, right? I mean, I love living in New York City, but I always find myself saying “This just isn’t enough like a dystopian near-future science fiction comic book.” So when my lease is up, and when it’s ready, I’m heading to the unnamed megacity currently being planned in China! The Telegraph writes:
The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.
The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.
Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.
The city doesn’t have a name yet (Neo Tokyo? Mega City One? The Sprawl?), and its still a few years away from completion. And, mostly, it will just be a lot of right rail and development money, and not actually 16,000 square miles of forbidding, brutalist housing projects and blank, glassy office buildings, policed by authoritarian paramilitaries in flying cars and populated by gangs of anarchist hacker punks engaged in constant low-level fighting. But, I’d say we’re on the right track!
Here’s what they’d be combining:
[Telegraph; image of Hong Kong via Shutterstock]