I noticed another panda clip on the news today. Moreroads communist propaganda.
citymetric.com
Over the past 15 years China has built hundreds of new cities, expanded thousands of urban areas, wiped over a million villages off the map, and urbanised hundreds of millions of people. It’s a development boom that’s incomparable to anything that any other country has ever attempted.
Led by its national urbanisation plan, China has transitioned from a mostly rural country of peasant farmers to one that is defined by its cities. But this urbanisation drive has produced a peculiar side effect: newly built urban areas, even completely new cities, that entirely lack people.
Enough floor space to cover Hong Kong twice over is being constructed in China’s cities each year. Yet despite the fact that 250m more people are expected to move into cities by 2030, and even though the demand for modern housing is huge, an incredible amount of apartments are currently vacant. At a rough estimate, there are around 600m m2 of floor space still unoccupied – enough to completely cover Madrid.
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