China's obsession with vertical cities

By the end of next year one-in-three of the world’s 100m+ skyscrapers will be in China, as its state-orchestrated urbanisation drive prompts a megacity building bonanza

Nicola Davison in Shanghai 

The Guardian - Thursday 30 October 2014

In late September, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a non-profit organisation that keeps the world’s largest database on skyscrapers, held its annual conference in Shanghai – two years after its last meeting there. “We’ve never done that before, gone back to the same city,” says Antony Wood, the council’s executive director. “But right now, most of the major advances in the typology, in design or in technical terms, are happening in China.”
As the global population rises and cities become more crowded, the fabric of urban centres is changing. Nowhere is the phenomenon more pronounced than in China, where a state-orchestrated urbanisation drive has prompted a megacity building bonanza characterised by skyscrapers and sprawl. By the end of 2015, one in three of the world’s buildings over 150-metres will be in China. Construction of the world’s second-tallest building, the 632-metre tall Shanghai Tower, is due to be completed next year.
Few people outside China have heard of Suzhou, a city in the eastern province of Jiangsu with a population of 1.3 million (China now has over 140 cities of more than one million people; America has nine). Yet if all goes to plan, Suzhou will soon boast the world’s third-tallest building, the 700m Zhongnan Centre. Other Chinese cities joining the upward rush include Shenzhen, Wuhan, Tianjin and Shenyang. By 2020, China is set to be home to six of the world’s 10 tallest buildings, although none will top the globe’s current highest, the 828m Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

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