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Dalian, China, April 2008

Not a workers beehive, as someone mentioned below, or at least that wasn't how the property developers marketed it, it may become a workers beehive in time...right now though this is still a "luxury" middle-class beehive (with chinese characteristics). I've seen some of the flats inside it, polished floors, hardwood furniture (tsk tsk) etc...quite nice though.

So I was just looking at this building from my own rather large building and trying to count how many units there were, as you do, and it must be around 600 in that single block, and each unit is family sized. That's potentially 2000 people in one building. The building I live in, though less-wall like, has 53 floors, so that's another equivalent of a small town in Scotland.

China's huge rural to urban shift is actually only half-way through, it's down from 80 % rural in 1980 to 55 % rural or thereabouts today, but the final target is 30 % rural, and with such large population living on such little farmable land (two-thirds of China is mountain or desert), this is the only future for Chinese cities, there won't be US-style suburbia, there can't be. Eating up arable land might be a concern for cities built on a plain, but Dalian for one just doesn't have space full-stop, it's surrounded by sea and mountains, it's difficult to see how it's going to double its population to 6 or 7 million without stringing it out for 100 km. The only way is to knock down and build higher. Well, the locals do call it the Hong Kong of the North. (note, i met no Hong Kong-ese referring to themselves as the Dalian of the south...) And Dalian is only a "second-tier" Chinese city, somewhere around the 10th to 15th biggest, so consider this scenario repeated all over, and in the likes of Shanghai and Chongqing, on steroids...

This packed-in high-rise living is already normal throughout developed parts of Asia like Singapore, South Korea, and Hong-Kong, as mentioned, but will it become normal for the bulk of the world, not through choice, as in Europe's modernist experiments of the 1960s, but through necessity ? How will this change humanity is as a whole ? How will countries that have already developed in a low-density fashion adapt to the new era ?

Anyway, I'm away tonight for a short break to Qingdao, a city in the neighbouring province. No doubt photos will be taken...