Tag Archives: urbanisation

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What’s the Cantonese for “Sprawl”, anyway?

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Via Tobias Buckell comes news that China is planning to merge seven cities into one unified industrial-urban megaregion, complete with a high-speed rail transport infrastructure:

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.

I’ll let Tobias put that into perspective for us:

Some online have noticed that pretty soon China will have 260 million or so people all within one hour’s train ride of each other.

Imagine the entire population of the US all being within an hour commute of each other.

Uh-huh.

Today's Tomorrows

Cities and security: a Mexican story

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For the last few months I dove deeper into topics I’d already covered.  But this month I decided to do something else.  At my job, I get the Homeland Security Newswire (I manage technology for a medium-sized local government).  I keep seeing various articles that reference Mexico – the big country next door to the US that is in some danger of becoming a failed state; the one in the bloody middle of an honest-to-goodness drug war rather than an anemic War on Drugs. Continue reading Cities and security: a Mexican story →