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Sleepless in Shanghai

Anthony Townsend
Tue, 03/27/2007 - 15:21
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I'm in Shanghai this week conducting workshops for two of my Fortune 500 clients looking at the future of mobility in the Shanghai region and Chinese cities more broadly. If you've never been to China, get on a plane now and come here. You will never think about cities or urbanization the same way again.

Shanghai has created a city larger than Manhattan in less than 20 years, and is set to create another in the next 15. The earth literally sags under the weight of the new buildings, as they push the former rural swampland into the earth.

Mobility is changing incredibly fast here as the urban landscape shifts dramatically, explosive motorization provide new metropolitan freedom, and wireless communications rewrite the dynamics of coordination. (Fully 80 percent of the city's residents own cell phones vs. 20-30 percent for the nation as a whole).

For more reading, check out IFTF's del.icio.us tagroll for "shanghai". I'll be posting some more in-depth dispatches later in the week.

Anthony Townsend is a research director at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto, California.
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The views expressed are solely those of the author, and do not represent the views of any group or organization that he or she is affiliated with unless clearly stated, nor the views of Planetizen.
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The areas where we have severe blight and indications of more blight to come are basically the same as they ever were. How in the world are we ever going to move our community development selves into an alternative future that thinks differently about the challenges we face in our cities and low-income suburban and rural communities?
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