What could be bigger than megacities or what are urban clusters and how are they developed in China?

[zakiyatasnim]

China is rapidly urbanizing through the development of urban clusters. Let's take a closer look at the areas that underlie this strategy: high-speed rail, digitalization of government services, and environmental regulation in regions.



About 20 years ago, only 30% of China’s population lived in cities, but today it is 60%. This means that about 400 million people (more than the entire population of the United States) have moved to the country’s cities hungary number data in the past 20 years. In Europe, the same process took 90 years, and in the United States, 60 years. And for China, this transition is not yet complete: by 2035, 70% of the country’s population is expected to live in cities.

To cope with the influx of residents, China’s national urban development policy creates large urban clusters instead of expanding individual cities. Each cluster can accommodate up to 100 million people, and the cities within them will cooperate economically, environmentally and politically. This, in turn, will increase the competitiveness of the region.

Formation of urban clusters
In the 1950s, French geographer Jean Gottmann discovered a new pattern of urban development on the northeastern coast of the United States. A 100-kilometer region of 30 million people stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C., increasingly functioned as a single large city. Gottmann called this new structure, using the Greek word for megalopolis. The Boston-Washington megalopolis became home to the wealthiest and most educated people in the country, thanks to its high population density, accessibility to transportation, economic dominance, and cultural influence.

Megacities soon emerged in other parts of the world. The most successful of these is the Taiheiyo Belt in Japan, which is home to two-thirds of the country's population. It stretches for almost 1,200 km from Tokyo to Osaka via Nagoya and accounts for about 70% of the country's economic output.

Zhu Dajiang, a sustainability economist at Tongji University in Shanghai, believes that creating such megacities in China (where they are called urban clusters) is probably the best way to expand access to urban opportunities.