This year alone, Shanghai will complete towers with more space for living and working than there is in all the office buildings in New York City.
That is in a city that already has 4,000 skyscrapers, almost double the number in New York. And there are designs to build 1,000 more by the end of this decade.
Below is a picture of the skyline in Shanghai.
Source: Marginal Revolution
4 comments:
All I'll say is that we should all start learning Chinese now, it'll make it easier when they take over the world...
Daniel: I don't think that it's just the fact that labor and materials are cheaper, in fact, because of high demand, materials would prob be more expensive. I think it's just that there is so much money there (for instance because of foreign investment like Brian said) that they can afford to build all these skycrapers. NYC doesn't have a slower expansion rate because of high material and labor prices, it has a slower expansion rate because less big businesses want to build their buildings there...although on second thought what you said could be a contributing factor because maybe less people want to build in NYC because of the high prices, such as property in NYC.
China also has the hugest labor market in their back yard. It makes sense that they would be able to construct so many skyscrapers in shanghai, especially since those communists can control that sort of thing. The only question that i would have is how
much they're really spending on all of that steel being used in those skyscrapers. I mean that steel could go toward so many other added value products in other industries. Is shanghai really that attractive of
a city in terms of the jobs it offers in order for such skyscrapers to be built? But then again, i figure quite a few internationals that do frequent business in china might want one of those lofts in a skyscraper. If they really have that much of an immigration into the city, the chinese are being smart as to pile people into these large skyscrapers, because spreading those people out over the land diminishes the land's agricultural use, which is critical to their country's economy. If they don't have such a demand for those skyscrapers, i'm sure there are plenty of realtors that would invest quite a bit of money into those living spaces given the current growth in china.
that last comment was by David Wyant, my mistake.
Post a Comment