Shanghai 'sinking' from skyscrapers

[Zoe]

By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes
BBC, Beijing


China's largest city, Shanghai, is to slash construction of new high-rise buildings to try and stop the city from sinking under the weight of all the concrete and steel.


Shanghai is reportedly sinking 1.5cm each year. Parts of Shanghai are now sinking at a rate of one-and-a-half centimetres a year, largely as a result of a massive building boom there over the last 10 years. According to Saturday's China Daily, tall buildings look nice but they can also cause problems - a fact that Shanghai is rapidly finding out.

Over the last decade a massive building boom has totally transformed the skyline of China's largest city. According to the paper, at least 3,000 high-rise buildings have gone up; another 2,000 are on the drawing-boards.

World's tallest tower

Shanghai is already home to China's tallest building and a new tower now under construction will be the world's tallest.

All this in a city that is, in effect, built on a drained swamp. Now, as the city gradually sinks below the level of the Huang Pu river, the city fathers are getting cold feet - or should that be wet feet?

Construction of new skyscrapers is to be cut, but with so many already built or under construction it may not be enough to stop Shanghai's sinking feeling.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3105948.stm

[DominicanoNYC]

Oh No! :shock: No! I love Shanghai. I don't want it to go :cry:

[TLOZ Link5]

Kuala Lumpur has the same problem.

[Gulcrapek]

I don't think KL has the same problem, it was a joke by S.com.

I read about the Shanghai problem. Kind of unfortunate. But it can end up pretty dangerous.

[NyC MaNiAc]

What extra protection does New York City have against this kind of problem that Shanghai does not have?

[Gulcrapek]

Solid geology. Mostly anyway.

[Zoe]

Yeah the article says that Shanghai was built on a swamp, where NY is bedrock.

[Agglomeration]

That's not the only factor. If global warming continues at its current rate, the melting of the icecaps could flood New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and of course Shanghai, forcing people to live on top of these skyscrapers.

[DominicanoNYC]

THat's the same problem inn New Orleans right?

[TLOZ Link5]

And then New York would be a true Venice, with over 10,000 polygonal islands.

[Kris]

I look forward to it.

[Kris]

October 14, 2003

SHANGHAI JOURNAL

Splendid Skyline. Do You Feel Something Sinking?

By JIM YARDLEY

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/10/13/international/14shan.l.jpg
The view from the Bund to the Pudong district is impressive. But some people in Shanghai are having doubts about putting up more skyscrapers. And the city, which was built on a swamp, may be sinking seriously.

SHANGHAI — Like so many people here, Wang Yongxin happily moved into a high-rise apartment in the 1990's, when the construction frenzy seemed to capture this financial center's ambitions to become the next New York or Hong Kong. New skyscrapers always seemed to be rising, and Shanghai's self-esteem rose with them.

Now, though, sitting on a sidewalk bench in the Pudong district, the epicenter of the city's recent building boom, Mr. Wang, a local business owner, is more frustrated than impressed. He frets about traffic, pollution and what many local residents say is the diminishing quality of life. There is even the inconvenient fact that some scientists believe the skyscrapers are causing the city to sink.

One solution, Mr. Wang said, is to stop building skyscrapers. "It would certainly alleviate some of the problems," he said. "There are enough high-rise buildings."

Surprisingly, many officials in Shanghai seem, at least partly, to agree. Sometime in October, the city's urban planning bureau is expected to revise local building laws to limit, if not ban, high-rise development.

If a new law is approved, and the opacity of Chinese politics means nothing is ever certain, it could spell the end to a period in which Shanghai came to symbolize China's roaring economy. Few, if any, cities in the world built as many tall buildings during that period. A planning bureau report says Shanghai now has at least 2,880 buildings of 18 stories or higher, an overwhelming majority of them constructed since the early 1990's.

It was Deng Xiaoping, then China's aging supreme leader, who came to Pudong in 1992 out of frustration with Shanghai's laggard economic growth. He called on local officials to hasten development and "not waver until the job is complete." His words are now on a monument across the street from the Jin Mao Tower, which at 1,381 feet is by some calculations the world's fourth-tallest building. The planned World Financial Center, expected to surpass the twin, 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as the world's tallest building, will rise above the monument.

"The whole nation got excited about the development," said Wu Jiang, a former university professor who is now deputy director of Shanghai's planning bureau.

But if Shanghai officials and planners regarded every new building as another step in its march to becoming a leading world city, mundane problems, the sort experienced by so many other places, have arisen. The population density in certain downtown areas exceeds that in Tokyo and New York, according to the planning bureau report. Some downtown areas became so dense with buildings that they became "heat islands," where temperatures rose above surrounding areas, a local institute found.

In a city known for its graceful colonial architecture along the Bund, the skyline — the pride of local officials — became more formless as residential towers cropped up in every corner of the city. With increasing frequency, residents are filing complaints based on an obscure law mandating that every home or apartment must receive at least two hours of sunlight a day.

"The interesting thing about Shanghai is that for a variety of reasons it was almost designed from the outside in, as if planners were more concerned with how it looked to the outside world than how it worked from within," said Christopher Choa, who runs the Shanghai office of a New York-based architectural firm, HLW.

Mr. Wu, when he was still a professor, had been critical of city planners, calling for more parks and public spaces and for halting the city's demolition of historic buildings. But when the city government appointed him deputy director of the planning bureau, he said he was convinced that attitudes were changing.

"We still want to encourage all the economic development," he said. "We want people to come here. But on the other side, we want to make our city better."

The other question, of course, is whether the buildings are causing the city to sink. Built on a swamp, Shanghai sank by roughly eight feet from 1921 to 1965, largely because of the draining of groundwater beneath the city. But officials managed to correct the problem and virtually stop the sinking — for a while. Statistics vary, but the city is again sinking, at roughly a centimeter a year. A study by a local institute said the sinking is worst in the downtown areas with the highest concentration of new buildings.

Still, many local officials and academics say they are not overly alarmed. Tang Yi Qun, a professor of geo-technical engineering at Tongji University, said both Tokyo and Mexico City have worse problems with subsidence.

The debate about curbing development in Shanghai comes as many economists and government officials are expressing concerns that the national real estate market could overheat and threaten China's economy.

For now, though, regardless of what happens with the economy or the building law, cranes will still rise in Shanghai: officials say as many as 2,000 buildings of all sizes have been approved or are already under construction.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

Whether you call them delusions of grandeur or visionary thinking, China's biggest city has plans that are nothing if not bold

APART from a dozen Chinese tourists posing for a photograph, the platform at the oval dome-covered Longyang Road Station is nearly empty as the world's fastest train pulls in. Minutes later, with all but a handful of its 500 seats unoccupied, the train glides off, levitating on an electromagnetic cushion that propels it with barely a judder to its top speed of 430kph (267mph). It takes just eight minutes to complete the journey to Pudong International Airport, an ultra-modern structure of glass and steel 30km (19 miles) away.

Considering the thrill of being on the world's first maglev train in commercial use—and the half an hour or more saved on the journey—it might seem odd that so few people are trying it out. Since daily services were launched on December 29th, about 1,000 tickets a day have been sold on weekdays (out of 12,000 available). At weekends, when novelty-seekers are out in greater numbers, the total still only rises to about 5,000, according to Song Xiaojun, general manager of Shanghai Maglev Transportation Development Co. If the arrival of maglev is a great boon to Shanghai's overburdened transportation system, few appear to be aware of it.

It is more than just a cautious approach to rolling out this new, German-supplied, technology that is keeping numbers down. While other countries, including Germany itself, have hesitated about adopting maglev because of the high cost and uncertain returns, Shanghai has happily poured $1.2 billion into its track—even though a glance at a map immediately suggests the risks involved. Longyang Road Station, the only stop apart from the airport, is on the city's eastern fringe, a considerable distance from most residential areas. A taxi ride between the airport and Longyang costs little more than the 75 yuan ($9) price of a maglev ticket and saves the hassle of a transfer.

Shanghai's gamble on maglev, in which seven big state-owned companies have a stake, reflects an approach to the city's development that places great store on massively expensive and commercially dicey projects. Since the early 1990s Shanghai has been driven by a desire to reclaim its pre-communist era status as a regional financial capital and a cosmopolitan haven for international capitalists eager to penetrate the Chinese market—that lavish but raffish world immortalised in Vicki Baum's novel, “Shanghai '37”. China's former prime minister, Zhu Rongji (who previously served as Shanghai's party chief and is normally known for his hard-headedness), strongly backed the maglev project when it got under way in 2000.

Cynics should perhaps beware. The city's “build it and they will come” mentality has, after all, paid off handsomely before. Many people scoffed when Shanghai announced plans in 1990 to develop what was then just an expanse of marshy land, villages and old factories into the city's new financial district. Today Pudong, as the area is called (and where the maglev is located), is a stunning conglomeration of soaring office towers and hi-tech factories (pictured above) that has attracted tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment. Last year, it is reckoned, it sucked in just under $6 billion, more than a tenth of the total for the entire country.

In the next few years, changes in Shanghai—whose GDP, according to the official figures, grew last year by a sizzling 11.8%—could be similarly dramatic. In September, the city is due to host China's first Formula One car-racing event. This has involved one of the biggest outlays of any Formula One venue in the world, with $310m being spent on a 5.5km circuit and related facilities now under construction on the western outskirts of the city.

The plan is to turn this into the centrepiece of a new “auto city” in which all aspects of the industry from manufacturing to sales will be concentrated. Yu Zhifei, deputy general manager of the track's developers, Shanghai International Circuit Co, admits that a lot of Chinese do not know what Formula One is and that many who do are sceptical about the track's ability to make money. But he says he is confident that the facility, with a seating capacity of 200,000, will turn a profit as Chinese consumers' new-found penchant for cars continues to grow apace.

The car craze is evident in the worsening congestion of Shanghai's streets. But to the maglev's operators, this is comforting. “Within a few years, it'll be very inconvenient to take the road to the airport,” enthuses Mr Song. And next year, he says, work should begin on extending the line another 7km to the site where the World Expo will be held in 2010 on the banks of the Huangpu River, much closer to the city centre. The hope is that it will become the main way to visit the fair, an event that lasts several months.

Shanghai's planners regard the World Expo as the city's greatest opportunity to show off its resurgent glory. Scepticism may abound about the ability of World Expos to generate profits. Hanover, site of the last such event in 2000, suffered a disappointing turnout. But Shanghai sees it as comparable to Beijing's hosting of the Olympic Games in 2008: an event that will fix the world's attention on the city's, and the country's, achievements. Compared to that, the $3 billion needed to build the facilities and relocate tens of thousands of residents to the outskirts is a trifle. And, anyway, by then the maglev's operators hope to be making a profit.

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Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group