Sleepless in Shanghai

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.

1 minute read

March 27, 2007, 4:21 PM PDT

By Anthony Townsend

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.

Shanghai China

Anthony Townsend

Anthony has been researching the implications of new technology on cities and public institutions for over a decade. As Research Director at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto, California, Anthony's work focuses on several inter-related topics: pervasive computing, the urban environment, economics and demographics, public and nonprofit organizations, and the media industry.

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