Great article in the NYTimes Magazine about the creation of new megacities that is going on in places like China and the Middle East. In the last 20-30 years metropolises like Shenzhen have gone from being unremarkable villages to having 8 or 10 million inhabitant. As you can imagine, this throws a bit of a monkey wrench into existing theories of architecture and urban development.
'Cities like these, built on a colossal scale, seem to absorb any urban model, no matter how unique, virtually unnoticed. A project that could have a significant impact on the character of, say, New York — like the development plans for ground zero — can seem a mere blip in Beijing, which has embarked on dozens of similarly sized endeavors in the last decade alone. “The irony is that we still don’t know if postmodernism was the end of Modernism or just an interruption,” Koolhaas told me recently. “Was it a brief hiatus, and now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, or is it something radically different? We are in a condition we don’t understand yet.”'
However the theory works out, these cities aren't waiting. They'll be built in whatever way they can manage because the economic growth in the region demands it. I wonder how we will look back at them in 50 years -- as collossal mistakes or remnants of a tremendously creative era?
