China's "Great City" is fully built

               The architects behind the Kingdom Tower -- planned to be the world's first building to reach 1km in height -- have been chosen to build a completely new suburban city from scratch on the outskirts of Chengdu in southwest China. The "Great City" is effectively an entirely new municipality, designed as one whole instead of the chaotic and environmentally inefficient alternative of urban sprawl. The designers -- Adrian Smith +  Gordin Gill Architecture, based in Chicago -- have marked out a 1.3km2 circle surrounded by 1.9km2 of farmland and parks, where residents won't need cars because everything is within a 15-minute walk of the city centre.

         If the model is successful, the Great City will be copied on the edges of China's other megalopolises and their populations continue to boom -- putting pressure on housing, infrastructure and the environment. The 80,000 people expected to live in the Great City would give it a population density of 61,538 people per square kilometre. In London, the most densely populated boroughs in the inner city have a density of around 10,000 people per square kilometre.

           The entire Great City complex -- urban circle and surrounding open park/farmland -- is roughly the same size as Hampsted Heath.The Great City will offer an inner-city experience for residents on the edge of an existing conurbation, rather than something semi-rural that we might recognise -- a good thing, too, as postwar suburban sprawl is a hugely inefficient way of living.