Property News · March 18, 2017

Put us on the map, please: China's smaller cities go wild for starchitecture


From mountain-shaped apartment blocks to the centre of braised chicken reinventing itself as ‘Solar Valley’, China’s second (and third) tier cities are hiring big-name architects to help put them on the mapFrom egg-shaped concert halls to skyscrapers reminiscent of big pairs of pants, China’s top cities are famously full of curious monuments to architectural ambition. But as land prices in the main metropolises have shot into the stratosphere, developers have been scrambling to buy up plots in the country’s second and third-tier cities, spawning a new generation of delirious plans in the provinces. President Xi Jinping may have issued a directive last year outlawing “oversized, xenocentric, weird” buildings, but many of these schemes were already well under way; his diktat has proved to be no obstacle to mayoral hubris yet.From Harbin “City of Music” to Dezhou “Solar Valley”, provincial capitals are branding themselves as themed enclaves of culture and industry to attract inward investment, and commissioning scores of bold buildings to match. Even where there is no demand, city bureaucrats are relentlessly selling off land for development, hawking plots as the primary form of income – accounting for 80% of municipal revenues in some cases. In the last two months alone, 50 Chinese cities received a total of 453bn yuan (£54bn) from land auctions , a 73% increase on last year, and it’s the provincial capitals that are leading the way. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Put us on the map, please: China’s smaller cities go wild for starchitecture

You may also like...