![]() ![]() The government, howeve,r is making some restrictions and telling constructors to build the tall buildings as friendly to the environment as possible. Instead of creating a single office building Chinese high-rises have shopping malls on the lower floors, office rooms in the middle section and luxury apartments at the top. He is the author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade.Chinese skyscrapers are more multifunctional than American ones. ©2017 Bloomberg ViewĪdam Minter is a Bloomberg View columnist. ![]() Shanghai Tower doesn't need to worry about being topped. Notably, supertall buildings aren't part of the plan. In April, President Xi Jinping announced the government would build a new city designed to siphon people and businesses from Beijing's crowded centre and serve as a model for urban development for the next thousand years. With pressure on downtowns reduced, the need to build taller and denser will decline, too. They'll be connected by high-speed commuter rail (roughly four times quicker than a subway) that can avoid a crowded central hub. Those clusters will in theory be differentiated by function (manufacturing, services, government) and less densely populated. The government's solution to these problems is to cap the populations of the biggest cities, and encourage development of so-called urban clusters surrounding the traditional city centres. Likewise, creating the kind of novel workspaces that might appeal to them is difficult in a traditional office tower. Luring young, less wealthy workers - who typically have to live far from pricey downtowns - is a growing challenge for big companies. But millennials in China, as elsewhere, are embracing gig work, part-time opportunities and entrepreneurialism. Older generations were raised to appreciate lifetime employment and the stability of a large organisation - precisely the sort of companies that tend to occupy tall office buildings. Perhaps more significantly, workplace habits are changing. ![]() For employers, meanwhile, increased sprawl makes it harder and more expensive to connect with available labour. Surveys consistently show that long hours, including commutes, are a source of rising dissatisfaction among China's white-collar workers. In 2014, the average one-way commute in Beijing and Shanghai exceeded 50 minutes - longer than in New York - while six-hour round-trip commutes are not unknown. One reason is that China's breakneck urbanisation is creating cities that sprawl further than ever, leading to long commutes, reduced well-being and economic inefficiency. Yet for all its symbolic value, that model is almost certainly obsolete - and the Chinese cities of the future are likely to look very different. In recent years, seemingly every aspirational Chinese city has followed the same model of highly concentrated downtowns topped by massive towers. Some 46% of the 150-metre-plus buildings under construction in the world are in China, partly spurred by local governments keen to emulate Shanghai's skyline (just as the Shanghai government once hoped). That's common in many of China's biggest cities. According to CBRE Group Inc, a leasing agent for Shanghai Tower, more than 600,000 square metres of new office space went on the city's market in the first quarter of this year, with an additional 850,000 coming soon - even as rents are trending downward and vacancies are up. The city's commercial real-estate market couldn't justify the investment. If Shanghai wanted a private developer to take on such a project today, it wouldn't be able to find one. The winning proposal included three supertall buildings intended to represent the rise of Shanghai's financial district - and of China more broadly. ![]() In 1991, the local government held a competition to design a signature business district on the riverfront. Its plight suggests some major changes are afoot in the real-estate market - and in how the professional class lives and works in China.įor two decades, Shanghai's skyline has symbolised China's economic renaissance and modernisation. In this sense, Shanghai Tower signifies the end of an era. The only problem? Finding people to work there: Only 60% of Shanghai Tower is rented out, and only a third of current tenants have actually occupied their leased space. It looms over its neighbours - the world's ninth and 19th tallest buildings - in a supercluster of supertall structures unlike any other in the world. (Reuters file photo)Īt more than 610 metres, Shanghai Tower is the world's second-tallest building. Workmen clean the exterior of 632-metre Shanghai Tower, in the city's financial district of Pudong. ![]()
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