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 architects claim that the city will be built around the farmland that already exists in the patch of land allocated for the Great City, while within the 1.3km2 city area itself "15 percent of land will be devoted to parks and landscaped space". Another 25 percent will be allocated for infrastructure like roads (of which only half will be accessible to cars, as many residents will be expected not to need them) and the final 60 percent of land will hold tall, glass-and-steel tower blocks like those found in any other new large development in China. If people need to get out of the Great City, there are public transportation stations on the permiter and in the middle.


The 80,000 people expected to live in the Great City would give it a population density of 61,538 people per square kilometre.

That's comparable to some of the most densely-populated city districts in the world -- like Paris' Le Pré-Saint-Gervais (63,876) or Manila's Malabon (59,767). 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 emphasis is on fitting as many people as possible into as small a space as possible while still making a city that "quite simply, offers a great place to live, work and raise a family".

That means it "will use 48 percent less energy and 58 percent less water than a conventional development of similar population [and will also produce 89 percent less landfill waste and generate 60 percent less carbon dioxide". China's cities are notorious for their appalling air quality and their poor quality open spaces -- developments like the Great City are part of a concerted effort on the part of the Chinese government to start rectifying some of the mistakes of the past two decades of mass urbanisation.


It also offers an intriguing alternative to the urban sprawl seen in western cities over the past few decades, which has tended to favour low density housing planned out in repetitive streets -- often under the assumption that everyone would get around by car.

The Great City does have a western-style green belt, though, keeping the city confined within a certain space and reducing the land taken up by human infrastructure (which is interesting, seeing as the British government is reportedly considering relaxing green belt laws in the name of economic development). 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.

The closest comparable project to the Great City in the UK for scale might well be the post-Olympic developments at Stratford, which is effectively an entirely new district planned from scratch -- but don't expect to see anything quite so vast in scale being planned on entirely virgin land any time soon.