China Sky Cities Trying for Clean and Safe Versions of Judge Dredd’s Stratoscapers and Megacities

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China will be trying to make 200-700 story Sky City factory mass produced skyscrapers. These buildings will use less material (steel and concrete), be lower cost per square foot and will have other environmental and economic benefits.

From the Judge Dredd Comics there are the Stratoscrapers in Mega City One. They are described as often housing over 60,000 citizens and often reaching over 700 stories.

There is a video trailer for the new Dredd movie (2012 with Karl Urban)

The trailer for Dredd talks about 200 story buildings

Another screenshot from Dredd of Megacity One with scyscrapers towering over current buildings in the imagined future

The CEO of Broad Group Zhang Yue will be building a “Sky City” skyscraper which can fix many of the world’s pollution, congestion, transportation and even disease problems by completely purifying the tower’s air. The 838-meter-tall building (10 meters taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, currently the world’s tallest) will hold schools, a hospital, 17 helipads and some 30,000 people. He has plans for a 2 kilometer (1.25 mile tall) 636 floor skyscraper.

Reach for the sky: the world’s tallest buildings, once the 838-meter Sky City is completed, projected for January 2013.

Judge Dredd has a dystopian view of skyscrapers and megacities. However, Manhattan, Hong Kong and Singapore are relatively clean, safe, efficient and productive. The new Sky Cities will enable chinese cities to be far less dusty and to use cement and steel more efficiently.

Urban Development economic studies indicate that the higher density could enable a near doubling of per capita GDP.

Besides Being Tallest they will have the Most Area Inside

Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport has 1.185 million m² (12.76 million sq ft) of floor space. This is twice as much as the Pentagon (6.6 million square feet).

The Venetian Macao has the largest one single building are (instead of multiple towers in a complex) at 10.5 million square feet.

A Comfortable, clean and safe mega-building in China. Venetian Macao. 10.5 million square feet

A previous design for Sky City One was for 666 meters, have 200 floors and 1.24 million square meters (13.35 million square feet, 306 acres, 0.48 square miles.) The new design for Jan 2013 completion is 838 meters tall and 220 floors.

If the 838 meter building had 10% expansion of height and area (proportionally) it would have 16 million square feet.
If the 2000 meter tall, 636 floor building was expanded in height and area (proportionally), then it would have 135 million square feet.

China also Merging Cities into Megacities

The three major economic mega-urban zones are the pearl river delta in the south (merging into one 42 million person city) and Yangtze River delta around Shanghai and the Bohai economic rim

The area around Beijing and Tianjin, two of China’s most important cities, is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways that will create a super-urban area known as the Bohai Economic Rim. China is merging Beijing/Tianjin and several other cities around the Bohai Sea into one big super-urban zone over the next several years. By 2020 there could be 260,000,000 people (3% of the world’s
population) in one big super-city.

Here is translation of a plan for the development of the Bohai Economic Rim.

China will be about 70% urban in 2030. This will be over 1 billion people in the cities. China population is expected to peak at about 1.44 to 1.55 billion people in the 2030s. At 80% urbanization and 1.5 billion people, China would have 1.2 billion people in cities at the end of the 2030s. 90% urbanization (like the UK now) would mean 1.35 billion in the cities in the 2040s.

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