The Chinese City A Self-Contained Utopia

摘要

Could the Utopian ideal of building a tabula rasa city from scratch be slipping away? Neville Mars, Director of the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF), Beijing, highlights how in the last decade development has become focused on the periphery of existing metropolises. Fuelled by the aspirant middle classes' inexorable appetite for settling in modern cities, urbanisation is manifesting itself in 'self-contained Utopias': walled-off, slick cities that are dormitory, satellite towns rather than independent urban settlements.