Cyberpunk Now

While Shanghai and Hong Kong get the lion’s share of attention, in part because of how visually striking they are, it’s not a surprise that Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a futuristic Shanghai as one of the settings that the player will visit.

But Hong Kong isn’t the only city in the Pearl River Delta. Adjacent is the Shenzhen special economic zone and just up the river is the capital of Guangdong province and one of China’s five National Central Cities. But more than that, there are now plans to create the largest mega city in the world.

The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.
The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.

Interestingly, the merger of these cities is less about centralization, but more about linking these areas together and spreading industry and population through the delta.

However, [Ma Xiangming] said no name had been chosen for the area. “It will not be like Greater London or Greater Tokyo because there is no one city at the heart of this megalopolis,” he said. “We cannot just name it after one of the existing cities.”

Home.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis

Program a map to display the frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse. the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. . .

William Gibson, Neuromancer

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of cities on a vast scale, whether they’re dense agglomerations of people in arcologies or unimaginably vast sprawls of apartments and skyscrapers. The ultimate outcome of such a concept is typified by the concept of the ecumenopolis or “world city.” Various sizes of concentrations of people on a larger scale than currently exists are part of the study of Ekistics, the study of all kinds of human settlements and how they develop.

As the human population increases, barring the colonization of space or a great die-off that reduces the population of Earth, the growth of larger cities and the increased blurring of lines between urban areas seems inevitable. Already, parts of the planet have great areas of very dense population, as shown in this demographic information (PDF). The densities of the cities of India, particularly Mumbai and Kolkata are amazing, but we shouldn’t overlook places like Kinshasa which are large and extremely dense cities.