Mega Metro Cities

China is planning to create the world's biggest "mega city" by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million.

Planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta.The scheme will create a 16,000-square mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London.

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.

A mega-city is usually defined as a metropolitan area with more than 10 million people. The world's largest mega-city is currently Greater Tokyo, with some 34.2 million inhabitants. Guangzhou, thought to be home to almost 25 million people, ranks second, with Seoul third at 24.5 million.

During the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine Chinese cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan ($302 billion Cdn). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.

"The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas," said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.However, he 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.

"It will help spread industry and jobs more evenly across the region and public services will be distributed more fairly."Mr Ma said that residents would be able to use universal rail cards.

Twenty-nine rail lines, totalling 3,100 miles, will be added, cutting rail journeys around the urban area to a maximum of one hour between different city centres. According to planners, phone bills could also fall by 85 per cent and hospitals and schools will be improved.

"Residents will be able to choose where to get their services and will use the Internet to find out which hospital, for example, is less busy," said Mr Ma.
Pollution, a key problem in the Pearl River Delta because of its industrialization, will also be addressed with a united policy, and the price of petrol and electricity could also be unified.

It is hoped that the southern conglomeration will wrestle back a competitive advantage from the growing urban areas around Beijing and Shanghai.
By the end of the decade, China plans to move ever greater numbers into its cities, creating some city zones with 50 million to 100 million people and "small" city clusters of 10 million to 25 million.

In the north, the area around Beijing and Tianjin is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways that will create a super-urban area known as the Bohai Economic Rim. Its population could be as high as 260 million.

A new train link between Beijing and Tianjing allows the 75-mile journey to be completed in less than half an hour, providing an axis around which to create a network of feeder cities.

message from The Daily Telegraph.