China Plans A New City, Estimated Investment Of $290 Billion
A cure for the country’s capital, Beijing’s overcrowding, growth in country’s economy and betterment of ecology, China has planned to build a new city not so far from Beijing. Xiongan New Area, announced on April 1, is the new key for the development of densely populated areas in the country. According to the plan, the population of Beijing is to be capped at 23 million by 2020. The expected investment in the infrastructure and relocation, estimated by Morgan Stanley is about 2 trillion Yuan i.e. $290 billion for the first 15 years.
For President Xi Jinping, Xiongan is a transformation of ‘sleepy backwater of orchard and lotus flowers’ into a hub of pollution free transportation, world class universities and innovative companies.
Located about 100km (60 miles) southwest of central Beijing, covering sector of Xiongxian, Rongcheng and Anxin, and is home to Baiyangdian, one of the largest freshwater wetlands in North China, Xiongan New Area covers about 100 sq km, that will soon expand to 200 sq km and later to 2,000 sp km.
Xiongan is established for building a world-class modern, green and smart city for people looking for ecological environment, blue skies, fresh air and blue sky.
According to the estimates, the new area will have 1.55 million people in 15 years and it will help boosting the investment growth of the county by 0.33% and GDP by 0.13%-0.19% per year.
“China’s really pushed the idea in the last five years that it’s done the rapid urbanization process, and now it’s going to look at quality,” said Austin Williams, author of ‘China’s Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-Cities.’ “A lot of people are now aspiring to a quality of life beyond quantity.”
“I quite like Chinese experimentation,” says Williams, an associate professor of architecture at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou. “They’re building new cities whereas the west hasn’t built one for 50 years. This could be a nice, high-end, middle-class suburb, 30 minutes on a bullet train back into Beijing, a kind of Milton Keynes. There are lots of people demanding decent homes and moving away from some areas of Beijing, which are horrible, so producing a satellite city, I still think, in many ways has to be done.”
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