As China’s population becomes increasingly urbanized, its cities must not only grow, but find new forms. In many cases, cities are growing so fast they are sprouting new residential and business districts as separate satellites around their peripheries. Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in central China, is pursuing a particularly ambitious version of this strategy on the banks of nearby Meixi Lake.
There, New York-based Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) is master-planning a gigantic, 6.5 million square-meter satellite city from scratch. The project is being led by U.S. real-estate firm Gale International, in collaboration with information technology giant Cisco Systems. Modeled largely on KPF’s design for New Songdo City in South Korea, the Meixi Lake master plan places efficiency at its center, providing a variety of public modes of transportation (including subways, inter-city trains, and even electric canal boats) and taking an environmentally conscious approach to energy generation and use. The plan integrates city services—utilities, transportation and information technology—into the fabric of the city.
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