When the 101-storey Shanghai World Financial Centre finally opens for business early next year, China will have fulfilled its ambition to have the world's tallest building. But, as impressive as the soaring outline of the 492-metre modernist edifice promises to be, the story behind its stop-and-go construction should serve as a warning to developers of other mega projects on the mainland. More importantly, the skyscraper should also be taken as a plainly visible symbol of the problems China is likely to face in trying to achieve its goal of radically redesigning its urban areas as more environmentally sustainable communities.
Originally begun in 1997 by Japan's Mori Building Group, work on the tower ground to a halt within a year, a victim of the economic shockwave set off by the Asian financial crisis. The project languished as a large hole in the ground until the market rebounded in 2004. By then, the cost had shot past US$1.1 billion from the original US$850 million.
Even today, the rocketing demand for Shanghai office space masks the structural inadequacies of the country's overall property sector, such as speculative excesses, overbuilding and corruption. For those with ambitions to build similarly expensive mega structures, this makes for a precarious foundation. Meanwhile, there are the usual reams of mainland red tape to hack through. Foreign markets that have a culture of high-quality construction are almost self-regulating. In China, authorities insist on enforcing strict construction rules, because without them people would build anything. But the labyrinth of rules and procedures erodes the cost advantages of China's cheap labour, and magnifies the risks of working in an already volatile environment.
From a green perspective, that is a big shame. Why? Because China desperately needs to put up more, not fewer, ultra-tall buildings. In fact, its urban planners will eventually have little choice but to build up instead of out, given the growth rate of the economy and the speed with which the country's rural population is migrating to cities. Their sprawl, sooner or later, will run into natural limits.
The way mainland China currently builds its cities and consumes its raw materials is simply unsustainable. According to a study published in 2001 by Mathis Wackernagel, an environmental analyst, the country's ecological footprint is about 1.6 times its total per capita biocapacity. Translation: China's consumption of its natural resources and the pollution it generates in the process exceed its ecosystem's ability to regenerate by a factor of 1.6. That may not seem so bad compared with the equivalent footprints in developed economies such as the European Union (4.7 times) and the US (a staggering 9.7 times). But the mainland's per capita figure distorts the true picture because, with so many people, the country's overall impact is far greater.
Calculated on a per-country basis, China already consumes some 18 per cent of global biocapacity, ranking it on a par with the EU and not far behind the US (25 per cent). And China is only just getting started. The Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based think-tank, says that, if China's and India's per capita footprints by 2030 are equal to that of, say, Japan's today, then the resulting consumption of resources would eat up the biocapacity of the entire planet.
So, how China addresses this crisis of sustainability is critically important for the world. By their nature, densely populated urban areas are probably the only places where the necessary ecological efficiencies are likely to be found.