East Asia & Pacific » China » Nanjing
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Nanjing dialogue of scales |
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| Nanjing, as all China, is making a relevant effort to join the modern world of economic development. This economic thrust is based on infrastructure building. While in most countries the message has to be that there is a need to invest to improve economic output, in China the message is different: You have to prepare for when infrastructure investment and traditional heavy industries will not be a priority for development due to negative rates of return. Nanjing has to invest in metropolitan software (innovation and research) rather than metropolitan hardware. That turning point will definitively arrive in 20 years. But you have to start turning your wheel before to avoid running out of the sharp curve.
Nanjing is part of Shanghai Mega Metropolis. Has to find its role and play it well. The strategic location, on the Yangtze passage in the road to Beijing, is an asset that has worked for a thousand years and still plays. The bend of the Yangtze articulates de metropolis into two directionalities. Built infrastructures reflect that duality sometimes disconnected an unarticulated. The message is clear: Building is good, bravo. But intermodality is essential. Inarticulation is very inefficient and costly. Innovation flourishes in urban centralities: Connect your existing metropolitan hardware, feed your future metropolitan software. China is proud, and for a reason. I hope that these humble guidelines will be assumed, not necessarily in the open, and will help China becoming the first national GDP in the world in the next 17 years. |
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