That was the first thing I thought when I saw this stat posted a little while ago. "Fine, the stat sounds impressive, but there's a lot of other stats that other countries do more of in the last few years than in the 20th Century".
For example, anyone could write a dramatic headline declaring that we've created more computer chips in the last X months than in the 20th century. That doesn't mean much.
In short, this feel like some sort of crappy statistic handpicked to make China look bad, when in fact it's the whole world that's using a lot more concrete, not just China!
Why? So that China experience the 'luxury' of endless suburban sprawl and the myriad of problems it brings. Hopefully China can learn from out mistakes, not repeat them
No. Because a house is simply a nicer place to live than a flat.
It's very possible to have nice houses without endless suburban sprawl. They can indeed learn from our mistakes; have nice houses, but without endless suburban sprawl.
First of all I absolutely reject your claim that houses offer a priori simply a nicer place to live than flats. Sure there exists certain combinations of price point, geographic location and life situation where it holds, but it certainly isn't a given.
Secondly how are you going to build nice affordable houses for 1.4 billion people without sprawl. Are you suggesting completely giving up on urbanization and going back to having countless tiny villages?
There are many very nice places to live in the world that are not afflicted with suburban sprawl and provide houses to live in, yet are not tiny villages. I'm not going to sit here and fill in the gaps in your imagination; I suspect you've already made your mind up.
There are many very nice places to live in the world that are not afflicted with suburban sprawl and provide houses to live in, yet are not tiny villages
Absolutely, but they either suffer from rapidly rising houses prices or no appreciable population growth. If you stick to a population ceiling of say 50k or so then many problems are easy
But we are talking about about places that are seeing up to a million new people show up in just a few years. Building everybody a nice house is neither realistic nor, in my opinion, desirable. We've either got to re-think the whole "everybody gets a nice house" or try to reverse urbanization in favour of lots and lots of small town capped at around 50k population.
For example, anyone could write a dramatic headline declaring that we've created more computer chips in the last X months than in the 20th century. That doesn't mean much.
In short, this feel like some sort of crappy statistic handpicked to make China look bad, when in fact it's the whole world that's using a lot more concrete, not just China!