Dans l'optique du prochain Atelier Transit-City du 9 mars prochain consacré à la Chine - voir là - je voulais vous proposer cette carte de ce qui a vocation à devenir la plus vaste ville au monde avec ... 42 millions d'habitants.
Une super-city que les Chinois refusent de nommer mégapole tant ses principes d'organisation seraient radicalement inédits. C'est en tout cas ce qui transparait dans l'article parut récemment dans The Telegraph, sous le titre "China to create largest mega city in the world", et dont je vous propose deux larges extraits ci-dessous.
Ci-dessus la carte de la futur super-city chinoise (à gauche) comparée à celle du Greater London (à droite) - voir à ce sujet London orbital and other rings
"The new mega-city will cover a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong."The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas," said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.However, he said no name had been chosen for the area. "It will not be like Greater London or Greater Tokyo because there is no one city at the heart of this megalopolis," he said. "We cannot just name it after one of the existing cities.""It will help spread industry and jobs more evenly across the region and public services will also be distributed more fairly," he added.Mr Ma said that residents would be able to use universal rail cards and buy annual tickets to allow them to commute around the mega-city.Twenty-nine rail lines, totalling 3,100 miles, will be added, cutting rail journeys around the urban area to a maximum of one hour between different city centres. According to planners, phone bills could also fall by 85 per cent and hospitals and schools will be improved.
"By the end of the decade, China plans to move ever greater numbers into its cities, creating some city zones with 50 million to 100 million people and "small" city clusters of 10 million to 25 million.In the north, the area around Beijing and Tianjin, two of China's most important cities, is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways that will create a super-urban area known as the Bohai Economic Rim. Its population could be as high as 260 million.The process of merging the Bohai region has already begun with the connection of Beijing to Tianjing by a high speed railway that completes the 75 mile journey in less than half an hour, providing an axis around which to create a network of feeder cities."
