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https://www.economist.com/china/2018/06/23/china-is-trying-to-turn-itself-into-a-country-of-19-super-regions
> Hu Qiuping, a safety manager for a chemicals company, is in the urban vanguard. She lives in Wuxi, a city of 6m about 150km west of Shanghai. A trip between the two used to take a couple of hours. Today the bullet train takes just 29 minutes. Every Monday and Friday she works in Wuxi, inspecting the chemicals factory. From Tuesday to Thursday she travels to the firm’s headquarters in Shanghai. She could have based herself in either city, but living costs were much lower in Wuxi. At first she wondered whether her commute was unusual. It was not. “I see familiar faces on the train every day,” she says.
> For those in bedroom communities near London or Manhattan, Ms Hu’s train rides probably sound familiar. But three features make China’s super-regions exceptional. The first is scale. The biggest existing city cluster in the world is greater Tokyo, home to some 40m people. When it is fully connected the Yangzi delta, where Ms Hu is based, will be almost four times as big, with 150m people. The average population of the five biggest clusters that China hopes to develop is 110m. Part of the reason is that the physical area of most of the Chinese clusters will also be bigger. The most prosperous, the Pearl delta, is expected to cover 42,000 square kilometres, about the same as the Netherlands.
> Given that spread, it might seem nonsensical to talk of the clusters as unified entities. But the second point is the speed of transport links, notably the bullet trains between cities.
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The full article is interesting, but this is the relevant bit, basically I feel China is making the Urban setup that /n/ always wanted.
> Hu Qiuping, a safety manager for a chemicals company, is in the urban vanguard. She lives in Wuxi, a city of 6m about 150km west of Shanghai. A trip between the two used to take a couple of hours. Today the bullet train takes just 29 minutes. Every Monday and Friday she works in Wuxi, inspecting the chemicals factory. From Tuesday to Thursday she travels to the firm’s headquarters in Shanghai. She could have based herself in either city, but living costs were much lower in Wuxi. At first she wondered whether her commute was unusual. It was not. “I see familiar faces on the train every day,” she says.
> For those in bedroom communities near London or Manhattan, Ms Hu’s train rides probably sound familiar. But three features make China’s super-regions exceptional. The first is scale. The biggest existing city cluster in the world is greater Tokyo, home to some 40m people. When it is fully connected the Yangzi delta, where Ms Hu is based, will be almost four times as big, with 150m people. The average population of the five biggest clusters that China hopes to develop is 110m. Part of the reason is that the physical area of most of the Chinese clusters will also be bigger. The most prosperous, the Pearl delta, is expected to cover 42,000 square kilometres, about the same as the Netherlands.
> Given that spread, it might seem nonsensical to talk of the clusters as unified entities. But the second point is the speed of transport links, notably the bullet trains between cities.
----
The full article is interesting, but this is the relevant bit, basically I feel China is making the Urban setup that /n/ always wanted.
