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China’s towering ambitions have met reality—stricter regulations are now limiting skyscrapers as economic, environmental, and safety concerns reshape urban policy
Image Source: Getty
This is the 168th in the ‘China Chronicles’ series
In the first two decades of the 21st century, the world witnessed a prodigious 400 percent upsurge in skyscraper construction. This period also marked a phenomenal shift in skyscraper construction from the United States (US) to Asia. Only six commercial towers over 300 metres were built in the US in the first two decades of this century. In contrast, since 2000, China has built a staggering 1,575 skyscrapers, accounting for 60 percent of the world’s new high-rises. By 2021, Asia housed 80 percent of the world’s skyscrapers, with China leading the Asian skyscraper boom. Fuelled by its spectacular economic growth, rapid urbanisation and a yearning to display its financial and technical capability, China found the construction of skyscrapers as a fitting symbol to announce its prowess to the world.
China also exhibited almost an obsessive drive to build the tallest structures. This appears to be linked to the country’s target of 60 percent urbanisation by 2020, and relocating about 100 million workers from villages to towns by granting them urban resident status by then. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that China invested over ¥1 trillion (US$1.37 billion) annually in redeveloping run-down urban areas with landmark towers to showcase the successes of urbanisation. By the second decade of the century, China had eclipsed all other countries in skyscraper production, boasting the largest number of such high-rises in the world.
Since 2000, China has built a staggering 1,575 skyscrapers, accounting for 60 percent of the world’s new high-rises.
The Chinese local governments have played a significant role in this skyscraper boom. Local governments were lush with capital and strongly incentivised by the Chinese national government; the sub-national officials within local governments in China promoted major urban projects. These officials had reason to believe that such projects would attract investments and propel their careers up the high slope. As a consequence, local governments subsidised skyscraper development through discounted land prices, up to 40 percent below market rates, to encourage the development of new urban agglomerations. Evidence suggests that China’s largest cities competed with each other in building taller, which then spread out of megacities to smaller cities by Chinese standards.
However, around the same time, China began to reconsider its approach to building skyscrapers. This change was partly a result of the experiences and challenges the country faced during the construction of the 632-metre-tall Shanghai Tower. Constructed between 2008 and 2015, the Tower’s completion confronted several hiccups. To begin with, occupancy permits were delayed due to the absence of fire safety standards for structures exceeding 600 metres, which took time to formulate. Furthermore, despite all efforts, only 60 percent of the office space in the tower could be leased until 2017. To make matters worse, rents were excessively high since the building’s design—specifically crafted to offset high wind loads—rendered large areas unusable. Later, significant water leakages between the ninth and sixtieth floors damaged large quantities of office equipment and electronics. Furthermore, the Shanghai Tower’s location within a supercluster of high-rises, combined with massive groundwater extraction, led to subsidence—the sudden sinking of the earth’s surface due to underground material movement.
One of China’s tallest skyscrapers, the Shenzhen Electronics Group Plaza, was evacuated in May 2021 after it began to shake.
Many Chinese skyscrapers were marred by lax construction and fire standards. For instance, one of China’s tallest skyscrapers, the Shenzhen Electronics Group Plaza, was evacuated in May 2021 after it began to shake. The Chinese government was also not enthused by the local culture of constructing ‘copycat’ buildings aping Western architecture, which often neglected the Chinese cultural identity and the urban context in which they were built. Additionally, the government was frustrated by ‘vanity projects’— skyscrapers built to make a statement without assessing the actual demand for additional floorspace in the city. Other cities faced a situation where half-built skyscrapers remained incomplete as local government ran out of funds to complete them.
Around the same period, China found itself engulfed in a real estate crisis. The industry was one of the most robust pillars of its economy. However, alarm bells rang as its leading giants in the real estate sector, such as Evergrande and Country Garden, collapsed. Despite the huge regulatory incentives for house ownership that were offered, consumer confidence plummeted, and Chinese people became wary of investing in property. This further dampened the construction of both housing stock and skyscrapers.
The notice emphasised the significance of considering urban landscape and warned against large buildings with strange styles merely to attract attention, dubbing these constructions as a waste of resources.
China’s reassessment of its high-rises resulted in the Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction and the National Development and Reforms Commission’s Notice of 27 April 2020. Titled ‘Notice on Further Enhancing the Management over Urban and Architecture Styles,’ the order brought a halt to the blind race for height. It stated, in general, the prohibition of new structures over 500 metres and imposed restrictions on those over 250 metres.. Buildings taller than 100 metres were required to be in sync with the size and space of the city in which it was constructed. ‘Building plagiarism, imitation, and copycat behaviour’ was also forbidden. The notice emphasised the significance of considering urban landscape and warned against large buildings with strange styles merely to attract attention, dubbing these constructions as a waste of resources. A follow-up order in October 2021 reaffirmed these rules mentioned in the April 2020 notice, further adding that skyscrapers taller than 150 meters were disallowed in cities with less than 3 million people.
The Chinese U-turn on skyscrapers has lessons for other countries. These should be exceptions, built-in circumstances that fully justify such high-rises. It is now widely agreed that skyscrapers are expensive, take a long time to build, and are environmentally damaging. They invariably end up being highly inequitable and vulnerable in modern-day conflicts, and their maintenance costs are phenomenally high. They copiously rely on glass and steel, which makes temperature regulation quite difficult and turns them into power guzzlers. Clearly, the glitter of skyscrapers may not always be gold.
Ramanath Jha is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Dr. Ramanath Jha is Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai. He works on urbanisation — urban sustainability, urban governance and urban planning. Dr. Jha belongs ...
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