Page 19 - Sphere No.16 (Apr 2006)

SHANGHAI’S WARP-SPEED progress can be witnessed, first
hand, within minutes of leaving the international airport terminal.
Just a few hundred metres from the arrival hall is the world’s
fastest train, the Maglev, that bullets passengers to the urban-
area fringes in eight minutes flat, hitting a top speed of 430
kilometres per hour.
The thrilling, juddering ride – whizzing past paddy-fields,
factories and housing estates – is a metaphor for the way the
city itself is hurtling into the 21st century; Shanghai is the
richest, largest and quickest-moving city in the world’s fast-
est-growing nation, a financial and commercial centre with a
stated ambition to catch up with Hong Kong, Tokyo, London
and New York in record time. For the past 15 years, the east
coast metropolis has been a blur of construction – skyscrap-
ers, highways, flyovers, tunnels and bridges – resulting in a re-
markable transformation.
Anyone who visited Shanghai two decades ago will remem-
ber it as a moribund place, its glories all in the dim and distant
past. Way back in the 1920s and 1930s it enjoyed a reputation
as a decadent place and was often described as the Paris of the
SPHERE 17
SIZZLE

China’s fastest growing
metropolis is the city of the future
By Mark Graham
GHAI