![]() Yet Solomon's fellow architects at Gensler seem to side with him, as their design of Shanghai Tower comes complete with walkable spaces inside the tower and closed off pathways between the towers. ![]() This leaves the rich able to swiftly move around the city, only interacting with those who can afford to live within the towers, while leaving the infrastructure for the majority of the city's residents to degrade. Stacking different services vertically like shoe boxes in a tower and building pedestrian corridors to connect them does not equal improving walkability, especially when Chinese officials decide to keep inserting notorious 100-meter wide roads a a round these towers. The above is an outrageous statement for urban planners who are trained in the new urbanism movement that has swept across Europe and North America, in which 'walkability' measures pedestrian-friendliness and safety for actual streets, not the walkability of elongated hallways. There might be an 'alternative' walkable urbanism possible in which Shanghai Tower and other members of the "high tower family" can become neighborhoods where people essentially do their walking within the tower or between clusters of towers. This has led Associate Architecture Professor of Syracuse University, Jonathan Solomon, to say that perhaps 'walkability' needs to be redefined in the Chinese context. Meanwhile, China's worsening air quality and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle has also meant there has been lower numbers of people able to walk in the city to get a healthy level of exercise. The rising purchasing power of the Chinese citizens has increased the availability of fast food and the extra funds to buy such goods as cars. Obesity rates in China have skyrocketed as the economy has boomed. One such challenge is how the city will maintain or even increase walkability to help its residents maintain healthy lifestyles. While China's economic growth is impressive, this rapid expansion of wealth brings with it a myriad of challenges. Economic growth brings challenges and opportunities Yet, this massive economic growth and the ensuing architectural achievements come with large questions of what this will mean for access and walkability within China's cities. Two decades later, it has become China's Wall Street, with Lujiazui's Finance and Trade Zone being the only finance and trade zone amongst the 185 state-level development zones in China. Twenty years ago, Luijiazui was mainly farmland with simply a handful of warehouses and wharfs. ![]() The tower is located in the locality of Luijiazui, China. Once complete, it will proudly join Shanghai's already crowded skyline, which currently consists of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Jin Mao, and the Shanghai World Finance Center. Shanghai Tower, designed by transnational architecture design tycoon Gensler, will soon become the third tallest building in the world this year. The construction of the Shanghai Tower is a testament to architectural skill and China's growing economic power, but does this come at the expense of vibrant street life? Photo by Jerry Yang/Flickr. ![]()
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