[imagesource: NBBJ]

Everyone with enough money to throw at land and development seems to be trying their hand at a ‘city of the future’.

South Africans are getting on board, with the Lanseria Airport City and Steyn City, in Gauteng.

Elsewhere, people are abandoning land altogether for floating cities billed as utopian escapes from the rule of law. 

Then there’s Tencent and their plans to overshadow the rest with something the size of Monaco.

The company has clearly recovered well after its unfortunate downward spiral in 2018 where it lost billions on the stock market, because it’s building its own city-within-a-city in Shenzhen, China.

Per CNN:

Dubbed “Net City,” the 2-million-square-meter (22-million-square-foot) urban development will prioritize pedestrians, green spaces and self-driving vehicles, according to its designers.

The ambitious city-within-a-city is set to occupy a stretch of reclaimed land jutting out into the Pearl River estuary. Designed to accommodate a population of some 80,000 people, the site will primarily serve Tencent, the conglomerate behind WeChat and China’s popular QQ messaging service.

But as well as providing company residences and offices, the neighborhood is expected to host shops, schools and other public amenities, and will be connected to the rest of Shenzhen via road bridges, ferries and the city’s subway system. The American firm behind the master plan, NBBJ, hopes that the new district’s entertainment venues, parks and waterside promenade will attract visitors from elsewhere in the city.

Jonathan Ward, a design partner at NBBJ, said this when asked how the city differs from other smart cities:

“It’s definitely a destination (and has) a civic component…It’s not meant to be an isolated, secure island — it’s a vibrant city. People will walk through it, they’ll connect … and it will be a vital hub for Shenzhen.”

The vacant plot that the designers are working with is incredibly large and will accommodate a city the “size of Monaco”.

Like most ‘cities of the future’, this one will be designed to have as little impact on the environment as possible.

“Going ‘car-free’ is still a little bit challenging in our world, so we spent a lot of time designing the city to be as low-impact as possible, removing (cars from) where they don’t need to be and focusing on people.”

Although regular cars will be able to access some parts of the neighborhood, the plan centers around a “green corridor” designed for buses, bikes and autonomous vehicles. The layout eliminates what Ward called “unnecessary” traffic.

The city will have the usual trimmings like rooftop solar panels and elaborate systems for capturing and reusing wastewater.

NBBJ’s master plan is designed to offer what it calls an “interconnected, human-focused organic ecosystem” for Tencent employees, which is a fancy way of saying that the company would like the city to erode “the distinction between their work and private lives”.

Is it just me or is this suddenly a tad creepy and exploitative?

“Traditional cities are very much siloed, even in the densest cities where there’s more interaction and intermixing,” he added. “But what can happen now is you can start to blur those lines (between work and play), and bring more interaction between different parts of life.

There’s a reason that it’s important to keep work and play disparate: it’s healthy.

Tencent’s Net City will take around seven years to complete, with construction expected to commence later this year. The dozens of individual buildings, which will range from one to 30 floors in height, will be designed by variety of different architecture firms.

Seven years doesn’t actually seem that long when you take the scale of the city into account.

[source:cnn]