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No. What China did was essentially build cities from scratch was to increase GDP. What China has effectively done is create a massive bubble because of that and sooner or later it will most likely either burst or China is less likely going to stagnate for decades like Japan has. The US isn't interested in doing either. We already have had our industrial revolution and build up major cities from almost nothing before. We won't being doing that going into the future since that era has come and gone.
Probably not anytime soon; the US seems instead to be putting money into urbanizing and expanding existing small/medium sized cities, and the never ending supply and demand of suburban development still keeps most of the population around existing cities.
I do see demand and potential for more cities to be built on the west coast/in western sun belt states where costs are high and demand exceeds the sparse number of large metros, but to be honest, I don't think our current economic system can adequately build a "city" practically overnight the way China has with its socialized economy and abundant population... in the US such a city would have to be built by private developers... which almost gaurantees the community would be made up almost exclusively of new homes for upper middle/upper class families... even if built in an urban fashion... such a place would probably seem more like a dense, exclusive suburb than a city.
The cities are where they are for a reason, either current or historical. To start a city from scratch would require a reason to build a city in a place where there was no such reason before. These reasons sometimes occur, but in most cases they are transient (e.g. gold rush, oil booms) and you get a boom town instead of a city; the town becomes a ghost town or at least shrinks significantly once the boom is over.
US is fairly unique in that all of its cities are built from scratch to a large degree. Some of them are built on old settlements, but often times we purposely avoided doing that.
Short of some massive, global calamity that sparked a huge refugee crisis in the tens of millions there would never be a need in the US to build a new city overnight.
I think there a few scenarios where it could happen organically. For instance, I could see a new city popping up in North Dakota somewhere if the oil boom there can be sustained for long enough. I'm using the term "city" loosely but I don't think it's far fetched to see some kind of urbanized area of ~30,000 popping up near where a lot of people are working. If Canada and Alaska continue to thaw out I could see it happening there as well.
It's really only the plains/mountains where it would be likely. The rest of the country is already too densely settled with existing towns and villages for there to be any need to start over in a new place.
No. What China did was essentially build cities from scratch was to increase GDP. What China has effectively done is create a massive bubble because of that and sooner or later it will most likely either burst or China is less likely going to stagnate for decades like Japan has. The US isn't interested in doing either. We already have had our industrial revolution and build up major cities from almost nothing before. We won't being doing that going into the future since that era has come and gone.
China didn't build the new cities really to increase GDP. It did so because there was tremendous demand in the rural areas to move to the cities in search of better opportunity, and there was no way that the historic cities could handle the demand, either in terms of housing or employment.
This is exactly the reason there's no particular need to create planned cities in the U.S. The rural areas have emptied out, and there's no large wellspring of people clamoring to leave their current area.
Quite a different situation when they've got several times our population and half the land area and only a fraction of that land area (east and southern coasts) is modernized. They're still going through the process of migration from rural areas to cities--I was recently in Shanghai for a day and didn't meet a single person who was born and raised in Shanghai. Meanwhile here in the US we've pretty much gone through the rural-to-urban migration, moreover population growth is slowing due to the cost of supporting a large family (as happened in Japan decades ago), though there is perhaps some small city to large city migration, and there is potential to re-develop "edge cities" in existing metro areas, but this is not really "from scratch."
Quite a different situation when they've got several times our population and half the land area and only a fraction of that land area (east and southern coasts) is modernized. They're still going through the process of migration from rural areas to cities--I was recently in Shanghai for a day and didn't meet a single person who was born and raised in Shanghai. Meanwhile here in the US we've pretty much gone through the rural-to-urban migration, moreover population growth is slowing due to the cost of supporting a large family (as happened in Japan decades ago), though there is perhaps some small city to large city migration, and there is potential to re-develop "edge cities" in existing metro areas, but this is not really "from scratch."
China is larger than the CONUS + Alaska but I agree: It's all about the rural-to-urban migration.
China didn't build the new cities really to increase GDP. It did so because there was tremendous demand in the rural areas to move to the cities in search of better opportunity, and there was no way that the historic cities could handle the demand, either in terms of housing or employment.
Problem with this theory is the fact China's rural population roams across China looking for jobs. The intention of building these cities was to increase GDP since construction is around 20-25% of China's GDP. A lot of local officials supported these projects because they got finiacial kick backs and it made there books look better even though they have and still are creating a massive real estate bubble. These cities lack inhabitants let alone jobs. Then there is the problem of China's demographics being in permanent decline making building a bunch of ghost cities beyond dumb unless your goal is to cook the books and have it appear that the area is prospering.
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This is exactly the reason there's no particular need to create planned cities in the U.S. The rural areas have emptied out, and there's no large wellspring of people clamoring to leave their current area.
The US already went through this when it hit the industrial age with building up towns into major cities like Chicago for instance. That was back during a long period of economic growth in the US with increased population growth and mass immigration two things China currently doesn't have.
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