China’s housing bubble and the mounting debt of local governments raise urgent questions about which of its cities and neighborhoods are overbuilt—carrying more housing and infrastructure than their populations need. A common way to judge this is by looking at per-person averages, but that can be misleading. When more people share a place, the extra roads, pipes, and buildings needed do not rise one-for-one—it follows a nonlinear pattern where people in bigger cities and denser neighborhoods can share more, requiring less per-person. Applying complexity science on a global dataset of 3,000+ cities and 50,000+ neighborhoods, we discovered a universal nonlinear pattern between people and the built environment. This global baseline allows us to introduce the City Mass Index (CMI)—a simple check-up for cities and neighborhoods, much like the Body Mass Index for people, to scientifically measure whether China is overbuilt. This talk will show both the science behind this global pattern and what it reveals in China: which cities and neighborhoods are overbuilt, and what that means for their economic, environmental, and social futures.
- Tags
-