Say you're a central planner, and you want to blow up 700 or so mountains in order to build a shiny new city near a place where 3.6 million people already live. What might you do to take your citizenry's mind off of the massive impending environmental and health tolls you're about to inflict on their lives?
Make a badass Hollywood-style trailer, maybe.
It might be the most melodramatic design rendering I've ever seen, but it's 100% real. The Guardian reports that China is indeed moving ahead with plans to flatten the region around Lanzhou, already a major city, in order to make room for a new urban district. It's going to cost about $3.6 billion, and will add a new city 10 square miles in size. The project broke ground last October.
Opponents and the media are billing it the biggest "mountain-moving project" in history, but China and the state-run media are staying quiet on that unfortunate aspect of the development. There's no mention of mountains anywhere in the state-run China Daily's report, for instance. It's simply titled "New State-level zone to boost western growth." Hooray! The Daily claims that the new mountain-less city will increase the region's GDP by $44 billion dollars by 2030.
Called the Lanzhou New Area, it will require development on 500 square miles (130,000 hectares) of land 50 miles from the city. And it's already netted $11 billion in corporate investment.
And it's just the latest in a long line of ambitious city projects, as the Guardian notes:
The project will be China's fifth "state-level development zone" and the first in the country's rapidly developing interior, according to state media reports. Others include Shanghai's Pudong and Tianjin's Binhai, home to a half-built, 120-building replica of Manhattan.
It's also trying to turn its suburbs into bright green mega-cities. Maybe similar designs await Lanzhou.
Regardless, this is a horrible, horrible idea on so many levels. First of all, blowing up mountains never bodes well. We do it here in the U.S., mostly so fossil fuel companies can get coal on the cheap. It permanently destroys natural habitats, obviously. And it wreaks havoc on communities–it contaminates water sources, it pollutes the air, and it leaves vast stores of silt and toxic waste in its wake. This being China, I can't imagine they'll be overly intent on disposing all those byproducts safely, and ensuring the toxins don't enter nearby water supplies.
Speaking of water, Gansu province, where Lanzhou New Area is planned, doesn't have it. It's an arid desert region. Authorities are essentially blowing up mountains to make room for more people to live in the Chinese equivalent of Phoenix. They'll have to pump water in after they've blown up and moved the mountains out. This has disaster written all over it.
But wait, did you see that trailer? Never mind. It's going to be epic.