Editorial: An Early Encounter with Tomorrow

摘要

I stole the title for this editorial from architectural historian Arnold Lewis' excellent An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop, and the World's Columbian Exposition (University of Illinois Press, 1997), which documents the shock of exposure to a metropolis that emerged seemingly overnight, and in the middle of nowhere. Chicago had 4,000 residents at the time of its incorporation in 1837 and a population of 1 million when the fair opened in 1893. What the city presented to wide-eyed visitors from the Old World was a vast alien landscape of railyards and stockyards, department stores and skyscrapers-a surreal commingling of brute force and technological sophistication. More than a century later, I find myself similarly astounded by the urban explosion in East Asia. In July, The New York Times and other outlets reported that the Chinese capital of Beijing is going to absorb its two neighboring provinces, Tianjin and Hebei, into a megalopolis called Jing-Jin-Ji ("Jing" for Beijing, "Jin" for Tianjin, and "Ji" for Hebei). Administratively, it would be similar to the District of Columbia annexing Maryland and Virginia. Statistically, however, there's no comparison. The commingled urban area of 83,400 square miles will be bigger than the state of Kansas, its population of 100 to 130 million potentially greater than Japan's, and its annual economic output of nearly $1 trillion larger than the Netherlands'.