[apartment blocks in Zibo, via google maps]
A photo essay on the Chinese city of Zibo, in four parts (Zibo I, Zibo II, Zibo III, Zibo IV — best viewed in IE/Safari/Chrome, as some script there tends to upset Firefox), from Moving Cities, who are doing some fascinating research on urbanism in China. Zibo is one of the many very large cities in China which I think I’m being fair in saying that most westerners have never heard of (when we made this map, which shows only cities project to have over 5 million people by 2025, for our entry to the bracket competition, I was shocked at how many very large cities in China I’d never heard of). With somewhere between 2.75 and 3 million people in the city proper, Zibo’s city-center population is larger than that of every American city but New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago and every city in the EU but London, Berlin, Madrid, and Rome.
[via James Fallows]
