ICON 057 | March 2008 > Shenzhen

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by Justin Mcguirk

Shenzhen is probably the biggest city you’ve never heard of. Thirty years ago it didn’t exist. Today it has a population estimated at 13 million – nearly two Londons. Nowhere else has ever achieved the pace of this urban up-rush. But the merciless tempo of Chinese urbanisation is old news, the subject of excited broadsheet features and nervous conference papers for years now. More interesting to the non-statistically minded is not so much the speed of Shenzhen’s growth but its lifecycle. From agricultural landscape to industrial powerhouse to post-industrial city forging a culture and knowledge economy, Shenzhen took 28 years to evolve through a series of transitions that took many European cities 200.

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