Suddenly Mega-City One seems remarkably easy to navigate.
The reasons that it is Like This are:
it's built on extremely mountainous terrain, so you can easily have a building where you walk in one side on the ground floor and reach the other side on the seventh floor without changing altitude;
it's grown incredibly fast for political, economic and strategic reasons;
it is colossal, 30 million people.
The second link mentions that the city played a major role in WWII and how a lot of this was bomb shelters?
How does it work when the single family neighborhoods start worrying about loss of neighborhood character?
My sister was sent to China for her work, to look at their truck battery system. She could not believe the sheer scale of the infrastructure there.
I have a hard time imagining the extent of WWII bomb shelters is significant compared to the modern city - it only had about 1.5m people in 1950. Maybe once the shelters were exploitable commercially they started getting expanded.
Interesting academic article - in China, social media has been going on about the weird verticality of Chongqing at least since 2010.
The 30+ million population figure needs a caveat: Chongqing Municipality is a huge area, 82,400 km^2. That's about the size of South Carolina or Scotland. But the built-up area population is 9.6 million in 5,400 km^2, so a bit more than the population of London in more than three times the area.
A more accessible blog post on Chongqing, specifically on the innovations in governance called the "Chongqing Model" 2007-2012, which did not catch on.
At this scale it looks like somebody tried to put a city in the ridge-and-valley part of the Appalachians but it kept on overflowing its valleys.
Chongqing just keeps coming up. Screenshot of a TikTok where someone talks about seeing a budget breakdown from there showing rent, utilities and internet costing them US$100/month. Almost certainly false, at one stage or another.
(Many Zoomers seem to be getting a view of PRC social media this week by trying out RedNote, aka Little Red Book, as a prospective TikTok substitute. Being told being gay is fine as long as you aren't "flamboyant" about it; lots of stuff from Chinese influencers that functions as propaganda even if not precisely so intended, like the budget thing. The surge in signups has also swamped the app's censorship capacity but that will certainly catch up.)
I'm not joining an app where I can't openly support the KMT and the lama.
It's hilarious that people are reacting to the attempt to ban TikTok by switching to actual Chinese propaganda.
Not quite two Wales in a Scotland.
15. Attempt seems to have succeeded, US app will be shut down Sunday is the current status
15: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them" is so, so, so last-century. Today it's "the capitalists will give us the rope for free, hell they'll bribe us to take the rope off their hands!"
There are worse things than American zoomers using the internet to get to know Chinese zoomers and to understand more about the Chinese way of life. Such is how peace gets built.
11: Blue, killer, or Jimmy?
No Josie?
Elke just made her first post to RedNote. We explained a few things to her about Mao but I don't think she finds it very relevant. Hen gaoxing renshi ni, Chinese way of life.
Who needs spyware when your spouse posts your family's shame for all to see? This is what happens when you accidentally switch off "ask your parents before downloading new apps from a hostile foreign power" on the parental controls. (She had to ask for TikTok, and I took a year to give in.) Aaaaaaaggggghhhhh fuck everything.
Have her post your family portrait and see how long it takes to get censored.
8 thank you! It certainly doesn't look like a city with a third of the density of London...