You can do all sorts of amazing things if you don’t care about what people think or what people want.
This Doonesbury strip makes the same point.
They’ve done this with a bunch of different cities. First one I read abut was an Austrian village, then Paris, London, New York, etc.
I personally think it’s pretty awesome.
I think it’s pretty weird. It’s like something from Lem or Chiang - aliens trying to communicate with earthlings.
Exactly. Michael Palin mentioned this in (I believe it was Around the World in 80 Days): he was taking a train in China, and said that there is no labor shortage due to the number of people. The humorous part was someone was mopping the floor in the train…and it didn’t the carpet any good at all!
Did you not even read what you quoted?
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Well, what I’m glad we’re NOT doing is wasting time and money building miniature versions of famous cities. Let private companies build them to attract tourist money if they so desire.
like the previously mentioned Paris Casino & Hotel in Las Vegas.
as an aside, I did like that place’s ceiling design in the gaming area. the paint and lighting made it so convincingly like a late evening sky, for a moment I thought it was actually open-air.
then I remembered it was 3 p.m. 
They added something like 4 stops at absolutely enormous cost, when what they really needed was to replace 80 year old block signals. I think it was over $5 billion.
Holy shit people, calm down. I misread his sentence, and I apologize. Everybody take a breath.
I don’t doubt that the New York project is over budget and could be done cheaper. On the other hand, I think there’s obvious structural differences between burrowing through the infrastructure of Manhattan and slapping some concrete buildings up in the Chinese countryside to make comparisons between the two pretty irreverent.
Well I think much of the thread is pretty irrelevant; there’s no reason to be holding up buildings in the countryside as the prime example of chinese construction.
On the topic of subways, for example, we could compare…subways.
Here in Shanghai we’ve gone from no subway in 1993 to 15 lines now and 387 stations, plus a maglev. IIRC another 4 lines are going to be added by 2020.
That’s not me bashing the US: China’s situation is different from the US’, as Shanghai and most other cities could never cope with the level of car ownership that there is in America.
Also my native Britain is probably even less efficient WRT construction projects than the US.
I’m just defending China. It doesn’t make sense to handwave chinese construction on the implicit basis that this fake Paris is their highest achievement.
That’s okay; the US cities can’t cope with it either.
I’m not sure how you can definite a vast parking lot twice a day during ‘rush hour’, where the cars move at about a jogging pace for long periods of time, as “coping” with it.
There is only one detail that has any meaning, in what the Chinese are doing. A billion Chinese are eating and have safe and decent housing and education and health care, and not harming or exploiting anybody else to do it… Whatever else they do to keep people busy and entertained is just their version of putting Wheel of Fortune on TV at 6 oclock, and not for us to second-guess.
Woooow…what a misinformed post. China denies its violent past and suppresses academics and journalists who try to write about it, exploits Africa, has horrific pollution issues, exploits slave labor.
And their entertainment for Chinese New Year included black face ‘comedy’ on their most watched television program.
I don’t know where you get 1850-1927 from. Paris has existed as city for a couple of thousand years, and has been the capital of France since at least the 12th century. The Champs-Élysées was originally laid out 1677, and most of the buildings around it were built in the 18th century. Napoleon built the Arc de Triomphe.
Population of Tianducheng : Planned for 10,000 people, current population about 2,000.
Population of Paris : 2.2 million
Look at the pictures in this article, showing a small area of replica Paris, with a few high-rise buildings behind.
…and with modern technology, you can build a lot faster anywhere today than in past centuries.
Well, also, copying something is generally easier than inventing it.
And creating a city from scratch is a lot easier, if you’re willing to commit to a large lump-sum investment, than growing one gradually. Take those subways, for instance: They’re expensive to build because there’s already a bunch of other stuff built in New York, and so you have to be careful that, when you dig your tunnels, you’re not messing up anything over them. But if you’re building a city from scratch, then you can put the subways (and other underground infrastructure) in first, and then build other things on top of them.
It’s like playing SimCity with an unlimited money cheat code. Of course it’s going to be easier.